From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women's Aesthetic

From Word to Canvas

From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production

Edited by

V.G. Julie Rajan and Sanja Bahun-Radunoviü

From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production, Edited by V.G. Julie Rajan and Sanja Bahun-Radunoviü

This book first published 2009

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-0537-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0537-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...... vii

Acknowledgments ...... ix

Introduction The Feminine Gaze: Looking back and across the Landscape of Myth Sanja Bahun-Radunoviü and V. G. Julie Rajan...... 1

Chapter One Blue like Me Siona Benjamin ...... 11

Chapter Two The Persephone Figure in Eavan Boland’s “The Pomegranate” and Liz Lochhead’s “Lucy’s Diary” Tudor Balinisteanu ...... 23

Chapter Three Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage: Mary Zimmerman’s Post-9/11 Presentation of Orpheus Erika M. Nelson...... 51

Chapter Four Against Monologization: The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra Kirsten A. Sandrock ...... 73

Chapter Five Woman—Daughter—Actress—Icon—Murderer: Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci Raffaele Furno...... 93

vi Table of Contents

Chapter Six The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King: Female Appropriation of Violent Autochthonous Mythology through Aesthetic Transmission to the Diaspora Hanh N. Nguyen and R. C. Lutz...... 117

Chapter Seven The Languages of the Black Medusa: Dorothea Smartt and Ingrid Mwangi Maria Cristina Nisco...... 141

Note on Editors...... 165

Contributors...... 167

Index...... 171

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1-1 Siona Benjamin, Finding Home (Fereshteh) # 74: Lilith ...... 17

Fig. 1-2 Siona Benjamin, Finding Home # 45: Sister ...... 19

Fig. 5-1 Ermanna Montanari as Beatrice and Marco Martinelli as Francesco in Cenci...... 110

Figs. 7-1 & 7-2 Ingrid Mwangi, Cutting the Mask...... 158

Fig. 7-3 Ingrid Mwangi, If...... 160

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Editors are grateful for permission to reprint images from the following sources: to Siona Benjamin for graciously allowing us to reproduce her art, both on the cover page (Finding Home #89 “Vashti” (Fereshteh)), and in the book (Finding Home #74 “Lilith” (Fereshteh), and Finding Home #45 “Sister”); to Ermanna Montanari and the Teatro delle Albe for providing us with the copyright to reproduce a photo from her play Cenci; and to IngridMwangiRobertHutter for permitting us to reproduce stills from Mwangi’s video-installation Cutting the Mask and her photo work If. We are indebted to our Contributors whose dedication throughout the multiple stages of this project has been encouraging and stimulating. We thank Dušan, Kartik, and Raja, who, in the spirit of genuine inter-gender consideration, understood our absences and brought us joy in the intervals of respite. Finally, the Editors would like to dedicate this book to the global women-artists who, in an inspiring variety of ways, have endeavored to trans-value and re-value myths in their own production, transforming the mythic patterns into active, feminine, re-positionings of cultural dynamics.

INTRODUCTION

THE FEMININE GAZE: LOOKING BACK AND ACROSS THE LANDSCAPE OF MYTH

SANJA BAHUN-RADUNOVIû AND V. G. JULIE RAJAN

Vashti, we are told, refused to obey the Persian king Ahaseurus’, her future husband’s, request to dance naked in front of drunken guests assembled in the banquet hall of the ancient palace of Susa. She paid dearly for her disobedience; she was dethroned and, as the biblical interpretation implies, executed (Esth. 1.9-22). But it is precisely because of this event that Esther, another important queen and historical–mythic woman, came to power. It was Esther who was in position to save Jewish people from the royal official Haman’s genocidal plot, leaving Haman himself, in turn, to be seen by Jewish tradition as the spiritual ancestor of Adolf Hitler.1 History is a convolute, and so is myth. In Siona Benjamin’s painting Vashti (Fereshteh, Finding Home # 89), featured on the cover of this book, the Persian queen, now augmented by layers of history and myth, peers back at the site of her tragedy—an empty banquet hall in a doll-house sized palace, its floor stained with blood. But Vashti’s embracing hands indicate that she also protects the palace, as she

1 See, also, Esth. 2.1, 3.8. Jewish scholars have pondered the ethical, personal, and ontological implications of Vashti’s act for centuries. She is variably seen as a “heroine” and a “villain” in the Purim story. See, for a feminist perspective, Mary Gendler, “The Restoration of Vashti,” in Elizabeth Koltun, ed., The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives (New York: Schocken, 1976), pp. 241-7; Rabbi Jeffrey M. Cohen, “Vashti—An Unsung Heroine,” The Jewish Bible Quarterly (April- June 1996): 103-106. On the use of imagery of Vashti in Benjamin’s painting, see Ori Z. Soltes, “Finding Home: The Midrashic Art of Siona Benjamin,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 14 (Fall 2007): 173-178. 2 Introduction looks us straight in the eye—her sight stretching above and beyond the “chessboard of genocide.”2 It is through this property of “looking us in the eye” across a historical span that female-character centered myths from various cultures speak to us with force and with significance. The potency of this gaze is closely linked to what has frequently been neglected in the general assessment of myth, namely, its potential not so much to abstract historicity as to encompass and compress it, and to offer the result as a backdrop against which the move from word to canvas—or from a mythic tale to its new aesthetic appropriation—is performed. In contrast, this potential is frequently evoked and reconstellated precisely in female aesthetic production; the collection of essays From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production is dedicated to a re-examination of this practice. The relationship between myth and women can be envisioned and theorized on multiple levels. To begin with, as our knowledge of myths and mythic narrations from various cultures has grown and continues to grow exponentially, there seems to be less and less of a consensus nowadays regarding both what exactly constitutes a myth and how myth should be defined. Dictionaries are of modest help here, as they usually base their definitions on the elemental structural components of myths. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines myth broadly, as “a traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon.” Yet, it is arguable that each segment of this definition could easily be queried. As such, if myths are based on observed phenomena and on their various creators’ experiences over time, they cannot be perceived as fictitious narratives. Furthermore, myths and elements of myth may exist beyond or complementing the narrative verbal template. Supernatural persons, actions, and events, finally, become such only in the course of creating and re-creating a mythic narrative in each generation’s cultural imaginary—so some myths waver into being narratives about natural and supernatural events while others may not. The essential questions thus still obtain: What is a myth? Is its connection to narrative as indisputable as we claim it to be? What happens to a “narrative” when it is appropriated by non-verbal media? Various theorists have attempted to address these questions by connecting myth to all the possible realms of human experience, from

2 See, Siona Benjamin, poem “Vashti (Fereshteh, Finding Home # 89),” this volume, 19. The Feminine Gaze: Looking back and across the Landscape of Myth 3 physical movement/stature (Hans Blumenberg) and the observation of natural phenomena (Robert Graves); to rites, rituals, and religion (Mircea Eliade, Jessie L. Weston); to artistic expression (Jerome S. Bruner); to inner psychological dynamics (Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Joseph Campbell). They have elaborated, not only on the historic–moment specificity of myth (Eric Dardel) or on its eternal return/timelessness (Mircea Eliade), but also on its structure (Claude Lévi-Strauss), epistemology (Raffaele Pettazzoni, Colin Falck), ethics (Michael Bell), its closeness or openness as a system of thought (Marina Warner), and its role in the perpetuation or revision of societal customs, thence, its role in the cultural and political functioning of society (Bronislaw Malinowski, Simone de Beauvoir).3 Responsive to the fact that a comprehensive definition of myth would have to include all these and many more characterizations, the Editors of this book, however, define myth

3 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1974); Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); Jerome S. Bruner, “Myth and Identity,” Daedalus 88, no. 2: Myth and Mythmaking (Spring 1959): 349-358; Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: MJF Books, 1949); Eric Dardel, “The Mythic,” in Sacred Narratives: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 225-243; Emile Durkheim, The Elemental Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Reality, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Collins, 1970); Colin Falck, Myth, Truth, and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957; New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), vol. 23, 1-137; Robert Graves, “Introduction,” in The New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology (London: Hamlyn, 1975); Carl Gustav Jung and Carl Kerényi, The Science of Mythology: Essays on the Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis (London: Routledge, 2001); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York: Schocken, 1995); Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Role of Myth in Life,” in Sacred Narratives: Readings in the Theory of Myth, 193-206; Raffaele Pettazzoni, “The Truth of Myth,” in Sacred Narratives: Readings in the Theory of Myth, 98-109; Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). The reader is advised that this may be a representative but by no means comprehensive account of the various approaches to myth that have been proposed in the past hundred years. 4 Introduction differently, as an act of looking: looking back and forward, gazing at and across, and peering into or out from various “points of view.” The intertwined notions/activities of looking, gazing, and viewing are highly relevant to any critical writing concerning itself with the use of myth in female artistic production. As the example of Benjamin’s painting from the Finding Home series indicates and as the majority of contributions in From Word to Canvas confirm, what characterizes twentieth century and contemporary female artists’ engagement with myth in a variety of media is an effort to conceive of myth as a cluster of symbolic and metaphoric meanings that can be negotiated in such a way to constellate past historical moments and the moment of production of a work of art, and thereby to offer a more dynamic vision of subjecthood across centuries and in the present moment. In this way, female art, performance, and literature, avoid emptying out history of its variable and eventful historicity—histories of achievement, histories of oppression. What is revisited and frequently contested in these female artistic practices is precisely what Simone de Beauvoir would isolate as the major properties of myth vis-à-vis femininity: its a-historical perpetuation of patriarchal paradigms and the visual-epistemic incarceration of woman in myth (Beauvoir, 161 et passim). By virtue of their closedness or openness, aesthetic techniques (and they include artistic negotiations of mythic structure) “transmit thought patterns”; as such transmitters, they can be instruments of control but also tools through which to question that system of control, as German writer Christa Wolf reminds us.4 The contemporary female aesthetic gaze, we are tempted to propose, has learnt to wonder more freely across the mythological spatial–temporal spectrum, as well as to reflect back on its own position within it. From Word to Canvas thus positions itself as a contribution to a wider discourse that endeavors to theorize myth in conjunction with liberatory, subversive, or socially progressive interpretations of and repercussions from the act of female aesthetic production. In the effort to forge new perspectives on myth and feminine artistic production, an approach to the works of art as practices of concrete materiality, historicity, and testimonial value has been too often sidelined. This is why From Word to Canvas opens with an artist’s essayistic reflection on her own work. Siona Benjamin draws upon her unique life experiences to offer fresh approaches to the complex dynamics of cultural hybridity, identity politics, and myth. Benjamin was raised in the Jewish

4 Christa Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux, 1988), 266 and 300. See, also, Sandrock, this volume, 73. The Feminine Gaze: Looking back and across the Landscape of Myth 5 faith, grew up in the predominantly Hindu and Muslim nation of India, and now resides in the United States. It is her complex subjectivity that drives her to question in her work the rigidity of cultural boundaries ascribed by their various mythical traditions. Benjamin emphasizes the symbolic continuity among various cultures by collapsing in her works what may be perceived as their unique symbolisms to produce new feminist mythical narratives. Each of her pieces surfaces a distinct text that underscores how, despite their different origins and histories, cultures actually resonate with one another in how their myths have been interpreted to engender comparable forms of violence against women, and, also, how the same mythic patterns can be used to question this history of violation. Tudor Balinisteanu examines manifestations of female sexuality in contemporary poetry/poetic prose by Eavan Boland (“Pomegranate,” 1994) and Liz Lochhead (“Lucy’s Diary,” 1986 [1983]). Through close readings of Classic versions of the Greek myth of Persephone, Balinisteanu considers how mythical projections of femininity may affect perceptions of proper feminine sexual behavior in patriarchy, and indicates how Boland’s and Lochhead’s contemporary approaches to female sexuality, while derived from the problematic projections of the same in the ancient mythical renditions of Persephone, also present acts of poetic transvaluation. Boland’s and Lochhead’s texts function as testimonies to the fact that, as Liz Yorke has put it, wherever “experience, memory, fantasy or dream can be retrieved, whether in words or images, it may [also] be revalued, and re-presented.” Each such act re-configures the mythic (sub) text itself, allowing “different textures, colours, aspects, lights and shadings to be heard, seen and felt.”5 Recording a contemporary artistic iteration of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Erika M. Nelson considers American playwright Mary Zimmerman’s re-reading of the myth in her production “Metamorphoses,” which premiered in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. The mythic-literary subtext of this production is not only Ovid’s famed rendition of the myth, but also German modernist poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s re-reading of the myth in his 1908 poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” The latter is of particular interest to Nelson, as it is historically and structurally positioned in a framework comparable to that of Zimmerman’s drama production. Both versions of the myth emerged at the dawn of a century, at times when the present and future of the world

5 Liz Yorke, Impertinent Voices: Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Poetry (London: Routledge, 1991), 23. 6 Introduction was uncertain. Nelson considers how the gendered dimensions of the Orpheus myth, particularly in regard to his multiple experiences of and final loss of his beloved Eurydice, as well as the character of Eurydice herself, provided Rilke and Zimmerman with a mythical framework through which to contemplate the subject of loss—historical and personal. In “Against Monologization: The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra,” Kristen A. Sandrock investigates German author Christa Wolf’s re-orientation of feminine voice and visibility in her novel Cassandra as articulated in original projections of the ancient Greek mythical figure of Cassandra. Sandrock’s examination is premised on the timing of the publication of Wolf’s novel. The novel was produced in 1983, as Sandrock notes, when East and West Germany were divided, and “the reciprocal nuclear armament” divided the world. In her novel, Wolf draws parallels between her own anxieties about the stability of not only her native Germany, but the world as a whole, in the 1980s, and the mythical Cassandra’s anxieties over the potential downfall of Troy, in ancient Greece. In Classic versions of the myth, Cassandra is represented as a seeress who, during the battle over and downfall of Troy, was perceived as mitigating against power structure and hence was silenced by men for her attempts to interfere into male affairs of war; by silencing her, patriarchy cast Cassandra’s voice in negative moral terms and characterized her as deviant. Sandrock explores how Wolf’s re-reading of the myth attempts to correct that misogynist projection of Cassandra by casting her as a woman who, like herself in her own time, should have been valued for challenging the oppressive imaginaries of nationalism; out of this exploration, Cassandra’s voice (as much as Wolf’s own poetic voice) emerges as dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense. Raffaele Furno considers Italian playwright and actress Ermanna Montanari’s feminist responses to (mis)representations of the mythical figure of Beatrice Cenci in her 1993 production, Cenci, at Teatro Rasi in Ravenna, Italy. Born in 1577, Beatrice was the youngest of the notable and wealthy Cenci family, who resided in Rome. In 1598, Beatrice killed her father, who is characterized in history-books as having been violent and incestuous. After killing her father, Beatrice was sentenced to death for what was construed to be her “crime.” Montanari’s performance questions the social labels of criminality that were projected onto Beatrice by highlighting her interpretation of the psychological repercussions on Beatrice of the sexually criminal relationship that had been enforced upon her by her own father. Montanari conveys her interpretation through highly symbolic performances, where stark visuality and innovative use of voice resonate across an unvarnished stage, underscoring the multiple The Feminine Gaze: Looking back and across the Landscape of Myth 7 ways in which patriarchy renders suspect female social agency and hence normalizes violence against the female body and psyche. In “Female Appropriation of Autochthonous Mythology through Aesthetic Transmission to the Diaspora: The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Edition of Vietnamese Folk Tales in Two Cakes Fit for a King,” Hanh Ngoc Nguyen and R. C. Lutz ponder the significance of Vietnamese author and scholar Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s feminist interpretations of traditional Vietnamese folktales in 2003. The crafting of folktales and oral literatures over time may guide the establishment of a culture’s earliest ideologies of moral propriety, but their subsequent re-rendition and re- recording may also transform (and re-transform) these ideologies, at various points in the history of a society/community. Accordingly, the authors point out how, although the earliest (traditional) Vietnamese folktales had developed a relatively affirmative framework for inter- gender relations, emphasizing women’s rights and gender humanism in the discourse of legality, they were eventually transformed by patriarchal Confucian traditions, which introduced moral ideologies that sanction gender inequality and women’s invisibility, and reinforce suspicions around female social agencies. The authors reveal how Nguyen Nguyet Cam, in her recent recording and translation of certain Vietnamese folktales into the English language, negotiates against those inequity-based cultural registers and generates new versions of the folktales for her readers in diaspora, versions that affirm the value of femininity by casting it in a positive light. The last piece in our collection by Maria Cristina Nisco addresses the cultural and gendered (mis)interpretations of the Greek mythical figure of Medusa. Nisco suggests that original renditions of Medusa as “the horrible, dangerous and threatening monster” may in fact reflect Western anxieties about the non-European female Other. Nisco considers contemporary feminist revisions of the image of Medusa by two women artists of color residing in European geographies, both of whom draw parallels between their own racialized and gendered experiences and those of Medusa. Dorothea Smartt, an English poet of Caribbean origins, and Ingrid Mwangi, a Kenyan-German artist living in Germany, refigure the image of Medusa and hence reclaim for her—and through her, for themselves—a voice and visibility through which to articulate the challenges they have faced as women of color in Western culture. Through their aesthetic conceptualizations of Medusa, Smartt and Mwangi contest the racist and misogynist effects of the Medusa myth to claim a voice for women of color in societies that do not always understand them, effects that, in turn, they do not always understand themselves. Ultimately, 8 Introduction however, the questions that surface in their respective works are wider. Mwangi’s art, in particular, structured as it is around the denouncement of the exploitation of ethnic stereotypes wherever they may be found, exteriorizes another thematic configuration that resonates with all the texts included in this volume: how the condition of cultural hybridity, increasingly common in contemporary life and art, informs aesthetic practices dealing with culture-specific myths, history, and “mythhistory.” It is befitting for a volume that opens with the self-examination of a Jewish-Indian artist to close with the artwork of a Kenyan-German artist. Such topicality is also a thematic exteriorization of and testimony to the multicultural and hybrid set up of the volume itself (and, thence, also of the state of contemporary scholarship on myth): From Word to Canvas features not only myths, and cultural-mythic patterns from across the globe, but also global contributors—Vietnamese, German, Romanian, Italian, British, Jewish American scholars, and others—working in and outside their points of ethnic provenance. It is thus with a certain amount of (not only performative) pride that the Editors sign themselves off as a Croatian-Serbian working in the UK, and an Indian-American working in the US.

Bibliography de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Bell, Michael. Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Trans. Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Bruner, Jerome S. “Myth and Identity.” Daedalus 88, No. 2: Myth and Mythmaking (Spring 1959): 349-358. Campbell, Joseph. Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: MJF Books, 1949. Cohen, Rabbi Jeffrey M. “Vashti—An Unsung Heroine.” The Jewish Bible Quarterly (April-June 1996): 103-106. Dardel, Eric. “The Mythic.” In Sacred Narratives: Readings in the Theory of Myth, ed. Alan Dundes. 225-243. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Durkheim, Emile. The Elemental Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Carol Cosman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The Feminine Gaze: Looking back and across the Landscape of Myth 9

Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Reality. Trans. Philip Mairet. London: Collins, 1970. Falck, Colin. Myth, Truth, and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James and Alix Strachey. Vol. 23: 1-137. London: Hogarth Press, 1957; New York: W. W. Norton, 1961. Gendler, Mary. “The Restoration of Vashti.” In Elizabeth Koltun, ed., The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives. 241-7. New York: Schocken, 1976. Graves, Robert. “Introduction.” In The New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology. London: Hamlyn, 1975. Jung, Carl Gustav, and Carl Kerényi. The Science of Mythology: Essays on the Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis. London: Routledge, 2001. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. New York: Schocken, 1995. Malinowski, Bronislaw. “The Role of Myth in Life.” In Sacred Narratives: Readings in the Theory of Myth. 193-206. Pettazzoni, Raffaele. “The Truth of Myth.” In Sacred Narratives: Readings in the Theory of Myth. 98-109; Soltes, Ori Z. “Finding Home: The Midrashic Art of Siona Benjamin.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 14 (Fall 2007): 173-178. Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920. Wolf, Christa. “Conditions of a Narrative.” In Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Trans. Jan van Heurck. New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux, 1988. Yorke, Liz. Impertinent Voices: Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Poetry. London: Routledge, 1991.

CHAPTER ONE

BLUE LIKE ME

SIONA BENJAMIN, USA

Rest at pale evening... A tall slim tree... Night coming tenderly Black like me. —Langston Hughes, “Dream Variations”

In my paintings I raise questions about where the place we call “home” may be, while evoking issues such as identity, immigration, motherhood, and the role of art in society.1 I am a Bene Israel Jew from India. Although my family has gradually dispersed out of India, mostly to Israel and America, my parents remained in India. I am now also an American, living and working in New Jersey. With such a background, the desire to “find home,” spiritually and literally, has always preoccupied me—a concern to which I feel many Americans can relate, as this comparatively young nation was largely formed by immigrants and their descendants. I have never been able to set deep roots into the space where I am at any given moment, no matter where I am. This is unnerving, but there is also something seductive about the spiritual borderlands formed by the “displacements” in which I seem to find myself. In my paintings I explore those displacements by combining the imagery of my past with the role I play in America today, making a mosaic inspired by both Indian–Persian miniature paintings and Sephardic icons, by the oil lamps, the velvet- and silver-covered torahs, and a chair left vacant for the prophet Elijah in our Bombay synagogues. For I have always had to reflect upon the cultural boundary zones. Raised Jewish, I grew up in the predominantly Hindu and Muslim society of India, and was educated in Catholic and Zoroastrian schools; and I live in the US now. My family has married American,

1 This paper is a substantially developed paraphrase of my artistic statement. See, Siona Benjamin’s web-site: . 12 Chapter One

Yemenite, French, Ethiopian, Cochini, and other Jews. I am married to a Connecticut native who was raised Russian Orthodox, but who also has the Jewish faith as part of his family mix. In the 1970s he became a Buddhist and studied Indian classical music for some years with an Indian maestro in California. We now try to raise our children in the mosaic of all that we can bring to them from our backgrounds. I should like to present to the reader the portion of this fruitful diversity that most significantly influences my work. There are three distinct Jewish communities in India: the Bene Israel, who have remained the largest; the Cochini Jews, who once formed the second largest group (but who have now mostly immigrated to Israel); and the Iraqi Jews, who now form the second largest community. All three sections follow the same religious rituals and recite prayers in Sephardi intonations. Some customs vary among them, because the place in which they reside has influenced their rituals. Mostly one will find Jews in the coastal parts of India: Bombay, Cochin, and Calcutta, although there was also a small community of Jews in Delhi, which had one synagogue. There are also synagogues in Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) and Ahmedabad (Gujurat). Smaller synagogues can be found in some of the coastal villages in the Konkan (i.e., the west coast of India, south of Bombay).2 The community from which I come, the Bene Israel community of Maharashtra, is ancient. According to the story that has been handed down through the generations, the Bene Israel were said to be shipwrecked on the Konkan coast, near the Kenneri islands (about 6 miles south of Bombay), about 2,000 years ago. As related in the Books of Maccabees, after the Greeks conquered what is today Palestine in 332 B.C., life there became extremely oppressive for the orthodox Jews. The situation became insufferable when, in the year 167 B.C., the king Antiochus IV Epiphenes of Syria tried to impose Hellenistic religious practice on the orthodox Jews, an event which would eventually lead to what is known in Jewish and Christian traditions as the Maccabean revolt and the story of

2 For the information from this section, as well as the following account of the Bene-Israel Jews, see Shirley Berry Isenberg, India’s Bene Israel: A Comprehensive Inquiry and Sourcebook (Berkeley: Judah L. Magnus Museum, 1988), and E. M. Jacob Gadkar, The Religious and Cultural Heritage of the Bene- Israels, Book II: A Fantastic Story of Their Allegiance to Judaism (Bombay: Gate of Mercy Synagogue, 1984). See, also, “Abraham’s Children in India,” The Sunday Statesman Magazine (April 18, 1976); Renu Mehra, “India Nurtured Jewish Heritage without Prejudice,” India Worldwide (February 1988). I am indebted to Samuel Daniel for helpful discussions and editorial assistance with the information on the Jews of India. Blue like Me 13

Chanukkah.3 It is said that, prior to these events, a group of Jews from Galilee managed to flee into Egypt. In 175 B.C. they boarded a ship, probably sailing for Cheul, a major port city on the Maharashtra coast of west India. When they were within a couple of hundred yards off the port of Konkan, about fifteen miles from Cheul Creek, the ship ran aground and sank. Most of the people on board, together with all their possessions, including the Torah scrolls and prayer books, were lost. Out of all those on board, legend has it, only seven men and seven women managed to swim ashore. After being given shelter by some Hindus from Navgaon (a village twenty miles south of what would later become Bombay), the Jews found permanent abode on the Konkan Coast. The bodies of the people washed ashore were buried separately in large graves. There is a monument marking this site at Navgaon, India. Another version of the legend states that the ancestors of the Bene Israel came from northern Palestine. According to Biblical history, that area was inhabited by the ten tribes which formed the ancient Kingdom of Israel in the 8th century B.C. When the Assyrians captured the capital Samaria in 722 B.C., most of these people fled the country for fear of persecution and conversion by the Assyrians. It is said that some people belonging to the tribes of Asher and Zebulun boarded a ship, sailed via Egypt to the Indian Ocean, and were ship-wrecked on the west coast of India. They were offered shelter by the indigenous population, and they continued living there for centuries, as the Indian people have been welcoming. The Jews of India are one of the few communities in the world that did not face anti-Semitism in their “home” state. They adopted the mode of dress, some customs, and the local language (Marathi). They derived their family names from the names of the villages in which they settled (i.e., Kehim—Kehimkar; Pen—Penkar; Cheul—Cheulkar). The Bene Israel have certain rituals that are uniquely their own, such as the Malida ceremony, an event structured around the recitation of the Eliyahu- ha-navi prayer and a ceremonial offering of sweetened rice and dry fruits to the Prophet Elijah. There are now about 5,000 Bene Israel left in India, as most have immigrated to Israel, Canada, and the Unites States of America. My destiny has been similar. When, twenty-one years ago, I came to do my postgraduate studies in the United States, I could not imagine that I would stay on there and that I would feel so solidly American one day; yet I also never considered that I

3 These events are described in The Second Book of Maccabees. While the festival of Chanukkah has become one of the most widely celebrated Jewish holidays, Jews do not accept as scripture The Second Book of Maccabees where the actual story is related. 14 Chapter One would be in such a flux about where the borders of my homeland lay. In the meantime, I have come to the conclusion that the perfect “Place” or “Home” for anyone does not exist; it is precisely the sense of “non- belonging” that has given me an opportunity to encounter a home perhaps at any given time or place; and also to celebrate in art the impossibility of fixedness in any single “home.” After having struggled long with my own hybrid background and complex cultural experiences, I am beginning to see more clearly now that this blend can be humorous, enlightening, and revealing. At first the ornate culture from which I came seemed difficult to apply to and unnecessary to my work. As my life in art progressed, I have found a way to use my background, to be able to weave current issues and parts of my life in its intricacies, thus making this ornateness meaningful and generative. This is also the reason why my work celebrates my womanhood: my abilities, my strengths, and my ambitions. Now my art attempts to create a dialogue between the personal and the cultural, between the ancient and the modern times, and to force a confrontation of unresolved issues marking our lives in history. In this multicultural world I feel a strong need to make art that will speak to my audience of our similarities, not of our differences; thus I emphasize how the art-making process contributes to conversations about subjects like stereotyping, and religious and gender intolerance. By making images that problematize and question monolithic cultural identity, I feel I can contribute to a much needed “repair” (Tikkun in Hebrew) in discussing those issues. I would like my audience to re-evaluate their notions and concepts about identity and race, thus understanding that such misconceptions can lead to racism, hate, and war. Technique-wise, my artistic practice has been importantly influenced by Indian and Persian miniature paintings. These paintings were made on paper in India between the 14th and 19th centuries. They are small works of art, originally intended to be held in the hands of a single person and examined closely. They originated in the court workshops of the Indian kings and are like jewels. They are known for their fine colors and their status as courtly accessories. The primary aim of these works, whether a religious epic or a portrait, was to tell a story, created primarily for private enjoyment, to illustrate religious, heroic, or domestic narratives.4 My mixed-media paintings reflect the tradition of these miniatures. In my work I collage found objects and paint them, thus making a playful assemblage of disparate traditions, stories, and forms. For instance, in my

4 See Darielle Mason, B. N. Goswamy, Intimate Worlds: Indian Paintings from the Alvin O. Bellak Collection (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001). Blue like Me 15 mixed-media series of paintings entitled Spicy Girl,I address contemporary American culture in context of my own background, having lived in two diverse cultural settings. My mixed media piece, Spicy Girl: Sefer Torah (box exterior and interior) bespeaks this heterogeneity. On the one hand, this mixed media (gouache on wood, baked enamel on steel, and found object) evokes the sefer torah of my childhood, the one my father bid for during the Simha Torah ceremony. When I was a little girl, I would sit in the synagogue and gaze at the mysterious chair always left vacant, wondering for whom it was reserved. Later, in the grounds outside the synagogue, we would “pick” fruits that had been fastened to a canopy made of palm fronds woven around a bamboo frame. These recollections are colored by the glow of my mother’s sabbath lamp. She would recount stories about the family, how the Jewish women, even in their saris, were distinctly different from their Hindu neighbors. When my grandmother used to go about the city, she said, the Hindu women would remark: “She looks like a Chitpavan Brahmin, but where is the red sindhoor on her forehead? Who is she?” When they learned that she was a Jew, they would whisper “Israel” as she passed. An ornamented Indian woman in the painting represents that part of my childhood world and my heritage. The “spicy girl”—a bluish self-portrait—stands next to this Indian woman. The “spicy girl” on the left (myself) tries to imitate the ornate woman by wearing a veil over jeans. She is a poor copy, a hybrid clinging to this ornamentation. But the “spicy girl” also projects an “in-your-face-attitude” toward, not only certain aspects of American culture, but also toward American stereotypes of Asian women. Distance sharpens my vision; far from my former home, I see more clearly what once was. But this search for home is most thoroughly explored in my gouache- on-paper Finding Home series, where I combine traditional styles of painting, such as Indian/Persian miniatures, Byzantine icons, and Jewish and Christian illuminated manuscripts, with trans-temporal mythic and contemporary pop-cultural elements, to create a new artistic vocabulary of my own. This is a highly iconographic series. While growing up in India I recall being surrounded by Hindu idols and iconography that were taboo in my Jewish world. I eyed those figures from a distance, captivated with their radiance and richness. Since Judaism stressed monotheism and iconoclasm, I somehow resisted the lure of figurative drawing for years. Initially, I made abstract work, and, later, if I did venture to depict the forbidden fruit, my figures were shrouded with darkened faces. Then my work was filled with graven images, as suddenly it became clear, during my years studying and designing sets for theater, that I liked the narrative, the theatrical, the decorative lyrical line, this ornateness I carried with me 16 Chapter One all along. These figures have thus become characters in my paintings, actors that act out their parts, recording, balancing, rectifying, restoring, and absorbing, like in the paintings of surrealist women artists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Through all this experience, I understood how I can dip into my own personal specifics and universalize, thus playing the role of an artist/activist. Thus, in the Fereshteh (“angels” in Urdu) subseries of Finding Home, I invoke the women of the Bible to make them agents of a present day battle against wars and violence. In Finding Home (Fereshteh) # 74 “Lilith” (see figure 1-1), I explore the character of Lilith. Based on Jewish Midrashic literature and legends, Lilith has been identified as the predecessor to Eve who was created from the earth at the same time as Adam. Unlike Eve, The Alphabet of Ben-Sira relates, Lilith was unwilling to forgo her equality with Adam and demanded sexual equality. Rebuffed by Adam she took her case to God, who responded to her seductive powers by revealing His divine name. Speaking His name out loud she earned her ticket out of Pardes, or Paradise, and into eternal exile. Thus Lilith has been called and has represented a mother of demons, slayer of newborns, corruption, indulgence, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and the seductress of men.5 Lilith has made a return in feminist history many a time as an iconic symbol that represents the oppressed, both as a goddess and as an example of female strength, power, and mystery.6 In my painting Lilith dons symbols from many faiths. The snake armband perhaps symbolizing Hinduism, the head covering turns into a tallit (Jewish prayer shawl), the soldier’s bracelet is recast as the hamsa (or is it the hand of Fatima?), and the bullet wound invokes St. Teresa’s stigmata. Bringing her forth to today, the character of Lilith becomes the woman targeted, the sacrificing mother, the mourning war widow, the brave woman soldier, the rape victim in war. She cries out at this injustice

5 The Hebrew Biblical figure of Lilith, appearing in The Book of Isaiah 34:14, has been identified as an heir to the Mesopotamian wind and storm demon Lilitu. The story about Lilith as Adam’s first wife appears first in the collection of stories The Alphabet of Ben-Sira, collected by an anonymous and dated between the eighth and the tenth century. For more on Lilith in midrashic tradition, see Judith R. Baskin, Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 58-60 [editors’ comment]. 6 For the most influential feminist re-evaluation of Lilith, see Judith Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology,” in Woman Spirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, eds. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1979), 198-209. Blue like Me 17

Fig. 1-1: Siona Benjamin, Finding Home (Fereshteh) # 74: Lilith, 2006 (gouache on wood panel); courtesy of the author after “a thousand of years” of waiting: Where is peace, justice, freedom, and equality? Roy Lichtenstein, the pop artist, and the drama of the Indian Amar Chitra Katha comics served as an inspiration for the Lilith series. Indian/Persian miniatures and Jewish and Christian illuminated manuscripts also creep into parts of the painting style. The blond heroine in Lichtenstein’s paintings has been recast as a blue maiden in my art. Very often I look down at my own skin and in my perception, it has turned blue. It tends to do that when I face certain situations of people stereotyping and categorizing other people who are unlike themselves. Over the years I have therefore developed many blue-skinned characters in my paintings. While, in some stories and cultures, such as that which created traditional Japanese ukiyo-e prints, a bluish hue to skin connotes sickness, death or something alien, the turquoise blue skin of my characters portrays quite the opposite: a confidence in their difference, 18 Chapter One health, and radiance, and a definite will to survive. Making them come alive and enacting their stories as they reach out from a mythological past, (besides Jewish myth, I am also inspired by Indian goddesses like Kali and the famous blue god, Krishna), I show how these characters use their blue skin to tell or retell stories. In this process of recycling and rejuvenating, they remind me (and hopefully my audience) that myth-making is cyclical and timeless. This blue self portrait takes on many roles and forms, and theatrically enacts many ancient and contemporary dilemmas. In Finding Home # 45 “Sister” I employ an autobiographical dual blue figure to respond to the Middle East crisis (see figure 7-2). Since most of my family immigrated to Israel from India, I formed this two-headed, several-armed woman—half- Jewish and half-Muslim, both whose hands display the rich henna of the similarities between both religions. Although the juxtaposition of these symbols seems peaceful, a blasting plunger and wires that indicate a bomb connected to them are in front of them. The tension between the symbols surfaces questions such as: Will they destroy themselves, or, Is there any hope that they will be saved…from themselves? This global uncertainty informs many other paintings of mine, and it informs works such as Finding Home # 46 “Tikkun ha-Olam.” The latter phrase refers to “the restoration/repair of the world,” an inspirational story from Kaballah. The story compares the world to a pot or vessel that contains all the virtues. Because the cosmos was unable to contain this divine energy, the pot shattered, but the broken shards retained the divine light or energy. It is humanity’s task to reconstruct this vessel, and this is accomplished through various ethical, spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic acts that re- establish values in our world. By making images that contribute to this “Tikkun,” I am participating in my own small way in this process of “Restoration.” I would like to conclude by saying that making transcultural art is like sitting on top of a fence. Sometimes it feels safe to fit into a compartment and fall either way from the fence, but then I am reminded, that although precarious, this position gives me a wider perspective of being able to see both sides. Sometimes I share my art world with the rising group of South Asian-American artists and sometimes with diasporic Jewish artists, both of which feed the core of my being. I am also solidly an American artist, as the environment in which I live inspires me. It is sometimes discouraging, though, when I am asked for information about the Jews of India, not in a research effort, but to ground me in a single valid category, in my Indian/Asian/Jewishness or my Indian/Asian/Americanness. Similarly the Jewish world has been sometimes puzzled by the hybridism of images Blue like Me 19

Fig. 1-2: Siona Benjamin, Finding Home # 45: Sister, 2000 (gouache on paper) Courtesy of the author of Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish tradition in my work. Since the work does not fit into the typical Ashkenazi Jewish category, it becomes difficult to digest and process the images. This is exactly what interests me in de-categorizing my work. These are persistent issues that disturb me, so I choose to present them. I do not wish to be a token artist for any one category, as tribal impulses and nationalism are deeply ingrained in us and too easy to assume. Because of the lack of tribal security and comfort, I (as an artistic outsider) pursue special insights into this situation. This is the reason why I have always been on a quest for making hybrid images or characters in my work, a sort of universal being that comes from one point of view but that leads the viewer to unexpected destinations. I feel that there is a vigorous transcultural movement, now more than ever, and that this movement will only get stronger. The word 20 Chapter One

“transcultural” seems especially pertinent here because it connotes the potential of crossing or straddling numerous boundary zones. It is this potential that enhances the possibilities of the artist coming from, not just one, but numerous influences, countries, and backgrounds. An artist “transcultured” in this way becomes an artist less static and more mobile, an artist able to continue to change identities and to be in a constant state of flux, engaging dialogically in numerous points of view. The characters in my world thus have to shed the skin of religion while in turn celebrating it, shed the skin of nationalism while at the same time being proud of it, and completely shed the skin of tribalism and the wrong use of power. Once these skins are shed, one can construct a new language of understanding, because what was once “the other,” is none other than— oneself.

Finding Home # 89 (Fereshteh) “Vashti”

Vashti was cast out Now she looks in

A black and white setting from yesteryear Postcards from another target A chessboard of genocide The ner tamid of a lost synagogue A palace of another dictator Smoke stacks of your ancestor’s crematorium

I search during my journey But cannot find How can they erase without a trace I wonder Now more than necessary Along with her dignity Will she restore yours.

—Siona Benjamin

Blue like Me 21

Bibliography

Baskin, Judith R. Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002. Drob, Sanford L. Kabbalistic Metaphors: Jewish Mystical Themes in Ancient and Modern Thought. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 2000. Gadkar, E. M. Jacob. The Religious and Cultural Heritage of the Bene- Israels, Book II: A Fantastic Story of Their Allegiance to Judaism. Bombay: Gate of Mercy Synagogue, 1984. Isenberg, Shirley Berry. India’s Bene Israel: A Comprehensive Inquiry and Sourcebook. Judah L. Magnus Museum. Berkeley California, 1988. Mason, Darielle. Intimate Worlds: Indian Paintings from the Alvin O. Bellak Collection. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001. Mehra, Renu. “India Nurtured Jewish Heritage without Prejudice.” India Worldwide (February 1988). Orenstein, Gloria F. “And Woman Creates God: Multicultural musings inform the visions of Siona Benjamin, a Jewish Indian woman artist in America.” The Little Magazine 1, Issue 4 (New Delhi, September- October 2000). Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology.” In Woman Spirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. Eds. Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ. 198-209.San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1979. “Abraham’s Children in India.” The Sunday Statesman Magazine (18 April 1976). Reading the Women of the Bible. Ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky. New York: Schocken, 2004. The Women’s Torah Commentary. Ed. Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, Woodstock: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2000.

CHAPTER TWO

THE PERSEPHONE FIGURE IN EAVAN BOLAND’S “THE POMEGRANATE” AND LIZ LOCHHEAD’S “LUCY’S DIARY”

TUDOR BALINISTEANU, UK

Myths have always held sway in the realms of our imagination, helping us to define our social identities and worlds in certain ways. Narratives, as one of the means through which we negotiate identities and adequate socialization scenarios, may become oppressive when they coalesce into discourses of authority that create myths. However, narratives are also a means of exploring the regenerative potential of the identities we can derive from myths. Narrative (reiterative) citations of discourses of authority may consolidate social myths, but reiterations of certain myths can also become subversive. When the reiteration of a myth foregrounds what has been repudiated in the discourses that consecrate the myth, it brings into light new cultural possibilities of conceiving identities.1 In his analysis of “the oral and the feminist properties of [Liz] Lochhead’s work,” Robert Crawford points out that Lochhead’s verse seems to offer the perfect illustration to Liz Yorke’s assessment of women writers’ reconstructions of narratives of experience, memory, fantasy, or dream:

Anywhere that experience, memory, fantasy or dream can be retrieved, whether in words or images, it may be revalued, and re-presented. This effort of retrieval may permit different textures, colours, aspects, lights and

1 The referenced concepts of reiterative citing and repudiation are drawn from the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 24 Chapter Two

shadings to be heard, seen and felt: such feminist transvaluation is a continual re-processing.2

Yorke’s assessment is valid for any narratives that explore the potential for productive heteroglossia. The narrative development of this potential counteracts the stifling disciplinary force of myths that compels the repetition of the same, a force which creates normative constraints for the subjects it seeks to shape. In the following analysis, I will examine versions of Persephone’s story to see how its constitutive elements have been used, on the one hand, to create, and on the other, to challenge a social myth about the transformation of pre-sexual girls into wives or lovers in heterosexual partnerships. I begin by exploring the story of Persephone as rendered in Classical Greek culture, focusing on the representation of three experiences that have been used to different effects in the poems “The Pomegranate” (1994), by Irish poet Eavan Boland, and “Lucy’s Diary” (1986), by Scottish poet Liz Lochhead: ensnarement, enchantment, and anger.3 In the myth of Persephone, those three experiences are presented as related to young girls’ sexual awakenings. My discussion, while suggesting avenues for critical investigation, is also aimed at highlighting the three experiences as elements that continue to mesmerize and stir those who find themselves, to various extents, participating in and awakened to the myth through its various literary/narrative versions. Herein I define myth as a narrative that is part of a chain of narrative reiterations of identities and socialization scenarios which, through their reiteration, are naturalized as legitimate—a process that also establishes them as normative. This view accounts for the fact that, while having normative power, myths also change according to the circumstances that determine a specific narrative reiteration at a given point in time, in a particular place. Furthermore, in this view any narrative can yield a myth, or it can extend an existing myth by altering some of its elements while preserving others, according to how it relates to prior narratives and their investment in myth. I will treat Bram Stoker’s narrative of Dracula (1897) as having yielded a myth that shares with the Persephone myth the themes

2 Liz Yorke, Impertinent Voices: Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Poetry (London: Routledge, 1991), 23; quoted in Robert Crawford, “The Two- faced Language of Lochhead’s Poetry,” in Liz Lochhead’s Voices, eds. Robert Crawford and Anne Varty (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 62. 3 Eavan Boland, “The Pomegranate,” in In a Time of Violence (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), 20-21; Liz Lochhead, “Lucy’s Diary,” in Bagpipe Muzak (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 60-62.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 25 of ensnarement, enchantment, and anger.4 In addition, I will regard the two poems by Boland and Lochhead as reiterations of the Persephone myth (and of the Dracula myth in Lochhead’s case) to discern how repeating the stories of both myths challenge their prior patterns and explanatory authority.

Persephone in the Ancient World

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the corn goddess of ancient Greece, her young daughter Persephone or Kore (meaning “young maiden” in Greek) is introduced through a scene of enchantment. The girl is enraptured by a beautiful flower, a narcissus, and seeks to pluck it. The narrator announces that this is the story of how Kore was seized by Aïdoneus:

[…] she frolicked […] picking flowers across the soft meadow, roses and saffron and lovely violets, iris and hyacinth, and narcissus, that Earth put forth as a snare for the maiden with eyes like buds by the will of Zeus, as a favour to the Hospitable one. It shone wondrously, an awe inspiring thing to see […]. In amazement she reached out with both hands to take the pretty plaything.5

The meadow is a paradisal space, yet one that hides dangers. While the narcissus is endowed with wondrous beauty, it is also a snare. On the one hand, Kore’s enchantment is possible because of the wondrous beauty of the flower, yet on the other hand, this enchantment is a ruse to ensnare her as Hades’ sexual partner. The conspiracy to ensnare Kore is plotted between the male gods, Zeus and Hades, who are brothers. The hymn posits Kore’s enchantment as an ensnarement in two ways that illuminate its meaning: It is narrated in reference to both hypnotizing attraction and deadly peril. The narrator posits Kore as unaware of the enchantment’s perils, and hence, constructs the pre-sexual girl as innocent and unsuspecting of danger. In meta-narrative perspective, the story itself is a space of enchantment and ensnarement. It has captivated audiences, readers, and writers throughout the centuries. However, while the story has the power to enchant, it also has the power to ensnare audiences by mobilizing their

4 Bram Stoker, Dracula, eds. Nina Auerbach and David Skal (New York: Norton, 1997). 5 Homer, Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer, ed. and trans. Martin L. West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 33.

26 Chapter Two consent to certain configurations of social order and practices. Perhaps its spellbinding power was most effective for the participants in the Eleusinian mysteries. In ancient Greece, the narrative plot was born(e) through and enhanced by the rituals of the Mysteries, and thus it contributed to legitimizing scenarios of socialization. In the Pantheon’s hierarchy, Zeus and Hades occupy positions of tremendous power, from which they derive their authority to plot and transact Kore’s fate. In conveying to the audience the authority of Zeus and Hades, the story also conveys faith in the masculine brotherhood, the power of which was wielded in the social reality. The Hymn to Demeter relates that when Kore reached out for the narcissus, the earth opened and “the Hospitable Lord [Hades] rushed forth […]. Seizing her by force, he began to drive her off on his golden chariot, with her wailing and screaming […].”6 Kore’s ensnarement grieves her and provokes her anger. Afflicted by the loss of her daughter, Demeter sets out to search for her and no longer tends to the fertility of the land. This forces Zeus to arrange for Kore’s return. When, through her mother’s subterfuge, Kore is eventually allowed to leave the underworld, Hades has to perform a trick to insure that she will return to him. He offers Kore pomegranate seeds, knowing that those who taste of food from the underworld would be chained to that realm forever. When she is reunited with Demeter, Kore-Persephone tells her mother that Hades “surreptitiously got a pomegranate seed into me, a honey-sweet food, and made me taste it against my will.”7 It is for this reason that Persephone will have to spend part of the year in Hades’ realm and the remainder with her mother. In Apollodorus’ later rendering, Hades’ trick is revealed thus: “When Zeus ordered Pluto to send Kore back to earth, Pluto, to prevent her from remaining too long with her mother, gave her a pomegranate seed to eat; and failing to foresee what the consequence could be, she ate it.”8 Here Kore is, again, posited as innocent as she is unable to foresee the consequence of accepting the offering. Apollodorus’ version, however, also relates another incident that casts Kore’s innocence in an ambiguous light. It relates that “when Ascalaphos […] bore witness against her [Persephone], Demeter placed a heavy rock over him in Hades.”9 Even as Ascalaphos’ punishment shows Demeter’s anger at the testimony that seals her daughter’s fate, one may risk asking if Demeter and her daughter

6 Ibid., 33. 7 Ibid., 65. 8 Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 33. 9 Ibid., 33.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 27 did not attempt to also hide the fact that Kore had tasted the seed willingly. Although both the Homeric hymn and Apollodorus’ tale posit Kore as innocent, the phrasings employed in this version do not exclude the possibility of conceiving that Kore has been pleased with the enticement. The arguments of this essay are emphatically concerned with the possibility and potential of this ambiguity, and I will return to this topic frequently. The significance of Persephone’s acceptance of the pomegranate seed can be explored in relation to her awakening sexuality and in the context of fertility rites. Summarizing the prevailing opinion on the mythical significance of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Classics scholar Lars Albinus points out: “[T]he myth of Demeter and Kore has been likened to the myths of Aphrodite/Adonis, Kybele/Attis, Isis/Osiris and Ishtar/Tammuz. In all of these stories, the motif of the death and resurrection of the beloved victim seems to reflect the cycle of vegetation.”10 If the story were to be regarded as a record of fertility rites, this view would explain how the ancient mind could employ Kore’s enchantment in a social sense. The story would allow for the fertility of young women’s bodies to be equated with that of nature, while at the same time integrate this fertility with the social function of women as wives and mothers. In this context, Persephone’s acceptance of the pomegranate seed can be interpreted as signifying her acceptance of motherhood and an erotic partnership in marriage. The symbolism of the pomegranate seed offers a means to interpret the nature of the young girl’s enchantment in a socio-cultural framework; it was only necessary to lure the girl into becoming a wife. The Homeric hymn and Apollodorus’ text appear to endorse Persephone’s acceptance of her new role in the male-dominated hierarchy, and nothing is said that would allow one to envision Kore as a willful agent rather than as a mere subject of this enchantment. To further clarify the significance of Persephone’s tasting of Hades’ offering, one could attempt to extrapolate it from the information on practices of the Eleusinian mysteries. According to the Homeric hymn, the Mysteries were given to the mortals by Demeter shortly after her daughter’s fate in marriage was decided.11 Referring to the ritual practices of the Eleusinian cult, Albinus notes that “while the hymn may have influenced the content of the ritual process, the same should be equally probable vice versa.”12 This is, therefore, an instance when a story can be

10 Lars Albinus, The House of Hades: Studies in Ancient Greek Eschatology (Oxford: Aarhus University Press, 2000), 165-6. 11 Homeric Hymns, 70-71. 12 Albinus, The House of Hades, 173.

28 Chapter Two derived from a series of public performances that hold social significance and credibility in their depictions of marriage, agricultural practices, and mothering. When, in turn, this story is transacted through reiterations, the myth that arises from the reiterations may have contributed to the scripting of those social roles and their performance in society. The correlation between the story and the drawing of a social space is immediately visible. Its performance as ritual gives birth to socialization patterns that engender specific understandings of women. Therefore, insight into the ritual performance may reveal the significance of several important narrative elements that have remained obscure in the Homeric hymn, perhaps due to the limitations inherent in its medium and genre. According to Albinus, “it may be said of the Homeric hymn that it resembles the ritual only insofar as the structure of performances is translatable into a scheme of events that fits the narrative purpose.”13 He then proceeds to extrapolate the significance of the performances of the Eleusinian rites by comparing the Homeric hymn to the Orphic discourse, and by examining archaeological evidence. Cross-referencing renderings of the character of Baubo in the Orphic tradition with the account given by Clement of Alexandria, Albinus asserts:

In the Orphic context, this “nightly daemon” […] as she is called […] assumes and combines in one person the roles that are divided between Metaneira and Iambe in the Homeric hymn. Being the Queen of Eleusis she receives Demeter as a guest in the palace and offers her a ‘draught’ […] of wine and meal. When Demeter declines, Baubo teases her by uncovering her ‘genitals’ […] and revealing thereby the child of Iacchos in her bosom […]. Pleased at the sight, Demeter now accepts the drink, and this—Clement says—is “the hidden mysteries of the Athenians.”14

But what has this to do with Kore? Albinus comments that the chthonic sphere was often associated with the female womb or bosom (“thus, ‘the bosom of nightly Hades’ […] presumably alludes to the bosom of the divine nurse, be it Persephone […] Demeter or Baubo”15), that eskhara, referring to the hollow altar used in the hero cult, was also a word for the vagina, and that Baubo’s spouse, Dysaulus, being “intimately associated with Hades himself,” establishes “another implicit association between Baubo and the Queen of the underworld.”16

13 Ibid., 177. 14 Ibid., 177-8. 15 Ibid., 180. 16 Ibid., 180.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 29

Thus, it seems that the rituals of the Eleusinian mysteries were more emphatically connected with celebrating the fertility of women’s bodies. Albinus further relates Karl Kerényi’s theory, according to which Demeter and Kore represent two different manifestations of the same goddess.17 The interpretation outlined by Albinus, suggesting that Demeter is pleased with the opportunity of being able to nurse as a mother would nurse a child, can also be applied to interpreting the figure of Kore: Kore’s acceptance of the pomegranate seed can be seen as signifying her acceptance of motherhood within marriage. The girl is pleased with the prospect of fulfilling her body’s fertility. Such is the story enacted through the rituals of the Eleusinian mysteries. In the ancient world, the vision of Persephone as a cosmic mother consecrates the understanding that women can only master their fertility attributes when they transform from an unmarried girl into a wife, just as Kore can become Queen of the underworld (associated with the female womb) only by marrying Hades. The tasting of the pomegranate seed seems to mark this transition in femininity. It is possible then to view this same transition as representative of Kore’s sexual initiation—although it must be noted that there is no direct evidence of this in the Homeric hymn or in the Orphic texts. While the emphasis in the Eleusinian mysteries seems to have been on the celebration of the fertility of women’s bodies, the Homeric hymn specifies more emphatically that the girl’s sexual awakening, and the potential fertility of her body, must be fulfilled in a specific way: through becoming a wife. The hymn highlights the advantages of marriage, for example, when it narrates Helios’ attempts to convince Demeter that her daughter will fare well as Hades’ spouse, as well as in Hades’ own “plea” to Persephone that she remain with him before she temporarily returns to her mother.18 Conversely, the scenario of enchantment and abduction that leads to Persephone’s marriage also triggers Demeter’s adventures in the human world and occasions her revelation of the Mysteries to the Eleusinians.19 The Mysteries themselves are related to nursing children, and the revelation of them is preceded by and metaphorically connected to the manifestation of Demeter’s role as fertility goddess. Thus, the narration of the Homeric hymn emphasizes women’s fulfillment of the social functions of wives and mothers as envisioned in the myth that inspired both the story and the performance of those social roles in the Eleusinian mysteries. If the story and the ritual indeed had influenced one

17 Ibid., 166. 18 Homeric Hymns, 37-8, 61. 19 Ibid., 41-57.

30 Chapter Two another, as Albinus notes, it is arguable that both served the purpose of legitimizing the social “value” of women as wives. In this process, the social meanings of “girl” and “woman” became transcendental and transfixed in a larger and broader vision of gender in the cosmic order. All participants in the Eleusinian mysteries, men and women alike, must internalize these meanings and no other, because social order must be integrated into cosmic order through this interpretation of nature’s cyclical transformations. Persephone’s return from the underworld in spring as Hades’ Queen signifies the change of seasons on the cosmic level and the change in any young girl’s social status after marriage on the social level. The cosmic and the social are integrated through a common denominator. On the two levels, the changes unlock the fertility potential of nature and of women’s bodies. There would be no spring if Persephone did not return, just as there would be no legitimate manifestation of fertility of women’s bodies if they did not accept marriage and consent to rejoin the social order that consecrates it. In the Homeric hymn, the representation of women’s experiences of enchantment, ensnarement, and anger channels patriarchal understandings of the social function of women’s sexuality. The narrator portrays Kore as innocent, easily spellbound by the beauty of the narcissus, or, perhaps, by her awakening sexuality. The power of the enchantment that leads to her transformation into a wife is shown as being controlled by Zeus. The narcissus was “put forth as a snare” “by the will of Zeus” “as a favour” to Hades.20 Hence, the enchantment that leads to Kore’s sexual initiation and to her subsequent marriage to Hades is narrated in a patriarchal context governed by a transaction settled within the masculine hierarchy of gods. In that patriarchy, Kore is represented as unable to resist being enchanted or controlled by its consequences. As long as Kore could be denied control over being enchanted in the mythology of the age, the possibilities of representing her within scenarios that might otherwise enable her to resist or master the power of the enchantment would be suppressed. Such scenarios would have required the representation of Persephone as being in control of that articulation of her enchantment and associated sexual awakening through her ability to give or withhold consent to becoming Hades’ partner. Such ungovernability could not be tolerated, since it would have meant that the authority over the fertility of the land (and over women’s bodies) would have been taken away from the mythical masculine brotherhood of Zeus and Hades (in the social reality, from men) and, instead, given to the mythical femininity represented by

20 Ibid., 33.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 31

Demeter and Persephone (in social reality, to mothers and daughters). As such, the sexual control over Persephone through ensnarement—by enchantment, by force, and by negotiation—, allows one to interpret Zeus and Hades as controlling the function of the fertility of the land and of women’s bodies, and simultaneously to envision Demeter and Persephone as “performing” this fertility as nursing mothers and sexual partners. In meta-narrative perspective, this interpretation also reveals the power of the myth to enchant and ensnare audiences through its narrative expression. Persephone and Demeter may be shown as divine women wielding agency, but their agency is defined by their fertility attributes and can be seen as being limited by Zeus and Hades’ scheming. Although fertility and, indirectly, the female sexual body are celebrated in the figures of Demeter and Persephone, we should not forget that they are also mothers and wives, and that Zeus and Hades can always be seen as the patrons of this celebration. To an extent, these identities of male and female gods, and the range of actions they were shown capable of performing, were probably consecrated also through the ritual expression of the myth that enchanted and ensnared the participants through a means of subjection that differed from those specific to narrative stories. Through such ensnarement and enchantment, the events and identities conveyed in myth were translated into social identities and scenarios of socialization in the mundane world. These interpretations of Persephone’s story and its resultant rituals strongly connect Persephone to the rituals of fertility that involve a vision of sexuality and provide hints regarding its social management in a male- dominated gender regime. But Persephone’s myth has also created a cultural terrain spanning competing claims between such social myths that propagate and legitimate understandings of sexuality within marriage and the understandings of marriage, sexuality, and motherhood that challenge those, especially in reinterpretations by contemporary women writers. In the following sections I focus on two examples of how the ethos of the Persephone myth serves contemporary writers. Boland’s and Lochhead’s poems analyzed here exploit the myth for the opportunities it offers to conceive alternative possibilities of cultural expression of women’s sexuality and fertility that do not bind women to the social roles of wives and mothers in male-dominated gender regimes. These opportunities derive from the story of Persephone’s enchantment and from the ambiguity regarding her willful acceptance of the token of sexual awakening.

32 Chapter Two

Persephone in Eavan Boland’s “The Pomegranate”

Eavan Boland’s poem “The Pomegranate” was published in the collection In a Time of Violence (1994). In his review of the collection, R. T. Smith describes Boland as “an explorer of the terrible beauties Yeats witnessed and […] a creator of language which radiates with both lyrical and intellectual beauty.”21 Like W. B. Yeats, Boland is interested in the otherness of the past as known through myth, which permeates our experience of the present through memory. Yet she has explored myth from a distinctly feminine perspective, as, for instance, Colleen Hynes points out: “[Boland’s] efforts to retrieve women’s stories from historical silence and record them, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing to the present, established a new type of poetics in what had previously been a male-dominated field” in Ireland.22 In reviewing In a Time of Violence in the year of its publication, Jan Garden Castro has noted that “critics already align [Boland’s] ideas with those of Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood,” and she adds to the list Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, and William Gass.23 Indeed, the poems in In a Time of Violence, as well as those in Boland’s earlier collection Outside History (1990) show that her writing answered Adrienne Rich’s call for the revision of male-dominated traditions.24 Debrah Raschke argues that in the poems of these collections, “the individual moments sustain and heal […]. Boland claims history should be personal and ordinary lest it shift truth.”25 As regards “The Pomegranate” (In a Time of Violence), Raschke notices that, in this poem, “the myth of Ceres and Persephone becomes metaphor for the love and feared loss the mother feels for her child.” She explicates: “The myth intensifies an ordinary moment of the mother watching the daughter with a ‘can of Coke’ and a ‘plate of uncut fruit.’”26 My own analysis of the poem explores the degree to which Boland’s use of the Persephone myth to

21 R.T. Smith, “Review of In a Time of Violence,” Southern Humanities Review 30, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 304. 22 Colleen Hynes, “‘A song for every child I might have had’: Infertility and Maternal Loss in Contemporary Irish Poetry,” The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry, ed. Irene Nordin (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), 149. 23 Jan Garden Castro, “Mad Ireland Hurts Her Too,” Nation (June 6 1994): 802. 24 Eavan Boland, Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990 (New York: Norton, 1990). 25 Debrah Raschke, “Eavan Boland’s Outside History and In a Time of Violence: Rescuing Women, the Concrete, and Other Things Physical from the Dung Heap,” Colby Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 1996): 136. 26 Raschke, “Eavan Boland’s Outside History and In a Time of Violence,” 139.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 33 intensify an ordinary experience in the life of a mother serves to change the perception of the social functions of women which the myth originally envisioned. I will examine the ways in which the poem suggests that myth and (personal and ordinary) history create each other, or rather, set each other up: myth frames and entraps history, and vice versa. The narrator of the poem grew up as an Irish girl in London, and her perception of the tenseness of Anglo–Irish relations informs her perceptions of masculinity and femininity as belonging to the untranslatable domains of experience. History is made personal and ordinary by skepticism about the possibilities of communication and bonding in resonance with relations between the English and Irish, mothers (complicit in masculine arrangements) and daughters, and men and women. This skepticism is reflected in the poem’s use of the Persephone myth to show that traditional versions of the myth legitimate male-dominated gender regimes that alienate women from themselves. However, even as it suggests that the Persephone myth is couched in a masculine language of authority, the poem entices us to glimpse an unnameable secret “at the heart of legend,” namely, that the power of myth may yet change historical reality. The following argument will explain how Boland’s narrator both longs for and fears this possibility of change. The viewpoint of Boland’s narrator is that of a mother who locates her subjectivity in the images of both Persephone and Ceres (Demeter’s name in Latin versions of the myth).27 This is evidenced in the belief of the “I” of the poem that “the best thing about the legend [myth of Persephone] is/I can enter it anywhere. And have.”28 The narrator’s childhood experiences are given meaning, through the myth, as cultural abductions. An Irish girl in London, the narrator finds herself “in exile/ in a city of fogs and strange consonants.”29 London is thus envisioned in parallel with the mythic location of the underworld as a cultural landscape of masculine agency. The narrator not only finds herself in unfamiliar territory but, as young woman, is unable to comprehend the alien, masculine voice of the English. She remembers this voice as inflected by “strange consonants.”30 After she becomes a mother, the myth correlative of the narrator’s identity changes

27 Boland, “The Pomegranate,” 20. 28 Ibid., 20. 29 Ibid., 20. 30 Boland’s expression evokes Seamus Heaney’s words: “I think of the personal and Irish pieties as vowels, and the literary awareness nourished on English as consonants.” Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980), 37.

34 Chapter Two from the image of Persephone to that of Ceres, but she finds Persephone again, this time in her daughter:

Later I walked out in a summer twilight Searching for my daughter at bed-time. When she came running I was ready To make any bargain to keep her. I carried her back past whitebeams And wasps and honey-scented buddleias.31

The mother’s willingness to make any bargain to keep her daughter can be read in reference to Demeter’s bond with Persephone in the Greek myth. Boland’s poem speaks of the daughter as a child, presenting the mother’s readiness for the bargain as a memory of the past. However, in relation to the Persephone myth, the bargain referred to is most likely that through which Persephone’s faith is transacted between Demeter, Zeus, and Hades. The poem thus suggests that the mother’s readiness is characteristic of a maternal figure’s anticipation throughout her daughter’s childhood of the eventual bargain she will have to make at the time of the daughter’s sexual awakening, and hence, alludes to the inevitability of the myth’s scenario. For the Ceres inherent in every mother, the myth’s patterns are inescapable. The ever-present danger threatening the paradise world of the pre-sexual daughter is suggested by evoking, not only floral adornments, but also the image of wasps. As if fated to inhabit the mythic role and to thread the pathways laid out in the mythic story, the narrator fears the meanings she is, hence, myth-bound to read into her own role as mother:

But I was Ceres then and I knew winter was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road. Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me.32

In the second part of the poem, the references to the Persephone-Kore myth again suggest that a daughter cannot avoid the fate to which she is destined in the myth. When the narrator tells of how her daughter is asleep “beside her teen magazines,/ Her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit,” we may imagine her as an innocent Kore who has not yet tasted Hades’

31 Boland, “The Pomegranate,” 20. 32 Ibid., 20.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 35 offering.33 The mythic realm of the dead has become the immediate reality, marked by signs of corporate consumerism into which the girl has not yet woken. The story is about to be transformed into reality, and its point of entry into the realm of experience is counterpointed with a questioning of the myth’s pattern. Boland records the possibilities of changing the myth’s life-shaping stories:

The pomegranate! How did I forget it? She could have come home and been safe And ended the story and all Our heart-broken searching but she reached Out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.34

The gesture, signifying the young woman’s “hunger”—the awakening of her sexual desire—is seen as being “at the heart of legend.” Boland draws the reader’s attention to the potential ways in which the words that carry Persephone’s myth into a story can signify the young girl’s desire:

She put out her hand and pulled down the French sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proof that even in the place of death, at the heart of legend, in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears ready to be diamonds by the time the story was told, a child can be hungry.35

These verses reflect on the process in the myth through which the girl’s desire is rendered. The young girl’s hunger is at the heart of the story, contained like a gem in its words. In the lines above, “rocks” and “diamonds” are used to refer to the way the words of Persephone’s story function. The words can be like rocks that, rather than awakening women to Kore’s fate, chain them to it. This is not the only story that closes off the significance of young girls’ sexual awakenings by interpreting them only within masculine meaning systems. The rendering of the girl’s object of desire as “the French sound for apple” (pomme) suggests a reference to the biblical story of Adam and Eve as rendered in Western cultural contexts in which the fruit Eve tasted

33 Ibid., 20. 34 Ibid., 20. 35 Ibid., 20-21.

36 Chapter Two from the Tree of Knowledge in Eden is an apple. Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit is widely understood to signify her acknowledgement of her sexuality, which leads to her fall from God’s grace. Boland’s poem correlates “the French sound for apple” with “the noise of stone.” This correlation of pomme with a metaphorical rendering of the phonetic expression of “granite,” makes up phonetically the “pomegranate;” as such, it suggests that the Eden myth, too, participates in chaining young girls’ sexual desire to masculine explanations and legitimizations. However, the words of Kore’s story can also be like diamonds, allowing for a precious gift to shine through the myth. Persephone’s story, as we have seen from the analysis of its classical versions, can serve to legitimate constraining social identities for women, but Boland’s poem suggests that re-crafting the story can uncover the diamonds hidden in the rocks. The narrator is not ready to give up preserving the beauty that she perceives lies hidden in the myth—the possibility of transforming rocks into diamonds:

But what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time?36

Here “rifts” refers to the breaking and remaking of the bond between mother and daughter—the mother’s unwilling concession to the girl’s transformation into a lover and to her draw into the time’s becoming. But “rifts” may also suggest the possibility of breaking the materiality of the myth, that is, the myth’s manifestation in its timing of a woman’s life as daughter and mother, to reveal beneath its cast Ceres’ deeper secret: that the story of the young girl’s hunger can only be given as a gift of diamonds by her mother and that outside of the mother-daughter bond the true story of the daughter’s hunger remains hidden under barren rocks. The poem makes us doubt whether “the hidden mysteries of the Athenians,” as Clement references the secret of women’s fertility, has ever, in fact, been revealed through the rites and retellings of the myth.37 Perhaps these rites and retellings of the events of myth have merely covered up the meanings of those events, naturalizing across time a mythic

36 Ibid., 21. Boland adopts a similar position in relation to myths of femininity used in Irish nationalist ideologies, as Edna Longley has shown in Edna Longley, “From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands,” in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994), 187-88. 37 Albinus, The House of Hades, 178.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 37 experience that benefits men. The ending of Boland’s poem retains a sense of the beauty of living through the magic of myth, but also suggests that this magic must be sought beyond the masculine interpretations of the events of Kore’s transformation into Persephone through her sexual awakening. This quest would be a painful working-through within the constraints of myth, which are still perceived as irrevocable:

If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. The legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have. She will wake up. She will hold The papery flushed skin in her hand. And to her lips. I will say nothing.38

Boland’s poem ambiguously suggests that Persephone’s myth, although stifling, still points towards a specifically women’s understanding of its “gift.” The myth is used to negotiate the meaning of the rift between the innocent daughter and mother in terms of both inner desire and social constraints. We learn about the making of the girl’s “hunger” into a “legend,” the “sound” and “noise” of which belong to a masculine voice of “strange consonants.” On another level, this voice registers the strange consonance between daughter and mother—strange because the consonance is set up in a myth of masculine agency. Nevertheless it is through this consonance that the mystery of the “gift” is concealed from men, and thus Demeter’s true revelation remains the secret of women. The ending line of the poem, in which the mother “will say nothing,” might suggest that nothing of the gift of womanhood will be revealed, or has ever been, in spite of the masculine (narrative) appropriation of the girl’s “hunger,” that is, of the desire manifested in her sexual awakening. Boland’s poem exploits an idea expressed in W. F. Otto’s observation that the relationship between Demeter and Kore differs from the other relationships envisioned in the fertility paradigm as understood in myth studies, for “it does not constitute a liaison between lovers, but the loving bond between mother and daughter.”39 In Boland’s poetic interpretation of the myth, this bond is of foremost significance. Boland exploits the possibilities, offered by the myth, that the bond between mother and daughter may be stronger than that between lovers, and thus challenges the myth’s traditional meanings. Noticeably in Boland’s poem, the space of myth is integrated with that

38 Boland, “The Pomegranate,” 21. 39 Albinus, The House of Hades, 166.

38 Chapter Two of the reality of experience. The godly figures of Demeter-Ceres and Persephone shape the content of human experience, and the mythic location of the underworld is read into the contemporary suburb. The story of Persephone is told as one of personal and social relations, making visible the myth’s social functions—i.e., it posits Persephone’s myth as a social myth that affects and produces effects in modes of women’s socialization. R. T. Smith comments that the collection in which “The Pomegranate” appears, In a Time of Violence, “employs subversive and disruptive rhetorical strategies to create a distressed beauty, witnessing to the fact that any time is a violent one for those who lack autonomy.”40 “The Pomegranate” reflects a case in point in its emphasis on the inescapability of socialization patterns designed in male-generated myths through which women become wives and mothers. However, “The Pomegranate” also suggests that women’s own stories of sexual awakening remain incomprehensible to men, interspaced as they are between the “strange consonants” of masculine languages of authority. The poem triggers the intuition that in the tales derived from the myth, their past versions demand an acceptance of masculine abduction as the price for acknowledging young girls’ sexual awakenings as enchantment. Ceres, the mother, has yet to tell a story that is larger than that maintained in masculine transactions of reality, and hence, the enchantment “at the heart of legend” has yet to be explored on women’s terms.41 Until then, the poem suggests, the enchantment remains only distressingly beautiful.

Reversals: Liz Lochhead’s Version of Lucy’s Diary

As Boland’s poetry in Ireland, Liz Lochhead’s poetry responded, in Scotland, to Adrienne Rich’s revisionist manifesto, and reacted to the male-dominated literary traditions that govern and constrain the expression

40 Smith, “Review of In a Time of Violence,” 304. 41 The danger of re-mythologizing women “on women’s terms” in telling such a story should be noted, as Brian Henry suggests when he argues that several poems of In a Time of Violence, including “The Pomegranate,” transform women into icons so that “Boland’s credibility in her essay becomes questionable.” Henry refers to Boland’s collection of essays Object Lessons, in which she denounces the male generated mythologizing of women. Brian Henry, “The Woman as Icon, the Woman as Poet,” Michigan Quarterly Review 36, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 200. Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995).

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 39 of women’s subjective identities.42 Focusing on the oral and performative qualities of discourse (associated in Scotland in the 1970s with the domestic sphere as a women’s realm), Lochhead’s poetry “offered a radical departure from the forms of previous Scottish poetry,” which enabled her “to interrogate accepted social commonplaces with regard to female experience.”43 “Lucy’s Diary” was first published in an issue of the series entitled Writers in Brief in 1986 and then republished in Lochhead’s own 1991 collection Bagpipe Muzak.44 In 1991 Lochhead was an established writer with a significant publication record. Dorothy McMillan suggests that the poems before Bagpipe Muzak clear away the myths about women’s identities and promise “a story of new woman.” Yet, since this new woman has had to endure the “struggle of self-conception and self- deliverance, she faces the danger of solipsism and severance from the past.”45 For McMillan, “the poems of Bagpipe Muzak […] go some way towards tackling this problem, both by recapitulating the strategies of the preceding poems and by going on to provide a new sense of privacy and public meaning.”46 “Lucy’s Diary” can be interpreted as a synthesis of Lochhead’s play Dracula, first published three years after “Lucy’s Diary” first appeared.47 In Bagpipe Muzak the poem functions both as a recapitulation of Lochhead’s earlier narrative strategies and as a context for other poems dealing with representations of women’s private and public personae. “Lucy’s Diary” is structured in six parts, each an entry narrated in poetry by Lucy. The note to the title reads: “This Lucy is a version of Bram Stoker’s Lucy, Dracula’s first and perfect victim,” which indicates that the narrative framework used by Lochhead’s narrator has been inherited from Bram Stoker’s novel by the same name, together with its

42 Carol Anderson, “Emma Tennant, Elspeth Barker, Alice Thompson: Gothic Revisited,” in Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, eds. Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 128. 43 Margery McCulloch, “Scottish Women’s Poetry 1972-1999: Transforming Traditions,” in Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, 17. 44 Liz Lochhead, Liz Lochhead (Glasgow: National Book League, 1986), Writers in Brief no. 21. My references will be to the poem as published in Bagpipe Muzak (1991). 45 Dorothy McMillan, “Liz Lochhead and the Ungentle Art of Clyping,” in Liz Lochhead’s Voices, 30. 46 Ibid. 47 Liz Lochhead, Dracula, in Dracula, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and Dracula (London: Penguin, 1989), 69-147.

40 Chapter Two preordaining scripts.48 Lochhead’s Lucy, in the poem as in the play, is a young woman who can “enter” Dracula’s story “anywhere,” to use in a different context the vision of Boland’s narrator in “The Pomegranate.” Jan McDonald and Jennifer Harvie emphasize that two versions of Lucy are represented in Lochhead’s Dracula: as fully human, Lucy is “immature, an undeveloped child, not a woman,” whereas as vampire she is shown as a sexually mature woman, aware of the power that her body gives her and of its source and means of control.49 This observation can also be applied to “Lucy’s Diary.” Thus, Lochhead’s retelling uses Dracula’s story to reflect on the transformations that accompany young girls’ sexual awakenings. In the poem, the narrator might be said to enter Dracula’s story as a Lucy inhabiting the threshold between the human and vampire states. McDonald and Harvie argue that the poem represents Lucy as anorexic: “This gross flesh I will confine/ in the whalebone of my very own/ hunger.”50 In my view, these lines also suggest that Lucy anticipates favorably Dracula’s power in her body. The human, pre-sexual Lucy sees her body as controlled by others; as such, her anorexia can be explained as a manifestation of her refusal of this control. This interpretation is consistent with one of the major thematic concerns of Bagpipe Muzak, identified by Lynda Mugglestone as “the refutation of the importance of body image.”51 However, as both vampire and sexual woman, the poem anticipates that the girl’s hunger can be identified with Dracula’s seductive sensuality and power, and serves to integrate body and self in an identity that Lucy can control, in the whalebone of the girl’s own desire. McDonald and Harvie explain that Lochhead’s vision of Lucy’s character is derived from The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, a text that discusses “the ‘benefits’ bestowed by Dracula on his women.”52 Based on Shuttle and Redgrove’s text, McDonald and Harvie show that Lochhead’s Lucy can be characterized as a “chlorotic weak

48 Lochhead, “Lucy’s Diary,” 60. But in Stoker’s text Lucy is not Dracula’s first victim. Perhaps Lochhead wishes to suggest that Lucy’s awakening to her body’s desires through Dracula can be seen as an initiation experience. 49 Jan McDonald and Jennifer Harvie, “Putting New Twists to Old Stories,” in Liz Lochhead’s Voices, 131. 50 Lochhead, “Lucy’s Diary,” 62. McDonald and Harvie, “Putting New Twists to Old Stories,” 131. 51 Lynda Mugglestone, “Lochhead’s Language: Style, Status, Gender and Identity,” in Liz Lochhead’s Voices, 106. 52 McDonald and Harvie, “Putting New Twists to Old Stories,” 131. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound (London: Penguin, 1980), 267.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 41 creature” before she is turned into a vampire, whereas afterwards Lucy can be seen as empowered, sharing the features of vampire women whose “eyes shone” and who “spoke energy with every glance.”53 These insights suggest that Lochhead’s reconstruction of a vampiric Lucy envisions an empowerment of the female body that challenges the worldview advocated in Stoker’s Dracula, in which the corporeal, sexual, woman must be sublimated into the role of the incorporeal “good” wife through a kind of social anorexia determined by the need to govern the body. This need to govern the female body is a reflection of the need to govern the body of nature and the body politic, government that is threatened by Dracula in his association with wild desires, nature, and anarchy—which is why several members of the gentlemanly elite of late Victorian Britain are set to destroy him. However, while taking this argument into account, my reading of “Lucy’s Diary” will focus more emphatically on how the poem offers a background for juxtaposing elements of the Persephone and Dracula myths. In doing so I will explore the valences of the metaphor of Lucy’s “hunger,” which can be compared to the girl’s “hunger” referenced in Boland’s poem. I have defined myth as being engendered by the reiteration of normative stories. This view allows us to conceive that any story can be elevated to the status of myth, so that we may speak of Dracula’s and Persephone’s myths through the same concepts. We may jostle the two myths in order to see how they corroborate the same norms, yet, at the same time, this jostling may offer opportunities for challenging the norms nestled in the myths. “Lucy’s Diary” offers opportunities for such jostling, which allows us to explore possibilities of representing Persephone’s and Lucy’s willfulness in ways that suggest more empowering identities for women as wives and lovers. Examining these possibilities, I will compare Lochhead’s poem and Boland’s “The Pomegranate.” In the comparison, I will focus on how both poets deal with the themes of enchantment and ensnarement of the pre-sexual girl, as well as with the accompanying theme of anger (suffused with grief in Boland’s poem). This comparison will show that young girls’ “hunger” has been mythically consolidated in different ways in Lochhead’s and Boland’s respective voices, with different effects. In its creation of what has become an archetypal vampire figure, Stoker’s narrative represents women’s bodily desires and sexualities as demonic by distinguishing between an evil abductor who allows for its unchecked display and the men of good standing of Victorian society.

53 Shuttle and Redgrove, The Wise Wound, 267.

42 Chapter Two

Stoker’s text legitimates socialization modes that require the government of the body through reason in a cultural framework that equates body with nature and women, and reason with society seen as a brotherhood elite’s realm of gentlemanly spirit and taste. Within this multi-layered framework, Dracula’s story deals with aspects of the inter-relation between abduction, desire, and the transformation of young women into wives. This inter-relation and transformation renders the text suitable for juxtaposition to Persephone’s myth. In the latter, the masculine brotherhood of Jupiter and Hades wins a share in the government of nature that leads to the appropriation of Persephone’s body’s fertility. The myth provides an explanation for social hierarchies in which women are confined to domestic roles and also legitimizes those same roles by connecting a woman’s fertility to the fertility of nature. The possible scenarios of erotic encounters between men and women devised in Persephone’s and Dracula’s myths share similar elements inasmuch as both are concerned with how the realm of the organic, of the body and of its desires, may be governed through masculine agency. Such common elements are suggested in Lochhead’s poem, where entry number 3 reads:

Yesterday the gardener’s big lad gave me a peach from the greenhouse. Unthinking, I bit and sucked then suddenly flung it from me in a real rage at its beauty. Something in its furred blush hurt me, stuck in my throat like a lump and made me spill, deliberately, clouded paint-water all over my watercolour I’d worked on all morning, spoiling it.54

This portion of the poem allows us to compare elements of Persephone’s myth with those in the Judeo–Christian tradition myth of Adam and Eve as well as with the elements of Dracula’s myth. Lochhead’s voice permits envisioning a site of interaction between the meanings of these myths, and thus makes possible an exploration of their tendencies to recreate the drama of erotic encounters within frameworks of masculine agency.

54 Lochhead, “Lucy’s Diary,” 61.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 43

As in Boland’s poem, elements of Eve’s story are interwoven with those of Persephone’s story: “Yesterday/ the gardener’s big lad/ gave me a peach from the greenhouse.” Reflections on the nature of desire and women’s sexuality gather up around this token of enchantment: “Unthinking, I bit and sucked/ then suddenly flung it from me/ in a real rage at its beauty.” The young woman’s tasting of the fruit is rendered through expressions resonating with those in Dracula’s story used to describe the sucking and biting of the vampire. This reveals a framework for reinterpreting Persephone’s myth, since the character of Lochhead’s poem can be seen as being involved in the overlapping fabulas of several stories. At first, the young woman of Lochhead’s poem appears like an innocent Kore. Like the Kore of Apollodorus’ myth who ate the pomegranate seed “failing to foresee what the consequence could be,” she accepts the token “unthinking.”55 But, reading Persephone’s character through Lochhead’s contemporary figure of Lucy, the traditional event in which Persephone accepts food from the deadly abductor is colored with overtones of sexual lust. Lochhead’s poem invites an interpretation of the Dracula myth through its employment of Persephone’s myth, and vice versa. This circular reinterpretation of the myths allows us to challenge the paradigmatic value of the mythical scenarios that explain young women’s sexual awakenings through using narratives of abduction and temptation. The ancient Persephone myth justifies the abduction of the pre-sexual girl and condones her giving in to temptation by regarding these actions as natural and necessary for the fulfillment of a larger social and cosmic desiderate: the manifestation of nature’s fertility that guarantees survival. In Boland’s poem, the tense acknowledgement of the inevitable “cultural” abduction of the pre-sexual girl into a male-dominated social world occasioned by the anticipation of her response to temptation suggests that the girl’s transformation into a sexual woman will be inevitably made sense of on men’s terms, while women’s own stories of the enchantment of sexual awakening remains accessible only through rifts that open unto alterity, within the bonding relationship between mother and daughter. For Lochhead’s Lucy, the temptation signifying a sexual awakening is the occasion of the revelation of both the rage and the beauty that accompanies it. But unlike in Boland’s poem, the awakening of Lucy does not trigger the realization of the impossibility of communicating the experience in a masculine voice, but rather the impulse to challenge this

55 Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, 33.

44 Chapter Two voice: “When Quincey Morris calls me mighty pretty/ it only makes me hate him.”56 As the young woman becomes aware of her “very own hunger,” she rejects the matronage of other women figures in her life:

This gross flesh I will confine in the whalebone of my very own hunger. All term I would not bleed, not for Matron, Mama, Mademoiselle, nor my sister Mina.57

This Persephone-like Lucy refuses to “bleed” for her mother, an act that reveals her rejection of the notion that she must direct the use of her body’s fertility in a manner that fulfils the patriarchal role of the wife. This refusal allows us to reinterpret the significance of Demeter’s negotiations as a process in which the mother’s consent to Persephone’s transformation into a wife is complicit with masculine desire. But the Persephone that Lochhead makes transparent behind Stoker’s Lucy is no longer only an innocent; she has assumed the sensuality assigned in Stoker’s text to openly sexual women. In Stoker’s narrative, Van Helsing’s brotherhood deplores Lucy’s transformation from an angelic innocent into a sexual predator, and hence proceeds to seal her fate and disenchant her body to underscore her emotions. In Lochhead’s poem, Lucy begins to understand and act out the sensuality of the sexual woman by noting: “Despite myself,/ the sea air is giving me an appetite.”58 It is possible to discern a revised meaning in the ancient myth by re- envisioning it through the prism of Boland’s and Lochhead’s poems. The ancient myth of Kore-Persephone serves to define both the category of woman (as pre-sexual girl, wife, and mother) and the ritual of erotic encounters that differentiate the roles of men and women in terms of abduction and temptation (to which the girl ambiguously surrenders). Boland’s poem underscores a separation between the narrative realms of masculinity and femininity. For, if femininity has been narrated as abduction and temptation, it has been done so by men. Even as women fulfill the social rituals to which the narration subjects them, the loss is men’s, for the nature of the enchantment circumscribing women’s sexual awakenings remains incomprehensible to them. Lochhead’s poem allows us to draw on the myth of Dracula in order to contextualize the sexual connotations of rituals of abduction, enchantment,

56 Lochhead, “Lucy’s Diary,” 62. 57 Ibid., 62. 58 Ibid., 62.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 45 and temptation that underlie Persephone’s story with those of a modern myth. Here, however, the roles envisioned as socially legitimate are challenged. The young woman comes to inhabit a masculine position by becoming an abductress herself. Unlike Stoker’s sanitized abductress, whose sexual body was punished to recuperate the angelic incorporeal body, however, Lochhead’s Lucy reclaims the position of both an innocent and a sexual woman, and thus engenders an understanding of “woman” that is irreducible to the categories straitjacketing femininity and masculinity in terms of polarized socially acceptable idealizations.

Conclusion

As noted, Albinus argues that the expression of the Persephone myth in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter may have influenced the content of the ritual practices of the Eleusinian cult, but “the same should be equally probable vice versa.”59 Persephone’s story was developed from, and in turn served to develop, the practices associated with the Eleusinian mysteries. The ancient story is thus derived from a series of events that held public significance in the time in which they were performed and, hence, events that corroborate certain meanings of marriage, agricultural practices, and mothering of cultural significance; in turn, the story contributes to the scripting of such events—in its aesthetic performance. The narrative and ritual expression of the myth reinforce each other, scripting and legitimating socialization patterns for men and women, and also strengthening the desirability of their repetition. Thus, myths become integrated into social rituals that engender forms of socialization. The ancient myth grants that Kore-Persephone, and henceforth every pre-sexual girl, must be the subject of a transaction between males, be tempted by their future husbands; the girl’s responses are read only in terms of giving in to the future husband’s demands, at least partially. Their marriage is celebrated, and the terms of this union are legitimated by making it reflect the cosmic order of seasonal alternation. This corroboration of cosmic and social orders engenders unchallengeable and fixed understandings of “women.” The recent myth centered on Dracula also defines social rituals of marriage using the motif of abduction. As in Persephone’s myth, the abductor hails from an “otherworldly” realm, and his victims spend their existence traversing between this world and his. Their encounters are eroticized. Here, however, the abduction is not legitimate, for its legitimization would imply an acceptance of women’s

59 Albinus, The House of Hades, 173.

46 Chapter Two sexuality that would make visible their enchantment, not simply as passive victims, but as active “predators” themselves. Late nineteenth century male-generated understandings of women as innocent would have been undermined if women were seen to enjoy legitimately an appetite for mastering erotic encounters. The young woman’s abduction is demonized in Bram Stoker’s Dracula to qualify negatively her willful participation in the abduction; hence, there, willful women are constructed as archetypical harlots. Dracula’s myth expresses what Bruno Latour has identified as one of the moderns’ paradoxes; the myth carries out both the work of mediation that permits Nature’s intervention “at every point in the fabrication of their societies,” and the work of purification that holds Nature at bay, othered in its “radical transcendence.”60 The figures of Dracula and Lucy, metonymically tied to Nature, serve to mediate the social norms that separate masculine culture from feminine nature, and specify the government of the latter by the former. Although invoking the hybrids born through the intersection between masculine culture and feminine nature, Dracula’s myth nevertheless carries out the work of purification that separates nature from culture. Kenneth Burke points out that as soon as a myth emerges, the need arises for “specialist” guardians of the myth and supervisors of the correct fulfillment of rituals.61 In ancient Greece these would have been the priests and priestesses who guaranteed the authority attributed to the gods. The guardians of the cultural order in the society that Dracula haunts are representatives of the medical, scientific, and legal professions; their authority is strengthened by narrators such as those enabled in Stoker’s text. It is not my intention to suggest that Dracula’s myth is based on Persephone’s myth, but only to compare their functioning as social myths in their creation of the meaning of female eroticism and sexual partnership. The Kore of ancient myth is first enchanted with the narcissus’ beauty and then enraged at the prospect of living with Hades. Boland’s poem suggests a need to preserve the enchantment of the young girl’s sexual awakening on feminine, rather than masculine, terms. The Persephone coexisting with Lucy in the narrator of “Lucy’s Diary” is both enraged and enchanted, and, as such, she recuperates agency in the cultural space defining sexual encounters between men and women. By giving her the narrative space to voice her contradictory feelings, Lochhead’s poem

60 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1993), 32. 61 Kenneth Burke, “Doing and Saying: Thoughts on Myth, Cult and Archetype,” Salmagundi 7 (1971): 100-119.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 47 helps us to understand the ambiguity of Persephone’s acceptance of Hades’ seed, as well as Lucy’s ambiguous status as Dracula’s passive victim, proof of women’s erotic willfulness. Lochhead’s young woman both accepts and denies, is enraged at, and longs for, the male’s offering. The faithful enchantment of the young woman in the ancient myth has become a dreary enchantment of women’s fate in Boland. The faithful disenchantment of the young woman from the demon’s grip in Stoker’s Dracula has inspired Lochhead’s recreation of her as a woman in control of her fate. The analysis of myth undertaken in this essay focused on the constraining role of narrative in shaping identities while also allowing me to preserve a dynamic view of the social imaginaries texts construct. Judith Butler argues that narrative reiterations yield normative frameworks of self-presentation.62 This normative force of narrative, established through a citational chain, can be seen as constitutive of myths. In turn, myths consolidate the authority of the narratives from whence they had taken off, and through which they are nourished, and they compel reiterative citation. These myths may be more properly termed social myths to capture their role in defining social identities and socialization scenarios. However, because the norms conveyed in narratives can be challenged using a discourse’s deictic force to reconfigure social imaginaries, narratives of myths are not immune to the intervention of the subjects they nurse into being. The concept of the dynamics of social myth that emerges from the analyses undertaken in this essay can be used not only to investigate literary texts dealing explicitly or indirectly with mythological themes. Irrespective of our social, geographical, and political situations, we come across the force of social myth at every step. Pre-existing narrative patterns infiltrate, through the citational force engendered by myth, our innermost recesses, scripting our fantasies of ourselves and thus shaping our perceptions of ourselves. These in turn underlie our presentations of ourselves to others in social reality, and our social acts, molding our presence and how we make sense of our lived experiences. I feel that it is important to interrogate those patterns in order to find out whether and why they are constraining. And if they are, we need to know how they can be changed. Such reconstructions and revisions are indeed the ways of steering ourselves and our surroundings, helping us to recreate ourselves and our world in more empowering configurations.

62 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 1-29, 124-140, 187-189; see, also, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 140, 145, 226.

48 Chapter Two

Bibliography

Albinus, Lars. The House of Hades: Studies in Ancient Greek Eschatology. Oxford: Aarhus University Press, 2000. Anderson, Carol. “Emma Tennant, Elspeth Barker, Alice Thompson: Gothic Revisited.” In Contemporary Scottish Women Writers. Eds. Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 117-130. Apollodorus. The Library of Greek Mythology. Trans. Robin Hard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Boland, Eavan. Outside History: Selected Poems 1980-1990. New York: Norton, 1990. —. “The Pomegranate.” In a Time of Violence. 20-21. Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. —. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Manchester: Carcanet, 1995. Burke, Kenneth. “Doing and Saying: Thoughts on Myth, Cult and Archetype.” Salmagundi 7 (1971): 100-119. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. —. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Castro, Jan Garden. “Mad Ireland Hurts Her Too.” Nation 6 (1994): 798- 802. Crawford, Robert. “The Two-faced Language of Lochhead’s Poetry.” In Liz Lochhead’s Voices. 57-74. Eds. Robert Crawford and Anne Varty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. London: Faber, 1980. Henry, Brian. “The Woman as Icon, the Woman as Poet.” Michigan Quarterly Review 36, No. 1 (Winter 1997): 188-202. Homer, Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer. Ed. and trans. Martin L. West. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Hynes, Colleen. “‘A song for every child I might have had’: Infertility and Maternal Loss in Contemporary Irish Poetry.” In The Body and Desire in Contemporary Irish Poetry. Ed. Irene Nordin. 144-59. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006.

The Persephone Figure in “The Pomegranate” and “Lucy’s Diary” 49

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lochhead, Liz. Liz Lochhead. Writers in Brief No. 21. Glasgow: National Book League, 1986. —. Dracula. In Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and Dracula. 69-147. London: Penguin, 1989. —. “Lucy’s Diary.” Bagpipe Muzak. 60-62. London: Penguin, 1991. Longley, Edna. “From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands.” In The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland. 173-95. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994. McCulloch, Margery. “Scottish Women’s Poetry 1972-1999: Transforming Traditions.” In Contemporary Scottish Women Writers. 11-26. McDonald, Jan, and Jennifer Harvie. “Putting New Twists to Old Stories.” In Liz Lochhead’s Voices. 124-147. McMillan, Dorothy. “Liz Lochhead and the Ungentle Art of Clyping.” In Liz Lochhead’s Voices. 17-37. Mugglestone, Lynda. “Lochhead’s Language: Styles, Status, Gender and Identity.” In Liz Lochhead’s Voices. 93-108. Raschke, Debrah. “Eavan Boland’s Outside History and In a Time of Violence: Rescuing Women, the Concrete, and Other Things Physical from the Dung Heap.” Colby Quarterly 32, No. 2 (June 1996): 135-42. Shuttle, Penelope, and Peter Redgrove. The Wise Wound. London: Penguin, 1980. Smith, R.T. Review of In a Time of Violence. Southern Humanities Review 30, No. 3 (Summer 1996): 304-7. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Eds. Nina Auerbach and David Skal. New York: Norton, 1997. Yorke, Liz. Impertinent Voices: Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Poetry. London: Routledge, 1991.

CHAPTER THREE

CAUGHT IN A MEMORY OF MOURNING ON MODERN STAGE: MARY ZIMMERMAN’S POST-9/11 PRESENTATION OF ORPHEUS

ERIKA M. NELSON, USA

Oh, gods, I pray you change me, transform me entirely, let me step out of my own heart. —Mary Zimmerman, Metamorphoses1

A human’s experience of violence often crystallizes in memory into what Mary Zimmerman has called an “irredeemable moment,” where fate cannot be undone and something once perceived as whole becomes fractured beyond repair. Such a moment is caused usually by a suddenly inflicted loss, injury, or transgression, or by an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power. It is experienced as violence and it can remain a fixed point of trauma if not mitigated in some way through therapeutic or artistic expression. The collective experience of loss, which was lived through in New York City on September 11, 2001, is one such moment of variance. By sheer temporal coincidence, the Broadway production of American playwright Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses offered an aesthetic expression and a mythical perspective to the personal losses of 9/11. The stories that the play comprises—all modern renditions of Ovid’s classical

1 In an interview with Bill Moyers, Mary Zimmerman indicates that this line was the first line written for her production of Metamorphoses, inspired by her own difficulties in undergoing a personal transformation. See, NOW with Bill Moyers, “Transcript: Bill Moyers Interviews Mary Zimmerman,” March 22, 2002 (accessed October 12, 2008), . 52 Chapter Three work bearing the same name—deal directly with the haunting effect of loss for those who survive and experience the absence of a beloved. Thus, in many ways, this production began, at least in the aesthetic vein, the public and collective, even collaborative, work of mourning in the aftershock of the terrorist attacks. Zimmerman’s project Metamorphoses had started several years prior as a student production. Described as rather collaborative than scripted, it premiered on stage in Chicago in 1998 and then developed into an off- Broadway show produced on Second Stage in 2001 before going on to be performed on Broadway.2 The piece highlights approximately a dozen key stories of Ovid’s masterpiece on legendary transformation, Metamorphoses, stripped down to their most elemental storylines.3 In Zimmerman’s rendition, ten actors move in and out of the multiple characters to play mythological figures such as Midas, Phaeton, Cupid, Psyche, Apollo, Narcissus, and Orpheus interchangeably, in a visually beautiful and lyrically moving fashion. Stories are embedded in other stories, some presented as fleeting moments. Deborah Garwood has characterized Zimmerman’s directorial approach as one of a “collaborator” and her style as featuring “strongly visual, aural, and gestural elements.”4 Joseph Farrell has remarked that, in the play, “the basic emotions of each story are allowed to speak directly.”5 Zimmerman’s production melds drama, myth, and archetypal psychology into a “public dream,” a dream which, Garwood suggests, “gives the play themes that explore interesting links between myth, theatre, and therapy.”6 The Broadway production was well received, with Zimmerman winning a Tony Award for Best Director in 2002 and the production continuing its run until February 2003. The script of the play was published in 2002.7

2 In her article, “Myth as Public Dream: The Metamorphosis of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses,” Deborah Garwood describes the beginnings of this production as consisting of “early rehearsals […] with readings of source texts and players’ spontaneous characterizations.” Deborah Garwood, “Myth as Public Dream: The Metamorphosis of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25, no. 1 (January 2003): 69. 3 For this production, Zimmerman adapted David R. Slavitt’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, entitled The Metamorphoses of Ovid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 4 Garwood, 69. 5 Joseph Farrell, “Metamorphoses: A Play by Mary Zimmerman,” American Journal of Philology 123, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 624. 6 Garwood, 70. 7 Mary Zimmerman, Metamorphoses: A Play (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 27-28.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 53

Ovid’s collection of myths was written in dactylic hexameter verse in the form of a mock epic poem over the six-year period leading up to Ovid’s exile from Rome in 8 A.D. It is one of the most popular and important works of mythology and it serves as a primary source for over two hundred classical legends that have survived to the twenty-first century. Ovid’s retellings invert the accepted order and elevate human passions while ridiculing the gods, and their desires and conquests. Ovid’s Metamorphoses attends, in particular, to the pursuit and persistence of love in the face of inevitable change and transformation, or metamorphosis, as the lesser deities in this work continually transform their own selves and shapes into plants and animals, as well as manipulate the shapes and beings of humans. As an exploration of the centrality of love, loss, and endurance in human life is central to the myth’s private and public functions, there are many stories of irreparable loss in Ovid’s Metamorphoses—but none perhaps as tragic as that of Orpheus’ loss of his beloved Eurydice, not once, but twice. Orpheus is a legendary mythological hero who is praised, not only as a lover, but also as the master of voice and poetic, musical expression. Orpheus could sing and play the lyre so beautifully that he was able to move even immovable objects, tame the hearts of wild beasts, and transform reality by bringing it into vibrating resonance through the power of his singing. This “ultimate precursor, model and symbol of the ‘essence of poetry,’” as Joseph Metz describes him, suffers the sudden violent loss of his beloved Eurydice on their wedding day.8 Distraught and inconsolable after his wife Eurydice’s early and unexpected death, Orpheus challenges the very limits of human potential: He descends into the underworld to search for his beloved Eurydice. There he sings so mournfully that the nymphs weep and assist him in his journey to the gods of underworld. Orpheus’ music then softens the hearts of Hades and moves Persephone to tears. He thus gains permission to rescue his bride and lead her out of the underworld, under the condition that he not look back at her until she has reached the light of the upper world. In a moment of human weakness, as he sees the sun and cannot resist sharing his joy of it with Eurydice, he makes a fatal mistake. He turns to share his delight with Eurydice, and, in doing so, disobeys the one taboo given to him. Eurydice vanishes forever, leaving Orpheus to return to the upper world alone. Grieving even more inconsolably, he becomes a recluse and wanders for many years before he is affiliated with Hermes and is revered

8 Joseph Metz, “Exhuming Rilke’s Orphic Body: Gender and Poetic Voice in ‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’ and ‘Hetären-Gräber’,” The Germanic Review 79, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 248.

54 Chapter Three as an interpreter of the gods to man, and also as the initiator of men into the Orphic mysteries and secret workings of the world. Ironically, in the Classical versions of the myth, it is only after Orpheus has lost his wife for the second time that the power of his song grows. Ovid, for instance, only mentions the power of Orpheus’ song over animals, birds, and trees, once Orpheus has returned from the underworld without success.9 Thus in the Classical versions, Orpheus’ experience of violent loss from Eurydice’s death is underscored and, hence, is highlighted as an experience the poet–singer must undergo in order to strengthen the depth of his song and the power of its effect upon the natural world. Emmet Robbins suggests that the three facets of Orpheus— as lover, musician, and priest—are united in this character at this moment, transforming into a “complicated amalgam which took centuries to emerge,” an amalgam which, Charles Segal adds, symbolizes “the basic interrelatedness of all parts of the world.” In this way, Segal expounds, “[t]he magic of the poet’s song makes visible and communicable that hidden harmony; it reveals the unity in which life and death appear as ultimately parts of the same continuum.”10 It is thus not surprising that the elegiac story of Orpheus and Eurydice has so captured the imagination of the Western world in which Orpheus has become a central figure, not only of Classical mythology, but also of the modern cultural landscape. Perhaps it is the myth’s haunting, foreboding, and yet penetrating insight into human experience that has led Orpheus to re-emerge at critical junctures in history and in art as a key to approaching the problematics of love, unexpected and sudden loss, and mourning in modern society in Western culture. The figure of Orpheus emerges as particularly tragic, as his futile loss is re-experienced successively: first, as part of the natural cycle of life and death with his wife’s death; and second, as a testament to the human’s ultimate inability to win over such natural forces. In her work Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Julia Kristeva points out that mourning for that which is lost and never to be recovered, the “elusive preobject,” is an archaic memory of primal connection in existence before the occurrence of an inevitable emotional separation—a memory of a unity the re-capturing of which is impossible (with Kristeva, this lost unity is the dyadic bond between the mother and the child). Kristeva underscores the importance of learning to lose: to leave the

9 Ovid presents the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in Book X. See David R. Slavitt, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, 195-198. 10 Charles Segal, Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 28.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 55 memory of this unity and to re-establish a new unity that compensates for the loss in the realm of imaginative representations, i.e., in the world of language and symbols. Thus Kristeva presents the paradoxical idea that one can overcome the depression generated by loss by learning “how to lose.”11 Read in this context, Orpheus can be interpreted as the model for Kristeva’s unsuccessful and successful attempts at learning to lose. The Orpheus of Classical myth experiences bereavement by reflecting on his loss. This process of remembering compels him to revisit Eurydice’s death over and over again, and thereby to remain stuck in the very moment of his loss of her. He thus recreates the imaginative possibility of reconciling with the figure of his departed wife in his journey into the underworld as an ultimately futile journey, even an anti-journey. Yet it is not until he permanently loses his wife and all possibility of reuniting with her that he can ultimately meet her in the realm of language, as expressed in the final stages of the Orpheus myth when Orpheus emerges as an oracle and a part of nature. Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of the Orpheus myth brings together Ovid’s retelling of the myth and the version proposed by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his early twentieth century poem “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes” (“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” 1904).12 Together, these versions form a contemporary assessment of the myth at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as presented by Zimmerman on stage in the post-9/11 world. Significantly, in all these cases, the Orpheus myth re-emerges at times when the redemptive power of mythological stories appears to have lost its traditional meaning, role, and function in society, and an increasingly complicated world.13 The play proved its worth by attracting full audiences after its opening—a sign of the classic work’s endurance and of its transformative ability to adequately address and embrace the specific social, political, and human conditions and concerns of its modern incarnation. With her modern adaptation of the Orpheus myth, Zimmerman was heralded as a new inheritor of myths, as

11 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 4-5. 12 Rilke’s poem was first published in Neue Gedichte (Leipzig: Insel, 1907). For her production, Mary Zimmerman chose Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the poem, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York; Vintage, 1989), 49- 54. 13 For a discussion on the significance of Rilke’s version for the early 20th century culture, see Erika M. Nelson, Reading Rilke’s Orphic Identity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005).

56 Chapter Three one who was able to successfully adapt “unwieldy literary classics for stage.”14

The Makings of Myth

Zimmerman is an award-winning director and recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1998. She is well known for drawing on ancient literature and epic narratives based in oral tradition, including her artistic adaptations of such classics as The Odyssey, The Arabian Nights, and the Chinese Journey to the West. Zimmerman’s interest in mythology is grounded in her interest in the power of storytelling. In a 2002 interview with PBS Commentator Bill Moyers, Zimmerman discussed the “redemptive power” of myths to “change the way we see our world and ourselves.” For Zimmerman, this potential for change is part of the attraction of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the greatest achievement of which she identifies as telling “stories in a bunch of different ways.” Zimmerman reads this narrative strategy as construing a “subtext” which affirms that, “we’ve always liked to tell stories, and stories keep continuing, and narrative always continues. Even though we die, these stories continue and sort of ties (sic!) together.”15 In Zimmerman’s play, Phaeton’s therapist provides a more elaborate explanation of the form and function of mythic retellings in modern times:

It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.16

Zimmerman credits Edith Hamilton’s book Mythology and the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for much of her own interest in mythology and her inspiration for the play. Campbell’s work expresses his fundamental belief in the power of myths to offer a kind of psychological roadmap within the labyrinth of the complex modern world; myths, he claims, serve as

14 Robert Trussell, “Myth and Transformation,” The Kansas City Star (January 25, 2004) . 15 Zimmerman in Moyers. 16 Zimmerman, 67-8.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 57 culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths that point beyond a dualistic conception of reality.17 Similar to Campbell, Mircea Eliade has argued that myth offers manifestations of what he termed the “Sacred”—manifestations that provide a structure and an orientation of events in mythical proportion to the world and that thereby function as a “revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse” and the linear march of history.18 By performing myths, Eliade believes, one not only simply recounts or re-enacts mythical events, but “reactualizes” them and participates in the sacred event, which is “cyclic” in its nature and its vision of time.19 As such, it allows one to escape the “terror” that can be caused by a linear succession of events, which Eliade viewed as empty of any inherent value and as the source of modern human experience of anxiety.20 To experience the Sacred is tantamount to an escape from the human condition, from the limitations of the body so that one can reach the experience of the Sacred, which, in turn, is often expressed through the imagery of “freedom” or as the death of one’s old body and a rebirth into a new body. This idea is realized in the later version of Rilke’s poetic image of Eurydice and her newly discovered fullness in death, which is presented as the centerpiece of Zimmerman’s play. Furthermore, Carl Gustav Jung spoke of myth’s ability to speak in “primordial elements,” which he saw as central to great art and to the ability to communicate to humanity at large:

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in all of us those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.21

17 See, Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, vols. 1-4 (New York: Penguin, 1987). 18 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harvest, 1957), 21. 19 Ibid., 68–69. 20 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (London: Harvill Press, 1959), 231- 245 21 Carl G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972), 82.

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Zimmerman’s play was in the rehearsal stage when the World Trade Center attacks took place. It opened in New York on September 18, 2001, merely a week after the unprecedented terrorist attacks. Zimmerman’s adaptation of Ovid’s myths was the first theatrical work to open after the attacks at New York’s Second Stage, an Off Broadway theater. The play offered, as New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote on October 10, 2001, “a tone to a community in mourning—the concepts of loss, love, salvation, yet dealing with it with humor and sorrow. Catharsis was there, an unbelievable ‘letting forth’ of pent-up feeling.”22 Brantley elaborates:

[In Zimmerman’s play] the images of loss repeat, distort, freeze and transform. Orpheus, a prisoner of his own memory, makes his famous mistake again and again, looking backward as his bride slips, unreclaimable, into the underworld. A sad, hopeful wife stands at the ocean’s edge, scanning the horizon for the return of her long-dead husband, just as she did on the day his ship set sail. A girl, torn from her lover in the night, is evoked by words said softly three times by a narrator: “She’s going to suffer.”23

It is, thus, not only that classical mythological characters took on new shape as modern figures in Zimmerman’s play, but the play itself also took on an unexpected significance for the American cultural landscape at a time when the United States faced a violent loss. In an interview describing the opening of the play on Broadway, Zimmerman recalled the experience of feeling “sort of strange going in to rehearse a play at that time, but on the other hand, the play suddenly had all of these very profound resonances.”24 Zimmerman relates that she could neither gauge the audience’s proximity to the events of September 11, 2001, nor how the audience would respond. There were at least two stories in the play, that of Orpheus and that about Alcyone and Ceyx, which dealt directly with tragic, violent loss. The latter is the tale of a couple who live in a “monotony of happiness” or in “an unchanging kind of life” until Ceyx decides to take a sea voyage to consult an oracle. Alcyone has a premonition about the journey that warns him not to go. Yet he sails off and drowns. Zimmerman poignantly alludes to the ancient myth’s timely message: “as he’s drowning he makes a prayer to the gods

22 Ben Brantley, “How Ovid Helps with Loss and Suffering,” New York Times (October 10, 2001), E1. 23 Ibid. 24 Zimmerman in Moyers.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 59

[:] just let my body be found.”25 In Zimmerman’s adaptation, it is the character of Sleep who is beckoned by Iris to:

Devise, if you can, some form to resemble King Ceyx and send it down in a dream to his wife, the Queen Alcyone. Let her know the news of the wreck of his ship and the death Of the husband she loves so well. Sleep [she yawns] do this for us— can you?26

Sleep yawns and falls asleep, yet is awakened by the alarm clock that goes off—a common Zimmerman twist of the ancient tales—and encourages Morpheus to change forms and, disguised as the ghost of her husband, to visit Alcyone. Zimmerman relates the scene:

So then we sort of cut back to poor Alcyone, and I have her sleeping by the shore waiting for him to come home. And the gods take pity on her and send her a dream of her husband who says [...] And this is so wrenching in light of, you know, recent events. Your prayers have done no good, for I am gone beyond all help or hope forever. And he says, get up from your bed and put on your mourning clothes. And then he disappears and she wakes up and searches the shore for him, and he’s not there, but then his body comes up. And then [...] his body comes to the shore, his dead body. And in a very unusual moment I think in any myth—it’s rare for this to happen—she starts to run towards him and in her agony she turns into a bird [...] that’s not the rare part. The rare part is that he is resurrected and turns into a bird as well. And then they fly off together.27

Zimmerman’s innocent retelling of the mythological stories bears a strong sense, not only to healing, but also to a reassurance that, as she puts it, “some part of us does go on, some spirit does go on.” It is this reassurance provided by myth that leads one to the theatrical “suspension of disbelief,” and “makes it easy [for one] to enter the heart and to believe in greater change as well, not just the little magical enchantment of the theater but that we all can transform,” Zimmerman argues.28 As this episode indicates, Zimmerman’s story takes on an aesthetic, sacred quality as myths can in communicating both the beauty and necessity of finding artistic expression in the face of human mortality and as well as the consciousness of this mortality through such tragic events.

25 Ibid. 26 Zimmerman, 28-29. 27 Zimmerman in Moyers. 28 Ibid.

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Reflecting further on the performance of the time, Zimmerman states that she did not know how New Yorkers would respond to a story “where someone goes away, off to work basically, and is suddenly taken from the earth—just destroyed.” Not a line had been changed or added to the script, yet there was something powerful about these stories: “They have something to say because they are so ancient that [they] help you take the long view,” Zimmerman concludes.29

Entering the Orphic Dreamscape

The power of myth to transform emotions was heightened, not only by the performer’s agility and choreography, which supported the text, but also by Zimmerman’s choice to organize her production around an aquatic stage of a thirty-foot swimming pool. The presence of water became symbolic of an ocean of imagination, with water serving as the active “means of transmitting narrative, theme and mood,” as well as the medium, in which the metamorphoses occur.30 Zimmerman’s staging choice emphasizes the liminal space between water and land, and between consciousness and unconsciousness, through the “aquatic stage.” The aquatic stage evokes a dreamscape where Ceyx’s body can return from the unknown or Orpheus’ descent may become a journey into the depths of the contemporary psyche. As such, the stage came to serve as an entryway into the landscape of consciousness, creating a poetic and physical space for the “transparency” of thought, reflection, and self-expression, which re-inscribed the myth’s enduring relevance for contemporary society. In Zimmerman’s version, the presentation of the Orpheus myth introduces the audience to the very processes of modernization, and intertextual and collaborative adaptation. The myth is portrayed in two versions: the “first take” is the classical tale as told by Ovid, followed by a “take two” that features the 1904 poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” written by Rainer Maria Rilke. Ovid’s and Rilke’s re-readings of the Orpheus myth are further transformed by Zimmerman in the actual production, as the characters are given unprecedented agency in the embodiment of both versions of the poems, which allows the figures to speak for themselves.

29 Ibid. 30 Jennifer de Poyan, “Adapting the Ancients,” San Diego Union Tribune (April 1, 2005). .

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 61

The first rendition of the Orpheus myth is set up by the narrator’s introduction, which recalls versions of the myth: “You’ve heard of Orpheus, the greatest musician of all time, and his bride Eurydice?” This invocation is followed by a choreographed death-dance of Eurydice as she steps on the snake, which is overlayed by stage directions stating that “the joyful wedding bells become funereal.”31 A new narrator, Narrator One, appears with a music stand and steps into the pool to perform his work, which he prefaces by naming it “Orpheus and Eurydice: Number One: Ovid, A.D. 8.” At this point, the Underworld materializes around the narrator, and the performance of Ovid’s version begins. The play depicts the widower-bridegroom, Orpheus, as he descends into the Underworld and onto his knees as he literally drowns himself in grief, accompanied by stage directions indicating that he “kneels in a shower of water pouring down from above.”32 As Orpheus bemoans his loss of Eurydice with a beautiful song and showered by water, everyone in the Underworld stops to listen. Hades then calls out to Eurydice, who enters the stage. Hades informs Orpheus that he is granted permission to take Eurydice out of the Underworld on the condition that he not look back until they both have reached the upper world. At the fateful moment in which Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, Orpheus doubts whether “it wasn’t a cruel delusion, / a dream, or a mirage.” As he turns to look at his wife, Hermes, who has been accompanying them, lifts Eurydice and pulls her away into the Underworld again. Eurydice breathes her last “Farewell” as she and Orpheus reach out for each other. The narrator describes how, although it was “his last sight of her,” he “saw it over and over again.”33 After the performance of this familiar scene, the actors reassemble and act out the same scene again until Eurydice’s last “Farewell” is spoken, this time silently. In this second performance, the actor playing Orpheus stretches out for Eurydice over and over again, and she is whisked away from him and back toward death over and over again. As this scene is re- enacted continuously, the narrator questions: “Is this a story of love and how it always goes away?” The actors replay the entire scene two more times as the narrator struggles to find meaning in the actions. He asks the first time: “Is this a story of how time can move only in one direction?”; and, then the second time: “Is this story a story of an artist, and the loss that comes from sudden self-consciousness or impatience?”34 At this

31 Zimmerman, 41. 32 Ibid., 42. 33 Ibid., 43. 34 Ibid., 44.

62 Chapter Three moment of ambiguity, a new narrator appears, placing her music-stand in the water and introduces “Orpheus and Eurydice: Number Two. Rainer Maria Rilke. A.D. 1908.”35 Zimmerman’s choice to integrate Rilke’s interpretation of the Orpheus myth into her own play is perhaps not surprising, since Rilke’s work offers one of the most thorough explications of the myth in the twentieth century. The Orpheus myth reemerged, albeit in changed form, at two significant junctures in Rilke’s work: first, in the 1904 poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” in his New Poems (1907), in which an early Orpheus descends into the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice; and then again in 1922, as the central focus of his Sonnets to Orpheus, whereby the later Orpheus of the myth emerges as the dismembered and resurrected god who becomes an oracle and returns to nature. Rilke’s early re-creation of the Orpheus myth transformed the figures of Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes into modern individuals experiencing grief, loss, confusion, and tragedy, thereby adding psychological poignancy to their depiction and resignifying the myth to present patterns of cultural, social, and personal experience. He also shifted the focus from the two central figures, Orpheus and Eurydice, to the hermaphroditic and hermetic figure of Hermes, who represents a synthesis of the two. Rilke’s version underscores Hermes as a mediator of the distance between the lovers at the moment of their separation. This added focus on Hermes offers the audience a new perspective through which they can witness the drama unfolding from within—from the point of view of a character who is simultaneously part, yet ultimately outside, of the traditional core of the action. Hence, a third speaking position is introduced within the myth—a position that mediates the challenges and fears faced by the human characters. Zimmerman’s inclusion of Rilke’s poem (in truncated version) gestures the changed role of Orpheus as a means of exploring the fragility of the modern, subjective self, as well as its sense of alienation and loss in the modern world. The descent signifies a journey into greater self- knowledge and poetic creativity, whereby the historical power of the Orpheus figure emerges as a way to explore an alternative poetic identity, a “mask” or “role” for self-understanding in an era of drastic and unpredictable change. From this perspective, Zimmerman’s program emerges as poetically restorative in nature. By salvaging a sense of humanity from the tradition of myth for a world that appears to be disconnected from its mythic heritage and poetic

35 Ibid., 45.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 63 imagination, Zimmerman proposes ways of making such old forms and ancient myths translatable into, and hence, applicable to, modern life. Zimmerman’s Orpheus-myths juxtapose the ancient and the modern in both the language and action of her play to reflect the variable development, yet also persistence, of the original narrative in it. She consistently adds startling twists or changes in her handling of the older versions of the myth, thereby “updating” them for her contemporary audience. Zimmerman offers a restored vision of humanity’s inner self (a self threatened by incomprehensible violence and destruction), realizing the need to re-establish the vitality of the poetic mythic traditions by merging inner perception with external realities. The fragmentation of the past needed to be overcome by recouping the myths’ expressive value in a meld of the subjective, psychological, and objectively verifiable sociological factors. Stylistically, Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” presented a “turning-point and a new beginning” for the author.36 Joseph Metz has pointed out that the poem is “shot through with considerably greater anxiety” than many other of Rilke’s poems, a disquiet that Metz interprets as “gender anxiety.”37 Rilke’s initial inspiration to write this poem was a fourth century B.C. bas-relief of Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes, which he saw first in Paris and then again in Rome in 1904.38 The bas-relief depicts Orpheus turning to Eurydice and shows the two lovers in proximity as they touch one another and look into each other’s eyes. Rilke’s adds an element of emotion to this relief by adding to it what Manuela Speiser has described as the experience of “spatial and inner distance.”39

36 Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 102. 37 Joseph Metz, “Exhuming Rilke’s Orphic Body,” 248. 38 See Else Buddeberg, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” in Benno von Wiese, ed., Die Deutsche Lyrik. Form und Geschichte. Interpretationen, Vol. 2: Von der Spätromantik bis zur Gegenwart (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1956), 318-335; 323. Critics, including Hans Jürgen Tschiedel, think that Rilke perhaps saw the bas-relief on at least three different occasions between the years 1902-1904 when Rilke was visiting Paris, Rome, and Naples, and their respective museums (Louvre, villa Albani, Museo Nazionale). Hans Jürgen Tschiedel, “Orpheus und Eurydice,” in Rainer Maria Rilke. Wege der Forschung, Vol. 638, ed. Rüdiger Görner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 286. 39 Manuela Speiser, Orpheusdarstellungen im Kontext Poetischer Programme (Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Germanistische Reihe Band 47, 1992), 99. Translations from German are mine.

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The visual representation of the experience in the relief holds more keys to understanding the dynamics between the masculine and feminine characters than its Classical literary counterparts, Ovid’s and Virgil’s versions, convey. The fourth century bas-relief, a copy of which can still be viewed in Naples, was created long before its written counterparts and has fascinated scholars on account of its unique ambiguity. An analysis of it does not clearly reveal whether Orpheus is in the moment of losing or re-gaining Eurydice. What is comprehensible, though, is that Orpheus ascending from the Underworld with the new knowledge he has gained from his journey and with Hermes at his side. Similarly to the bas-relief, Rilke’s rendering of the Orpheus–Eurydice myth particularizes the moment in which Orpheus ascends from the underworld after he has won Eurydice’s release through his singing, but is caught in the moment of losing her. This moment, which can also be interpreted as the moment of possible reunion with his beloved Eurydice, ultimately represents the moment of human loss and failure, yet also the potential for the breakthrough that Kristeva suggests can lead one out of depression, as noted earlier. Intertextually engaging with all these different versions of the myth, Zimmerman incorporates this ambiguity into her production by proposing that both Ovid’s and Rilke’s perspectives are possible “performances” that are equally valued and intrinsically connected, and, hence, encouraging that the moment of separation should be re-assessed. The dual nature of this moment is presented thematically, spatially, and temporally in Zimmerman’s play, revealing the interaction and interdependence of two experiences: acquisition of the previously lost object, and its final and irretrievable loss. Zimmerman’s production shares in Ovid’s and Rilke’s recognition of the tragic element of the Orpheus myth, where even art is not able to adequately bridge the gap between the beloved and the poet, between image and object, and eternal form and changing substance. The tragic dimension of the myth is clearly portrayed in modern Orpheus’ inner anxiety in “Take Two” (Rilke).40 Heightened by self-doubt, Orpheus struggles with his own divided nature. He seeks to reassure himself of the presence of the two following behind him:

He said to himself, they had to be behind him; said it aloud and heard it fade away They had to be behind him, but their steps were ominously soft. If only he could

40 Rilke describes Orpheus’ senses as if divided—“wie entzweit”—a state which denotes lack of self-control, in which the senses seem to work independently.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 65

turn around, just once.41

But this modern Orpheus is not alone in his attempt to retrieve Eurydice. Hermes, the conductor of souls and “the god of distant messages,” is also present, unlike in Ovid’s version, and emerges with a companion at his side. The characters in Zimmerman’s play give voice to the parts of the poem that Rilke had relegated to the poetic narrator, thereby adding a new dimension of agency, embodiment, and presence to familiar figures. Hermes, for instance, describes his own divine movement, which is portrayed in his “vibrating wings around his ankles” (a characteristic which Rilke has added although it is not visible on the relief) and which sets him apart from Orpheus and his impatient gait.42 Although Orpheus is not able to see the other two figures, the mere thought of Eurydice stirs up past memories and generates his love-lament. The lamentation introduces Eurydice for the first time into the poem, not through her words or voice, but through those of Orpheus; thus she appears in her “function” and relationship to Orpheus as an inspiring muse and an object of devotion, the sole purpose of his life and of his creativity. As a recapitulation of Orpheus’ grief after Eurydice’s death, the lament also attests to the power of Orpheus’ song after her death—a detail that is absent in the initial portrayal of Orpheus. In his ability to evoke her presence and the experience of a lost harmony through the singing, Orpheus’ song grows. With Eurydice, there is once more a world and a future for Orpheus, one that is full of beautiful landscapes and harmony, and beyond the “lament” that he projects onto the world around him. Thus, in lamenting her death, Orpheus’ art attains a unique achievement, becoming, as Getrud Höhler has pointed out with respect to Rilke’s poem, an “act of creation” and a restoration, at least imaginatively, of a sense of a primal unity and harmony in song. Orpheus, in this case, is unaware of this power of his art. It emerges as a force greater than the mere identity of the poet, which can bridge the unbridgeable.43

41 Zimmerman, 45. 42 In Classical texts, Hermes appears traditionally as a lunar god, who stands in the center of the universe, making connections between life and death, the outer and inner world, between light and dark. Here, too, Hermes fulfills his role as mediator bridging the gap between Orpheus and Eurydice, and he is able to lead Eurydice on his arm out of the underworld towards Orpheus. 43 Getrud Höhler, “Rainer Maria Rilkes ‘Orpheus’,” in Helmut Koopmann, ed., Mythos und Mythologien in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts (Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 36), Frankfurt am Main: 1979), 369.

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When Eurydice then enters and speaks, she appears notably different than anticipated by the audience and she narrates her own experience in Zimmerman’s version. Led by Hermes, she walks onto the stage slowly and deliberately. Her movement is noticeably slower than that of her male companions, as her step is shortened by the long shroud of unraveling, winding sheets, so that she seems to totter. She is not concerned about the speed or success of this undertaking as Orpheus is, because she is, as the narrator states, “uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.” Yet, similarly to Orpheus, she is consumed, but with a state of peace and presence, not with excessive desire. The clothes wrapped around her—like a new skin— seal her up in this new protectiveness of the world inside her. Eurydice voices in Zimmerman’s words through Rilke: “She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy / With child, and did not see the man in front/ or the path ascending steeply into life.”44 She emerges “healed” and sheltered from the life she had led. She is one with herself and with the world that fills her with novel fullness. This Eurydice presents a distinctively new and modern image of her as a woman, calling into question the relationship between the male poetic voice and its female muse. At the heart of Rilke’s poem is the question of how poetry and meaning are constructed through one’s experience of life. In Zimmerman’s version, Eurydice’s state is that of a woman “pregnant” with death, but also organic, belonging and, thus returning, to nature. In death, Eurydice has entered a new stage of her being that is untouchable and is once again virginal. Zimmerman takes over Rilke’s (gender-wise somewhat problematic) conclusion: “She had come into a new virginity / and was untouchable / her sex had closed / like a young flower at nightfall.”45 In this new virginity, she has grown unaccustomed to her past wedding and to others’ touch so that “the god’s infinitely gentle touch of guidance/ hurt her / like an undesired kiss” (46). Having cast off all the roles and limitations her earthly life and connection to Orpheus had imposed on her, she has become part of nature, scattered into the world around her:

She was already loosened like long hair, Poured out like fallen rain, Shared like limitless supply.

Now, whole unto and within herself, Eurydice is at peace in her new state of being—without Orpheus. Ultimately, Eurydice’s death appears not as the enemy, but as the great liberator that achieves completion or

44 Zimmerman, 46. 45 Ibid., 46.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 67

“fulfillment,” compared to a fruit “suffused with its own mystery and sweetness.”46 It is at this point in the play that Orpheus turns to look at Eurydice, as if to witness for himself her transformation in death. But Eurydice’s death is clearly more than a negation of life. It emerges as an unknown condition that is fascinating in its own right and beyond human consciousness. Symbolically, Eurydice merges with the feminine creative element of life, in tune with its nature and its rhythm, moving in eternal space and in the state of forever “becoming.” The long excursion on Eurydice points to Rilke’s and also to Zimmerman’s choice of emphasis in the poem/play—it is Eurydice, not Orpheus, who becomes the center of attention. Unlike Ovid, who is more interested in “violent emotionality” and the “occasion for developing the rhetoric of love,”47 Rilke and Zimmerman are neither interested in love nor in the emotional interaction between the lovers. Instead, they are intrigued by the “privacy and autonomy of Eurydice as a being who is now given over to the otherness of death, a being who thus stands outside human sensuality and male sexual possessiveness,” by how the female point of view of death and dying is a regenerative experience.48 After providing a thorough introduction and description of the new “lead” character, Rilke’s poem and Zimmerman’s play return to the actual plot of the story and to its anticipated climax. The narrator explains that Orpheus’ turn has caused the god Hermes to put out his hand and stop Eurydice: “He has turned around—”. Here, Orpheus’ looking back is not understood within the same context or meaning, for Eurydice does not even understand Hermes’ compassionate and lamentful cry, as she softly asks: “Who?” Even this question does not maintain her focus for long, and she looks at Hermes, who then looks at Orpheus. Finally, she casts a glance at Orpheus, too, before she reads a line usually identified with the narrative focus in Rilke’s poem and turns away:

Far away, Dark before the shining exit-gates, Someone or other stood, whose features were unrecognizable.49

Eurydice articulates her own experience and emerges in the play with her own sense of subjectivity so that here it is Orpheus who is seen as the

46 Ibid., 46. 47 Segal, 120. 48 Ibid., 120. 49 Zimmerman, 47.

68 Chapter Three other, unrecognizable. Eurydice glances back to Hermes before herself slowly turning and walking away from Orpheus to return back to the Underworld. Orpheus is left to articulate his own experience:

He stood and saw how, on the strip of road among the meadows, With a mournful look, the god of messages Silently turned to follow the small figure Already walking back along the path, Her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes.50

The final line, an echo of Zimmerman’s narrator, leaves the audience with a lasting impression of Eurydice as “uncertain, gentle, and without impatience” and of Orpheus alone in the dark, watching the “figure” of Eurydice walk away from him.51 In the end, the contrast and unbridgeable distance between the two, once united, figures becomes painfully clear, as does the separation between the realm of the living and that of the dead. But Zimmerman’s rendering of the Rilke poem offers an important shift in perspective. The story’s climax has undergone its own transformation, one which might be thought of as embodying a feminist and a poetic woman’s touch. Ultimately Eurydice in her death is so deeply transformed that Orpheus’ attempt to bring her back to the real world appears unthinkable, not to mention unjustifiable, and even violent. As Werner Kohlschmidt interprets this point in Rilke’s poem, to not allow Eurydice to complete this transformation into her new existence would be “no longer just tragic but also unjust.”52 Zimmerman’s unique portrayal of Orpheus’ familiar journey into the underworld presents the audience with two possible and contrasting performances on life’s stage and the complexities of interpreting life’s and death’s journey, as indicated also with the music stand. The introduction of the music stand underscores the performative aspect of this piece in its current instantiation: understood is that this is one of many possible performances. The instability of sustaining an individual point of view presents what Charles Segal describes as “a more hesitant relation between language and reality,” which is typical of myth.53 The focus is no longer on the individual figures and their subjectivity, but again on “the long view” of the experience. Here, Orpheus stands at an important threshold, as he is faced with the realization that past relations, past traditions, and

50 Ibid., 48. 51 Ibid., 48. 52 Werner Kohlschmidt, Rainer Maria Rilke (Lübeck: I. M. Wildner, 1948), 46. 53 Segal, 120.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 69 past stories no longer work. His encounter with this new Eurydice forces him to deal with the implications of her rejection of him as non- recognition of his status as a lover, a husband, a poet-singer, and a man. Eurydice’s question “Who?” prompts Orpheus to “know himself” as completely and fully as she knows herself. In the portrayal of Eurydice emerges Rilke’s and Zimmerman’s imperative of change (“Wolle die Wandlung,” will the change) that art may also possess. As Zimmerman explains:

[T]he moment of metamorphoses is so excruciating but then it can produce something new […]. Something the world has created through these horrible changes. And I don’t mean that particularly from the World Trade Center, but if you take the long view, we’ve suffered incredible disasters and transforming events, and yet story goes on, narrative goes on.54

Performative Possibilities

Zimmerman’s modern version of Orpheus’ descent is not tragic. Rather, it offers new potentials in the performance of this myth, a “reconstellation of an ideal condition,” as Speiser terms it.55 Zimmerman’s elegiac production offered reprieve from the images of the 9/11 events that were repeated in the media and an alternative to the mass media’s problematic strategies of attempting to mediate intense human suffering in that time. The ability for modern audiences to mourn collectively the experience of human tragedy and loss emphasized the useful role that drama and tragedy play in particular for society. As a means of catharsis in a time where many New Yorkers were still in the midst of their grief, this performance offered a quiet, respectful way into the power of mythic imagination to transform grief and experience human resilience through creativity and art. In taking up the challenge to re-engage modern mythic imagination, Zimmerman offered the post-9/11 world a means of embracing again simple pleasures of humanity and joy even in the darkest of times. Zimmerman explains her work as a response to the poem that appeared on the back page of The New Yorker in the first issue of the magazine published after September 11, 2001, entitled “Try and Praise the Mutilated World.”56 For Zimmerman, the most important line in her play Metamorphoses occurs in the final moments of the play when Baucis and

54 Zimmerman in Moyers. 55 Speiser, 99. 56 Zimmerman in Moyers.

70 Chapter Three

Philemon set the table for the gods and bring out the food. Zimmerman relates the scene: “There’s a moment where one of the actors brings out a basket of apples and someone says, Remember how apples smell? And then everyone pauses and remembers.” This line, for Zimmerman, stands out in stark contrast to the familiar post-9/11 rhetoric about “how everything is changed, nothing will be the same, everything is different, we can’t go back, everything is lost, it’s all different, everything is over and done with.” In her estimation, it is “the natural world—the smell of apples” that remains innocent, reminding everyone that “there is still beauty in the world, and there is still love in the world, and these simple pleasures in the world, which are indelible.”57 In today’s society, which is still affected by recurring projections of the initial trauma through the media, there is an ever-present opportunity to re-experience the trauma over and over again. It is against this rhetoric that Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses emerges as a call to stop and remember the natural world and the experience of simple innocence even in the midst of horrific suffering. Even though, as one character observes in the play’s final episode, “none of these stories [have] completely happy endings,” Zimmerman’s play, echoing Ovid and Rilke, encourages us to learn to be willing to love and to lose again.

Bibliography

Buddeberg, Else. “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” In Die Deutsche Lyrik. Form und Geschichte. Interpretationen. Vol 2: Von der Spätromantik bis zur Gegenwart. Ed. Benno von Wiese. 318-335. Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1956. Brantley, Ben. “How Ovid Helps with Loss and Suffering.” New York Times (October 10, 2001, late edition). E1. Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God. New York: Penguin, 1987. De Poyen, Jennifer. “Adapting the Ancients.” San Diego Union Tribune. (April 1, 2005) Accessed October 12, 2008. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harvest Publ., 1957. —. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: the Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. London: Harvill Press, 1959.

57 Ibid.

Caught in a Memory of Mourning on Modern Stage 71

Farrell, Joseph. “Metamorphoses: A Play by Mary Zimmerman.” American Journal of Philology 123, No. 4 (Winter 2002): 623-628. Garwood, Deborah. “Myth as Public Dream: The Metamorphosis of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25, No. 1 (January 2003): 69-78. Jung, Carl G. The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. Collected Works, Vol. 15. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Höhler, Getrud. “Rainer Maria Rilkes ‘Orpheus’.” In Mythos und Mythologie in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts (Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts). Vol. 36. Ed. Helmut Koopmann. 367-385. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979. Kabel, Rainer. Orpheus in der deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart. Kiel: Dissertationschrift, 1964. Kohlschmidt, Werner. Rainer Maria Rilke. Lübeck: I. M. Wildner, 1948. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Metz, Joseph. “Exhuming Rilke’s Orphic Body: Gender and Poetic Voice in ‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’ and ‘Hetären-Gräber’.” The Germanic Review 79, No. 4 (Fall 2004): 247-272. Moyers, Bill, and Mary Zimmerman. “Transcript: Bill Moyers Interviews Mary Zimmerman.” NOW with Bill Moyers (March 22, 2002). Accessed October 12, 2008. Nelson, Erika M. Reading Rilke’s Orphic Identity. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. Prater, Donald. A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Neue Gedichte. Leipzig: Insel, 1907. —. “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. 49-54. New York, Vintage, 1989. Segal, Charles. Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1989. Speiser, Manuela. Orpheusdarstellungen im Kontext Poetischer Programme. Vol. 47. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Germanistische Reihe, 1992. Slavitt, David R. The Metamorphoses of Ovid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Trussell, Robert. “Myth and Transformation.” The Kansas City Star (January 25, 2004). Accessed October 12, 2008.

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Tschiedel, Hans Jürgen. “Orpheus und Eurydice.” In Rainer Maria Rilke. Wege der Forschung. Vol. 638. Ed. Rüdiger Görner. 285-318. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987. Zimmerman, Mary. Metamorphoses: A Play. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

CHAPTER FOUR

AGAINST MONOLOGIZATION: THE SUBVERSIVE VOICE OF CHRISTA WOLF’S CASSANDRA

KIRSTEN A. SANDROCK, GERMANY

“Cassandra, I believe, must have loved Troy more than herself when she dared to prophesy the downfall of the city to her fellow countrymen,” the German author Christa Wolf (born 1929) stated in 1980, when she was awarded the acclaimed Georg-Büchner Award.1 At that time, Wolf was working on a rewriting of the Cassandra myth, which is closely related to the downfall of Troy. The following article explores how Wolf’s appropriation of the Greek legend in Cassandra (1983) undermines patriarchal notions of patriotism as well as national and gender identity through its complex portrayal of the Greek sibyl. The novel was published together with four accompanying lectures about the writing process in a time when East and West Germany were still divided and the Cold War was leading to reciprocal nuclear armament.2 Taking into consideration this socio-historical context, the following paper argues that Cassandra

1 The original German quote reads: “Kassandra, denke ich mir, muß Troja mehr geliebt haben als sich selbst, als sie es wagte, ihren Landsleuten den Untergang ihrer Stadt zu prophezeien.” Qtd. in Christine Schmidjell, Christa Wolf: Kassandra. Erläuterungen und Dokumente (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 68. My translation. 2 The publication of Wolf's novel Kassandra: Eine Erzählung (1983) was accompanied by the publication of four lectures given on the occasion of the Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics under the title Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: ‘Kassandra’: Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen (1983). In English, the essays are entitled “Conditions of a Narrative: Cassandra” and were published together with the novel itself in Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux, 1988). All references in the following article are made to this edition. 74 Chapter Four serves as a critique of patriarchal and nationalist power politics alike. The analysis shows how Wolf’s work de-mystifies notions of heroism, and how it unsettles traditional representations of the seeress by giving her a voice of her own. Although Wolf’s Cassandra has been criticized for its apparently monologic structure, this paper argues that the narrative in fact defies the polarization of gender or national difference. This can be demonstrated particularly well by drawing on gender-critical appropriations of Bakhtin’s dialogical principle. Bakhtin’s principle allows long-muted voices of women to disrupt monologic discourses without falling into the essentialist trap of reading their versions as definite conceptions of “truth.”3 To set the ground for this argument, the first part of the paper gives details on the concept of female dialogism, according to which gender identity can only be envisaged as an incongruous body of voices. Instead of merely replacing a patriarchal with a matriarchal regime, dialogical approaches undermine essentialist conceptions of gender and seek a genuine dialogue between people regardless of their biological sex. It is this kind of polyvocal interaction that also emerges as the underlying motif of Wolf’s Cassandra, as the second part of the article will explore.

Gender Criticism, Female Dialogism, and the Concept of Voice

Within the field of gender studies, the motif of voice has often been seen as an emblem of emancipation. The ability to speak and to be heard is commonly understood as a prerequisite for a society that no longer censors women in either private or public spaces. This focus on voice has been of particular concern in gender-critical approaches to literature, as Judith Gardiner notes: “A central question of feminist literary criticism is, Who is there when a woman says, ‘I am’?”4 Accordingly, language and identity are seen as essentially intertwined. The process of vocalization turns into a pivotal point for the construction of a personal and a collective sense of self. Gender-critical readings of literature examine this process of self-

3 On the dialogic principle, see Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 287, 293, et passim, and my discussion hereafter. 4 Judith K. Gardiner, “On Female Identity and Writing by Women,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 178.

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 75 expression and investigate how the literary (re-)construction of female voices also influences extra-textual discourses. Despite the agreement among feminists about the importance of speaking, it is far from clear how the motif of voice should be defined. Whereas Hélène Cixous’ conception of an écriture feminine holds that “woman must write woman. And man, man […],”5 the idea of an exclusively gender-specific language has come under considerable attack for trying to essentialize, rather than to liberate, women. Judith Butler’s performativity principle came to serve as a corrective to the biological essentialism of Cixous’ approach. Butler states: “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity […]; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”6 Taking this notion of constructedness even further, critics like Donna Haraway do away with the notion of gender all together. Haraway abstracts womanhood into the hypothetical space of the “cyborg world,” where science and technology substitute the spheres of biology and culture.7 Against the background of this critical impasse, an increasing number of critics have been drawing on the dialogical principle that understands any speaking subject, whether individual or collective, as an interface of internally differentiated voices. The concept goes back to the writings of Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975), which were originally conceived in the early twentieth century and re-discovered in the West during the 1960s and 1970s. For Bakhtin, life is essentially entangled with language. Bakhtin’s premise holds that dialogical relationships exist between all forms of being, which are interdependent in their corporeal as well as their ideological natures. He claims: “To be means to communicate. […] Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. [...] Every thought and every life merges in the open-ended dialogue.”8

5 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane P. Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 348. 6 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 140. 7 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150ff. 8 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 287 and 293.

76 Chapter Four

In his seminal essay “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin elaborates on this concept of the dialogical self.9 The construction of identity is described as a never-ending process of formation that is shaped by internal and external forces together. According to Bakhtin, individuals constantly participate in the discourses of the world, so that they must be understood as processual rather than as stagnant beings. They interact with multiple voices inside and outside of themselves. These voices are simultaneously supporting, contradicting, and hybridizing each other, as Bakhtin states:

[A]ll languages […] are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values. As such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically. As such they encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people […].10

For Bakhtin, then, the concept of personal identity is an internally and externally differentiated one. The self is polyvocal and can only be situated in the interface of multiple dialogical voices. It is this sense of the multifaceted self that is increasingly appropriated in gender studies. Critics like Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry draw on Bakhtin’s dialogical principle to posit multivocality as a leitmotif of female identity and to attain an understanding of gender that neither essentializes nor deconstructs the self. Their premise of a “feminist dialogics” seeks to make women’s voices heard while it simultaneously challenges “the assumption in contemporary culture of a monolithic or univocal feminism.”11 Dialogical criticism is pluralistic in its understanding of gender. It allows for the simultaneity of difference within the female community. With regard to literature, the dialogical premise further allows for the recognition of alternative styles and narrative conventions without restricting women’s writing to unequivocal or stereotypical categories. Female dialogism welcomes hybridity in form and function without defining gender identity or women’s writing in absolutist categories. Rather, female dialogism provides a conceptual

9 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), 259-422. 10 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 291f. 11 Dale M. Bauer and Susan J. McKinstry, Introduction to Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, eds. Dale M. Bauer and Susan J. McKinstry (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 1.

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 77 framework for articulating the multiple realities experienced by women in their daily lives and expressed by them in their literatures. What makes female dialogism furthermore viable for gender-critical approaches to writing is the idea that the non-fictional context of a work functions as a dialogizing background; and that textual and contextual discourses can be thought of as interacting forces that relate reciprocally to one another. Literature, like the dialogical self, is seen as an autonomous entity that nevertheless stands in direct relationship with its socio- ideological environment. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow state in this respect that female appropriations of the dialogical principle are “ongoing attempts in life and art to remain aware of, acknowledge, and analyze these different languages and contexts, positions in space and time, in which and from which they are spoken.”12 Fiction is perceived as a creation of the imagination that is nevertheless significantly influenced by the socio-historical discourses of its day. Consequently, critics of female dialogism believe that the process of tracing back the non-fictional circumstances under which a work was produced enhances the reading of a text without predetermining its meaning. This idea of female dialogism, to read a text as interplay of interior and exterior voices, is also shared by German author and critic Christa Wolf, as her novel Cassandra illustrates.

Christa Wolf’s Cassandra (1983) Recovering Cassandra’s Voice: The Mythological Context

Wolf first embarked on the project of rewriting the story of Cassandra when she realized how strongly patriarchal conventions have influenced traditional narrations of the myth. This interest first arose in 1980, when the author and her husband Gerhard Wolf were warranted a travel permit to Greece by the government of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), which otherwise rigidly controlled the journeys of its citizens into non-socialist countries.13 On this trip, Wolf read Aeschylus’ Oresteia and was captivated by its representation of Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam and Hecuba. In the classical narrative, the priestess–prophetess is punished by Apollo for not loving him with the curse of being forever

12 Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow, Introduction to A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Theory and Bakhtin, eds. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xiii. 13 For further information on the former German Democratic Republic, see Graham Bartram and Anthony Waine, eds., Culture and Society in the GDR (Dundee: GDR Monitor, 1984).

78 Chapter Four disbelieved when she makes her predictions. Wolf is fascinated by this act of silencing, which has the opposite effect on her, namely that she believes Cassandra more than anybody else in her surroundings: “I believed every word she said. It seemed to me that [Cassandra] was the only person in the play who knew herself. […] But no: the patriotic old men forbid the unauthorized foreign woman to speak.”14 This is even true after Cassandra’s first prophecy of Troy’s downfall has come true. Aeschylus’ Oresteia relates how Cassandra is still not taken seriously by her surroundings, but seized by the Spartans and decried as mad by the chorus, which traditionally represents the received opinion of the aristocratic leaders: “You are mad, mad, carried away by the god, / Raising the dirge, the tuneless / Tune for yourself.”15 According to Wolf, this traditional portrayal of Cassandra constructs a perspective on the seeress that is at once patronizing and patriarchal. She believes the representation to be repressive to the point of being misogynist. Consequently, she starts her project of rewriting the myth from a gender-critical perspective in order to give Cassandra a voice of her own. Wolf’s point of departure is the relocation of the Cassandra story within its historical context. Her goal is to liberate the figure from one- dimensional stereotypes that were placed on her by ancient writers. In her lectures Wolf asks: “Who was Cassandra before anyone wrote about her? […] For she is a creation of the poets, she speaks only through them, we have only their view of her.”16 Following this dictum, Wolf sets out to uncover Cassandra from the layers of patriarchal myth that have traditionally enveloped her and to unsettle the idea that this version of the myth is the “correct” one.17 She believes that the first step towards reclaiming Cassandra from masculine mythologizations is to question the stylistic standards of Western aesthetics. In her accompanying lectures, the author argues that all literary and artistic conventions represent a certain

14 Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 145 and 147. 15 Aeschylus, The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, trans. Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 51f. For details on the Cassandra story in Greek mythology, see Simon Price and Emily Kearns, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 100. 16 Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 273 and 287. 17 Wolf ironically comments on attempts to read Greek mythology as representation of reality in her lectures: “The archaeology of the last hundred years offers an opportunity to observe the manufacturing process of a so-called historical truth. Take the example of Troy: A man, Heinrich Schliemann, takes Homer’s epic literally, while everyone else regards it as pure invention. […] he opens the eyes of science to the fact that ancient Greek history is not a myth, or more properly, that the myths mirror ‘truth’.” (Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 261).

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 79 ideological outlook on the world that must be reexamined and, if necessary, challenged for their potential reproductions of stereotypes: “Narrative techniques […] in their closedness or openness also transmit thought patterns. Aesthetics […] is a system of categorization and control, […] especially where it advocates certain views about the subject matter of the various genres, namely ‘reality.’”18 In line with this statement, Wolf’s project of rewriting the Cassandra story does not simply deconstruct a single myth; rather, it seeks to re-evaluate the cultural and literary traditions of the Western world, which has long taken for granted its roots in patriarchal power structures. Wolf envisions a form of narrative that does not lay claim to one- dimensional representations of truth but illustrates the heterogeneity of reality. She argues that women in particular must voice their experiences of reality in different forms of writing. She also makes clear why Cassandra occupies such a central position in this process of rewriting realities:

Cassandra is one of the first women figures handed down to us whose fate prefigures what was to be the fate of women for three thousand years: to be turned into an object. […] She plumbs to the depths what it means to be turned into an object exploited by others. She withdraws increasingly from her service to her own family, from the social machinery she is built into, and associates with people who like her are outsiders—either voluntarily or because they have no choice. Her inner history: the struggle for autonomy.19

In order to liberate the seeress from this subjugated position, Wolf gives Cassandra a voice of her own. She rewrites the myth of the traditionally silenced object and turns Cassandra into a speaking subject, who disrupts patriarchal monologues with a first-person narrative.

Narrative Maneuvers: Subjectivity, Emotionality, and Polyvocality

Wolf’s appropriation of the Cassandra story is characterized by a “tone of subjectivity” that Linda S. Pickle regards as a distinctive characteristic of gender-critical writing.20 Cassandra opens with a quotation from

18 Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 266 and 300. 19 Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 227 and 263f. 20 Linda S. Pickle, “Christa Wolf’s Cassandra: Parallels to Feminism in the West,” Critique 28, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 150.

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Sappho’s poem about “limb-loosing love,” which establishes the text’s emphasis on emotionality and introspection.21 The epigraph is followed by an opening paragraph that situates the story against the background of Cassandra’s imminent death.22 The events take place immediately after Troy has been destroyed by the Greeks. Cassandra is taken captive by Agamemnon and brought to Mycenae, where she is killed by his jealous wife Clytemnestra. In Wolf’s rewriting of the myth, however, Cassandra is still standing at the gates of Mycenae when she begins to tell the story of her life. As Peter Graves notes, the prophetess “uses the moments before her death under Clytemnestra’s knife to reflect on the experiences that have brought her to this point.”23 The rest of the novel is told from the perspective of Cassandra, who relates her version of the events in a form of interior monologue. In contrast to previous representations of the tragedy, Wolf’s Cassandra employs a non-linear and fluctuating style of narration. The text frequently shifts back and forth between different events in a manner that is evocative of the stream-of-consciousness style. Cassandra uses personal associations to interweave private and public experiences about the downfall of Troy. Her viewpoint opens up a perspective that is deeply subjective while still embodying the principle of dialogic polyvocality. Although some critics have read Wolf's novel as another one- dimensional view of the ancient myth,24 Cassandra really counters monologic discourses and creates an interface of voices that negates essentialist depictions of reality. Despite the subjective perspective from which it is relayed, Cassandra’s account incorporates the voices of different people and reflects their personal viewpoints in her first-person narration. In her role as prophetess she sees through the patterns and

21 Wolf identifies Sappho as one of the few female authors whose writings have survived from the past and are still available in the present: “Few, very few women’s voices have reached our ears since Sappho sang circa 600 B.C.” (Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 295). 22 Wolf, Cassandra, 3. 23 Peter J. Graves, “Christa Wolf's Kassandra: The Censoring of the GDR Edition,” Modern Language Review 81, no. 4 (October 1986): 944. 24 Monika Papenfuß, for instance, believes that Cassandra “nowhere fulfills the literary mandate Wolf set down for her work. The concept of a female aesthetics remains unrealized and fails already in theory […]. In practice, Christa Wolf even lapses at times into the very language of the classical heroic epos she otherwise characterizes as masculine and therefore as a territory of violence.” Monika Papenfuß, Die Literaturkritik zu Christa Wolfs Werk im Feuilleton: Eine kritische Studie vor dem Hintergrund des Literaturstreits um den Text 'Was bleibt' (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 1998), 119. My translation.

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 81 ideologies of her environment. Her voice echoes the heteroglot languages of others, as she states in a moment of self-reflection: “There is something of everyone in me, so I have belonged completely to no one, and I have even understood their hatred for me.”25 In passages like this, Cassandra is portrayed as an internally dialogized character. She represents the concept of polyvocality that Wolf believes to be an important precept of every representation of the world. Wolf contends: “The contradiction cannot be resolved, only named.”26 Having long lived under the secret surveillance of the former GDR government, the author advocates the recognition of alternative viewpoints and claims that only multiple perspectives can represent reality. Her protagonist Cassandra is an example of this kind of polyvocal discourse, which acknowledges differences in both private and public discourses. Cassandra seeks the interaction rather than the separation of different viewpoints. She values heterogeneity even when others try to enforce a singular opinion on societal discourse. One of the central means for the prophetess to achieve this sensibility towards her own and other people’s complexity is an awareness and appreciation of human emotions. Wolf’s narrator is an extremely receptive character who sees through the façades of other people and exposes them as covers for their underlying insecurities and fears. Her story exemplifies the fallacy of purely rationalistic discourses, which view emotions as inferior and try to suppress them.27 Cassandra refuses to speak as “unequivocally, publicly and loudly” as others do in her surroundings: “Yes, it’s true, fear too can be set free, and that shows that it belongs with everything and everyone who is oppressed. […] The free woman learns to lay aside her unimportant fears and not to fear the one big important fear because she is no longer too proud to share it with others.”28 The acknowledgement of one’s emotions thus turns into an important step towards personal and cultural emancipation. Cassandra speaks up in the face of those who would rather stifle her voice, and she refuses to be silenced by authoritative figures. From early childhood onwards, Cassandra develops an acute sense of self-determination that combines the longing for personal autonomy with the desire to serve Troy. She has set her heart on becoming a prophetess

25 Wolf, Cassandra, 4. 26 Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 266. 27 Wolf writes: “This antagonism takes the form of ambivalence in the man, and because it must be incessantly denied, glossed over, reinterpreted, and repressed, it generates fear, hatred, and hostility” (“Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 223). 28 Wolf, Cassandra, 75 and 35.

82 Chapter Four and thereby wants to acquire what is otherwise hard to achieve in her patriarchal surroundings, namely to be admitted the status of a speaking subject. Wolf’s Cassandra ponders: “Why did I want the gift of prophecy, come what may? / To speak with my voice: the ultimate. I did not want anything more, anything different.”29 This interdependence of power and voice functions as a leitmotif in the text. Wolf presents language as an instrument of authority that has the power of both constructing and subverting dominant discourses. The ambivalent power of speech becomes most apparent when Cassandra refuses to participate in the propaganda of her father’s military leaders. They propagate war against the Greeks after Cassandra’s brother Paris has abducted the beautiful Helen from Menelaus. In Wolf’s narrative, this seizure, which has traditionally been seen as the starting point of the Trojan War,30 is exposed as a charade that exemplifies the falseness of patriarchal power structures. After months and months of waiting to see the captive, Cassandra learns that Helen has never arrived in Troy but had been snatched away from her brother on his way home. The prophetess states: “The King of Egypt had taken her away from Paris, the stupid boy.”31 Rather than admitting this twofold failure, however, the Trojan authorities try to cover up the incident by engendering an attitude of hostility against the Greeks. Wolf’s narrative emphasizes that the palace prefers to contrive a war based on the deception of its citizens over the potential risk of losing face in the eyes of an opposing power. Cassandra brings out the full farce upon which personal and political war glorifications are constructed, not only in ancient Greece but still today. The figure of Eumelos is a primary example of a person who deceives the public for his personal and political advantages. The military leader of King Priam’s army spreads a net of lies over the city to justify a battle that he believes will gain him even more power and glory than he already has. In so doing, Eumelos comes to represent a despotic force. He suppresses alternative voices by “presupposing what he had still to create: war.”32 Cassandra alone sees through the officer’s practice of talking the people and the king into an avoidable war. She tries to talk her father out of this illusion, but King Priam proves to be “already blind to all the reasons for opposing war, and that what made him blind and deaf was the declaration

29 Wolf, Cassandra, 4. 30 For further information on the Trojan War, see Price and Kearns, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion, 560f. 31 Wolf, Cassandra, 69. 32 Wolf, Cassandra, 105.

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 83 of the military leaders: We will win.”33 Wolf thus rewrites the story of the Trojan War as an event that is fabricated by means of language. In Cassandra’s words, the legendary battle turns into “a war waged for a phantom.”34 Everybody else around her is deceived by the discourses of the military leader, who preaches Troy’s alleged post-war glorification when really the city is doomed to be defeated. As a consequence of Eumelos’ war propaganda, Wolf’s Cassandra is relegated to an outsider position. Governmental authorities try to silence her, and the once admired prophetess now acts at her own risk when she voices her dissent to the palace. When she first protests against the war, for instance, her father tries to convince Cassandra that she must surrender to Troy’s war plans. Priam says to his daughter: “Anyone who does not side with us now is working against us.”35 Despite this warning, Cassandra refuses to participate in the belligerence of the palace. When Priam and Eumelos want to use her sister, Polyxena, as a lure to trap Achilles, Cassandra decries the plan as ludicrous and is accordingly reprimanded for her unwillingness to conform. “Be silent, Cassandra!” the king orders when she voices her dissent in a crucial scene that epitomizes the autocracy of the palace:

“Now, Cassandra. You’re going to be sensible, aren’t you?” I said: “No.” “You don’t agree to the plan?” “No.” “But you will keep silent?” “No,” I said. My mother Hecuba grasped my arm fearfully. She knew what was coming now; so did I. The king said: “Seize her!”36

Cassandra is thrown into prison for her oppositional speech. She is kept there for the entire time of war preparations because Priam does not want his daughter to inform the Trojan people about the deceitfulness of the political authorities. But although Cassandra loses her physical freedom because of expressing disagreement, she refuses to be silenced even when she is punished for her speaking. During her imprisonment, Cassandra repeatedly re-enacts the confrontational scene in her mind and continues to negate the dominant discourses that try to censor her opposition: “A hundred times I said no

33 Wolf, Cassandra, 70. 34 Wolf, Cassandra, 69. 35 Wolf, Cassandra, 70. 36 Wolf, Cassandra, 126f.

84 Chapter Four again. My life, my voice, my body would produce no other answer. ‘You don’t agree?’ No. ‘But you will keep silent?’ No. No. No. No.”37 This repetition of disagreement indicates that Cassandra retains her personal power of speech despite the public censorship placed upon her. Edith Waldstein remarks with regard to this scene that “No” becomes “the key word with which to describe Cassandra’s relationship to the palace.”38 Considering this oppositional stance of Cassandra, her voice can be read as a thoroughly dialogizing force. She refuses to participate in the despotism of her surroundings and gives voice to her own opinion despite the dangers this act of articulation involves. Cassandra will not let herself be turned into a powerless object. Instead, she subverts domineering structures and uses her voice as an instrument of rebellion that nobody can take away from her.

Rereading the Myth: Wolf’s Cassandra in a Contemporary Context

Against the background of Cassandra’s pacifist rebellion, Wolf’s appropriation of the story has often been read as an analogy to the political era in which the novel was written. Jutta Marx, for one, considers Cassandra to be a critique of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). She believes that the play anticipates the downfall of the socialist state, which occurred six years after Wolf’s publication of the novel.39 Furthermore, the narrative is frequently interpreted as a cautionary comment on the practice of preemptive nuclear armament in the late Cold War era.40 The author herself motivates these kinds of contextual interpretations of the narrative when she draws parallels between the Greek sibyl and the status of the modern-day author. In her lectures, Wolf has described the prophetess as a precursor of female writers who use their profession to gain a public voice. Wolf states: “Cassandra was the first professional working woman in literature. What else could a woman have become besides a seeress?”41 Analogous readings of Wolf’s Cassandra story and its meta-fictional context are

37 Wolf, Cassandra, 131. 38 Edith Waldstein, “Prophecy in Search of a Voice: Silence in Christa Wolf’s Kassandra,” Germanic Review 62, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 196. 39 Jutta Marx, “Die Perspektive des Verlierers—ein utopischer Entwurf,” in Erinnerte Zukunft: 11 Studien zum Werk Christa Wolfs, ed. Wolfram Mauser (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1985), 161-79. 40 See Schmidjell, Christa Wolf, 65-71. 41 Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 176.

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 85 further strengthened by the author’s defiance of the arms race that Western authorities propagated during the final stages of the Cold War. According to Wolf, “[t]here is no such thing as an armed peace. Peace is unarmed or it is not peace—regardless of what one thinks one has to defend.”42 Similar to Cassandra’s revelation of the effects of corrupt political propaganda in the novel, the author exposes the destructive effects of one- sided political propaganda in the German society in which she wrote. Wolf urges people to disrupt the monocracy of domineering discourses because she believes that only an open dialogue can lead to a society that values life over death:

To prevent wars, people must criticize, in their own country, the abuses that occur in their own country. The role taboos play in the preparation for war. The number of shameful secrets keeps growing incessantly, boundlessly. How meaningless all censorship taboos become, and how meaningless the consequences for overstepping them, when your life is in danger.43

For Wolf, then, dialogic relations are a conditio sine qua non for a peaceful and progressive society. The suppression of critical thoughts amounts to self-destruction and death, which can only be overcome by voicing internal differences in a society and by allowing the multiplicity of voices to interact. Considering the subversive tendencies of the Cassandra narrative, it is inevitable to take into account the critical debate that evolved around Christa Wolf in the early 1990s. Following the reunification of East and West Germany in 1989, it became known that the author herself had long been a member of the dominant socialist party of the former GDR, the “Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands” (SED). Wolf came under considerable attack by readers and critics alike, in particular for having propagated characters who have been victimized by society in some of her publications while she herself had been part of the system all along.44 Various critics denigrated Wolf for opportunism, though in retrospection

42 Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 268. 43 Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative,” in Cassandra, 258f. 44 The debate on Wolf’s allegedly opportunistic behavior evolved around the publication of her narrative Was bleibt: Erzählung, which she originally wrote in 1979 but published in 1990. The text recounts the story of a female writer, who remains nameless but is commonly read as representing Wolf herself. For a detailed discussion of the debate, see Thomas Anz, ed., Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im Vereinten Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995).

86 Chapter Four these voices seem to underestimate the complexity of the circumstances under which the author wrote. Peter Graves writes that Wolf did not conform to any faction but had always taken a differentiated view on Western and Eastern politics alike: “She clearly views capitalism, with its competitive and avaricious spirit, as a particularly destructive expression […], but socialism too is not exempt from the domination of the male mentality to the exclusion of gentler, less-coercive qualities.”45 Wolf’s position can hence be read as being simultaneously inside and outside the political and social system in which she lived. She may have supported the basic tenets of the former GDR, but she did not endorse the more extremist practices of a state that sought to control its citizens and their political opinions. This can be seen particularly well when taking into consideration how Wolf gave voice to alternative representations of reality in her writing. Like several other authors in the former GDR, Wolf appropriated mythological material as a “medium for assessing critically the successes and failures of real existing Socialism.”46 As the example of Cassandra shows, Wolf subverted the system from within via narrative contrivance. After all, even the Party authorities detected the politicizing tone of her lectures, which clearly express dissidence to the communist agenda of the socialist state. Consequently, the Party only allowed an abridged version of Cassandra to be published in East Germany.47 Considering this act of censorship, Wolf’s position in the GDR seems very much like Cassandra’s position within the palace structures. Both the author and the prophetess oppose the totalitarian tendencies of their societies but they nevertheless decide to stay in them and to voice dissent from within. As Waldstein observes with respect to Cassandra’s ambivalent relationship to the palace: “She ultimately rejects everything [the palace] stands for—hierarchy, insensitivity and violence—without denying that she has been a part of it.”48 Like the author herself, Wolf's Cassandra decides to deal with the contradictions in her society rather than trying to escape them. She also admits the contradictions in herself and thereby embodies the dialogical principle and its decree that both personal and cultural can only be understood as a dialogue of heterogeneous voices.

45 Graves, “Christa Wolf’s Kassandra,” 948. 46 Herbert A. Arnold, “On Myth and Marxism: The Case of Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf,” Colloquia Germanica 21 (1988): 59. 47 For details on the political censorship of Wolf’s work in the former GDR, see Graves, “Christa Wolf's Kassandra,” 944-56. 48 Waldstein, “Prophecy in Search of a Voice,” 196.

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 87

That this recognition of internal difference and incongruity is not necessarily easy can be seen in the learning process Cassandra undergoes after her imprisonment. Silenced by her own father, the prophetess starts to distance herself from the Trojan authorities and the close-knit community of the palace. However, this act of distancing functions both ways. Not only does Cassandra turn away from the society but the society also turns away from her, as the narrative indicates by underscoring the motif of silence at this juncture in the story: “A ring of silence descended around me,” Cassandra reflects: “The palace, the place I called home, drew away from me; the inner courtyards I loved stopped speaking to me. I was alone with my justice.”49 The absence of Cassandra’s speech in this passage signifies the remoteness of her societal position. As a consequence, she becomes unable to do what she most longs to do, namely to speak to the people and make them aware of the dangers they are facing: “I could not say the most important thing, so it no longer occurred to me to say anything.”50 Cassandra’s silence in this excerpt indicates the powerlessness of her outsider position. Her voice is no longer heard by the people around her, so that her prophetic gift remains ineffective in a time when her warning would be crucial to the Trojan people. It is significant that Cassandra’s loss of voice is repeatedly associated with madness. Paradoxically, this madness seems to preserve Cassandra’s sanity in the time of Troy’s looming destruction. She flees from the grief and disappointment she feels over the war preparations by explicitly turning away from the world of sanity and reason. Insanity provides Cassandra with a sense of protection, even though she later realizes that it also takes away her agency: “Only madness stood between me and the intolerable pain […], I thought. So I clung to the madness as it clung to me. No doubt everyone began to give up on me, the inevitable fate of those who give up on themselves.”51 In passages like this, madness symbolizes Cassandra’s social isolation. It serves as a personal comfort to her, but it also renders her into a state of powerlessness that must be overcome if she wants to warn the people around her, as Cassandra realizes later on: “Then there was a silence into which my voice fitted; now it had found exactly the space intended for it.”52 Cassandra hence decides against remaining silent, and therewith against the position of powerlessness that accompanied her state of silence. Her story denotes the

49 Wolf, Cassandra, 38. 50 Wolf, Cassandra, 71. 51 Wolf, Cassandra, 60 and 71. 52 Wolf, Cassandra, 123.

88 Chapter Four importance of participating in societal communication and of disrupting monologic forces on all levels of personal and political discourse. The notions of polyvocality and dialogic interaction also surface in the feminist implications of the narrative. Despite the clearly emancipationist overtones of Cassandra’s coming-to-voice story, Wolf’s rewriting defies extreme forms of feminism and exposes gender-exclusive approaches as repressive. This negation of exclusive gender positions can be seen particularly well in the episode recounting the confrontation between Penthesilea and Achilles during the Trojan War. The scene is symbolic for the destructiveness of essentialist gender conceptions. First of all, the hero Achilles embodies a form of masculinity that is utterly destructive in its assertiveness and aggression against women. Being the leader of the Greek army, who eventually wins the battle against Troy with the help of a wooden horse, Achilles is driven by his desire to become a hero. This leads him to develop a fundamental disregard for life and to kill everything in his way. Wolf’s Cassandra therefore refers to Achilles either as a “murderer” or as “Achilles the brute.”53 The narrative brings to the fore this morbidity of Achilles’ behavior when Cassandra describes his encounter with Penthesilea. Achilles first kills the warrior woman and then rapes her: “Achilles the Greek hero desecrates the dead woman.”54 For Cassandra, Achilles thus embodies all negative implications of the patriarchal obsession with power, war, and gender supremacy. She scorns his desire for aggressive dominance and exposes it as a misogynist perversion underlying any kind of hero worship. Yet, while Wolf’s text exposes the destructive repercussions of Achilles’ aggressiveness, Cassandra simultaneously critiques the exclusively matriarchal principle embodied by his female counterpart. Although the leader of the Amazon tribe is perversely raped by Achilles after she has been murdered by him, Penthesilea is by no means represented as an innocent victim. Rather, she is described as a “man- killing warrior woman” who is so blinded by her hatred for men that she is almost as destructive as Achilles.55 Through the eyes of Cassandra, the encounter between Achilles and Penthesilea is depicted as a battle between the genders, where the radically feminist performance of Penthesilea is critiqued in a similar vein as Achilles’ misogyny. States Cassandra:

Sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, she was a shade too strident for my taste. Her every appearance, her every sentence, was a challenge to someone.

53 Wolf, Cassandra, 74. 54 Wolf, Cassandra, 120. 55 Wolf, Cassandra, 7.

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 89

She was not looking for allies among us. She was not merely fighting the Greeks; she was fighting all men. […] She ruled as only kings rule. The worthy Trojans whispered in horror that these women had killed their own menfolk. They were monsters with one breast (it was said), who had burned out the other at a tender age in order to use their bows more efficiently.56

The passage makes clear that Penthesilea represents a form of feminism that is as brutal and restrictive to society as is patriarchy. Penthesilea is characterized as a belligerent warrior who kills her opponents based on her conviction that women are unquestionably superior to men. For Cassandra, this experience of female violence is difficult to reconcile with her own understanding of the gender. She states: “I did not want to admit that a woman could crave death.”57 Penthesilea’s destructiveness stands diametrically opposed to the principle of nonviolent resistance that Cassandra believes to be the road towards female emancipation. The protagonist is forced to come to terms with these actual differences among women, which is the very essence of female dialogism. To add further force to the negation of radical feminism, Wolf’s narrative illustrates how men, too, can be stifled and subdued by the destructive powers of patriarchy. Cassandra’s lover Aeneas is a counter- example to the all-pervading forces of masculine aggression that suffocate non-conformist voices, whether male or female. In Wolf’s text, Aeneas, the son of king Anchises and of Aphrodite, is a sensitive character who positions himself outside of the hierarchical and belligerent structures of the palace. Like Cassandra, he is unable to reconcile his understanding of a wholesome society with the ongoing propaganda put forth by the palace. Aeneas becomes the only person with whom Cassandra can talk when she is in distress. She notes: “Aeneas was the reality; and faithful to reality, craving reality, I wanted to cling to it.”58 Wolf underscores this commonality between the protagonist and Aeneas, and thereby turns Cassandra into a text that defies gender-exclusive discourses. As Heidi Gilpin remarks, “Wolf bases her feminist assertions on cultural, not biological, differences between the sexes.”59 Wolf’s approach to reading gender implies that both men and women must counter the absolutism of

56 Wolf, Cassandra, 117. 57 Wolf, Cassandra, 119. 58 Wolf, Cassandra, 75. 59 Heidi Gilpin, “Cassandra: Creating a Female Voice,” Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays, ed. Marilyn S. Fries (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 351f.

90 Chapter Four radical gender politics and, with it, the authoritarianism of all essentialist structures. Thus Wolf’s Cassandra shows that relationships between men and women must be founded on the principle of dialogic interaction, where similarities as well as differences can be communicated dialogically. It calls for the acknowledgement of multiple, co-existent perceptions of reality. Thus the female community itself emerges as a heterogenous body of voices. In a key moment towards the end of the narrative, Cassandra contemplates in relation to the Amazons: “I say ‘we,’ and of all the ‘we’s’ I eventually said, this is still the one that challenges me most. It is so much easier to say ‘Achilles the brute’ than to say this ‘we.’”60 Similar to the conception of Cassandra’s individual self, then, the collective female community in Wolf’s narrative is one of heterogeneity. In an interview, the author confirms this defiance of unconditional ideologies when she states that she “cannot identify with any of today’s –isms” in the political or cultural sphere, including feminism and socialism.61 Similarly, Cassandra subverts absolutist discourses and illustrates the need for recognizing and upholding internal differences within every community of voices. The voice of Cassandra is one that still needs to be heard today, a voice against the monologization of personal and political truths on all levels of societal discourse.

Bibliography

Aeschylus. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Trans. Louis MacNeice. London: Faber and Faber, 1936. Anz, Thomas, ed. Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf: Der Literaturstreit im Vereinten Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995. Arnold, Herbert A. “On Myth and Marxism: The Case of Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf.” Colloquia Germanica 21 (1988): 58-69. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. —. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

60 Wolf, Cassandra, 119. 61 Karin E. Beeler quotes Wolf’s original German phrase: “Im Grunde muß ich sagen, daß ich mich zur Zeit mit keinem—Ismus voll identifizieren kann.” In Karin E. Beeler, “Re-Creating Cassandra and Anna Karenina: Unheard Voices in Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere,” Critique 36, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 234. My translation.

The Subversive Voice of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra 91

Bartram, Graham, and Anthony Waine, eds. Culture and Society in the GDR. Dundee: GDR Monitor, 1984. Bauer, Dale M., and Susan J. McKinstry. Introduction to Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic. Ed. Dale M. Bauer and Susan J. McKinstry. 1-6. New York: State University of New York Press, 1991. Beeler, Karin E. “Re-Creating Cassandra and Anna Karenina: Unheard Voices in Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere.” Critique 36, No. 4 (Summer 1995): 227-36. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of Medusa.” Trans. Keith and Paula Cohen. In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane P. Herndl. 347-69. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Originally published in Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-93. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Gardiner, Judith K. “On Female Identity and Writing by Women.” In Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. 177-91. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Gilpin, Heidi. “Cassandra: Creating a Female Voice.” In Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays. Ed. Marilyn S. Fries. 349-66. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989. Graves, Peter J. “Christa Wolf’s Kassandra: The Censoring of the GDR Edition.” Modern Language Review 81, No. 4 (October 1986): 944-56. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hohne, Karen, and Helen Wussow. Introduction to A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Theory and Bakhtin. Ed. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow. vii-xxiii. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Marx, Jutta. “Die Perspektive des Verlierers—ein utopischer Entwurf.” In Erinnerte Zukunft: 11 Studien zum Werk Christa Wolfs. Ed. Wolfram Mauser. 161-79. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1985. Papenfuß, Monika. Die Literaturkritik zu Christa Wolfs Werk im Feuilleton: Eine kritische Studie vor dem Hintergrund des Literaturstreits um den Text ‘Was bleibt’. Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 1998. Pickle, Linda S. “Christa Wolf's Cassandra: Parallels to Feminism in the West.” Critique 28, No. 3 (Spring 1987): 149-57. Price, Simon, and Emily Kearns, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of Classical Myth and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

92 Chapter Four

Schmidjell, Christine. Christa Wolf: Kassandra. Erläuterungen und Dokumente. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. Waldstein, Edith. “Prophecy in Search of a Voice: Silence in Christa Wolf’s Kassandra.” Germanic Review 62, No. 4 (Fall 1987): 194-98. Wolf, Christa. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Trans. Jan van Heurck. New York: Farrar/Straus/Giroux, 1988. —. Kassandra: Erzählung. Ungekürzte Ausgabe. Neunte Auflage. München: Luchterhand, 2001. —. Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: ‘Kassandra’: Frankfurter Poetik- Vorlesungen. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1983.

CHAPTER FIVE

WOMAN—DAUGHTER—ACTRESS— ICON—MURDERER: ERMANNA MONTANARI PERFORMS BEATRICE CENCI

RAFFAELE FURNO, USA/ITALY

In 1983 Ermanna Montanari and her husband Marco Martinelli co- founded the theatre company Teatro delle Albe in Ravenna, a small town in the Northeastern Italian region of Emilia Romagna. From the start, Montanari and Martinelli defined Teatro delle Albe as a “theatre of stable innovation,” which referenced their belief in the possibility that the company could stay true to its core poetic yet be receptive to the new and the unexpected.1 Faithful to this vision, in 1988 Teatro delle Albe opened

1 Critics position the genesis of Teatro delle Albe within the larger phenomenon of “Romagna Felix” to indicate the nourishing of many audacious and creative theater groups (Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Motus, Teatrino Clandestino, Fanny & Alexander, to name a few) in a region marginal to the circuits of cultural production and distribution. There is a limited bibliography in English on Italian experimental theater. Two good sources are: Ian Watson, Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); and, Tom Behan, Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theater (London: Sterling, 2000). For readers who are fluent in Italian, see: Stefania Chinzari and Paolo Ruffini, Nuova Scena Italiana: Il teatro dell’ultima generazione (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2000); Oliviero Ponte di Pino, Il Nuovo Teatro Italiano, 1975-1988: La ricerca dei gruppi, materiali e documenti. (Firenze: La Casa Usher, 1988); Giuseppe Bartolucci, Teatro come poiesis: Linguaggi della scena anni ottanta (Ancona: Bologna, 1987); and Dante Cappelletti, La sperimentazione teatrale in Italia tra norma e devianza (Torino: ERI Edizoni Rai, 1981). On Teatro delle Albe, see: Marco Martinelli, Teatro Impuro (Ravenna: Danilo Montanari Editore, 1997); and Ravenna Africana (Il Teatro Politttttttico delle Albe) (Ravenna: Essegi, 1988). 94 Chapter Five its doors to Senegalese immigrants in Italy, giving the group a successful Afro-Romagnole makeover. Likewise, in 1998 the company celebrated its new dramaturgic twist with a show, the cast of which consisted of a chorus of twelve teenagers who, since then, have become a recurring pillar of Martinelli’s poetics. Within Teatro delle Albe, Montanari constantly alternates her work as actress and costume designer for the shows directed by her husband and for her solo projects, which explore issues of femininity and power relations between genders. In this essay, I wish to analyze the interplay between gender and the dynamic of power in an early show by Ermanna Montanari: the 1993 original production of Cenci, directed and interpreted by the actress as a special project commissioned by the experimental theater festival of Santarcangelo di Romagna.2 In the play, the figure of Beatrice Cenci is suspended between history and myth. Her positioning reframes the long lineage of male dominance that had policed female bodies by executing against them the acts of physical and cultural violence, but it had also used memory as a political tool to unhinge the multiple systems of control. Such positioning also points at spaces of freedom in which differences between genders, ethnicities, or ideological positions still persist, although within a context of respectful coexistence. Before dwelling on the specific analysis of Cenci, I wish to provide some background information on Ermanna Montanari and Teatro delle Albe. Whether her performance is based on vocal or physical features of character, Montanari’s commitment to her stage work derives from a rigorous training that leaves the audience with a sense of awe—admiration for the actress’s talent and a response of discomfort to the severe acting techniques she imposes on herself that seem to push her body and voice beyond their natural limitations. In Nevio Spadoni’s L’isola di Alcina (Alcina’s Island, 2000), Montanari sits on a sofa against the backdrop of a high wall, the color of which slowly fades from acid green into the brilliant gold of Russian religious icons. Montanari remains motionless throughout her monologue, during which she delivers a multi-vocal

2 Cenci. Written by Ermanna Montanari. On stage: Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari. Costumes: Cosetta Gardini, Ermanna Montanari. Light design: Enrico Isola. Directors: Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari. Production: Teatro delle Albe, Ravenna Teatro, Santarcangelo dei Teatri d’Europa. Cenci opened on July 6, 1993 at Palazzo Cenci in Santarcangelo. The script can be found in Ermanna Montanari, Cenci—Monologo (Ravenna: Edizione del Girasole, 1995). My textual references also come from the only existent video recording of the show, available in the archives of Teatro delle Albe at their theatre house Teatro Rasi in Ravenna.

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 95 performance that is accompanied by the sound of an electronic horn and the howling of dogs. Her voice provides for the whole movement of the show a range of vocals: waves of sonorous whispering, yelling, or mumbling that express Alcina’s anger, frustration, and loneliness.3 In contrast, in the stage adaptation of Luca Doninelli’s book La Mano (The Hand, 2005), the stage curtains raise to reveal Montanari spinning like a dervish dancer for more than ten minutes until she abruptly stops to stare at the audience in perfect balance. In the meantime, a wall of revolving lights create a circular movement around her stage persona, as, she, in the part of the self-proclaimed nun Isis, recounts her incestuous relationship with her suicidal rock-legend brother Jeremy Olsen.4 In addition to her talent as a performer, what makes Montanari’s work of critical interest is the fact that her signature style resides in the connection/tension she forges between the female body and the over- arching “religious” ideologies framing her performance. But femininity does not become the exclusive point of entrance in the actress’s stage work. As she herself proclaims: “Doing so, would mean to limit oneself in a ghetto.”5 Instead, Montanari conducts a personal and artistic quest based on her unique interpretation of a Christian-like sacred trinity that is inspired by the theorization of gylania by feminist scholar Riane Eisler. In her book The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler conceptualizes a linguistic union between the male and female energies of the universe in which “gy” invokes the Greek root for “gyné”—woman—while the linguistic radical “an” stands for the masculine—“anér.” The scholar connects the two genders through the letter “l.” Through this linguistic paradigm, Eisler conceives of masculine and feminine in practical terms, as at the same time different and distant, yet linked and inseparable. As does the feminine aspect in Christianity’s belief in the Holy Trinity of the Father, the Son,

3 L’Isola di Alcina. Concert for French horn and Romagnole voice, by Nevio Spadoni. Director: Marco Martinelli Music and sound direction: Luigi Ceccarelli. On stage: Ermanna Montanari, Giusy Zanini, Francesco Antonelli, Luca Fagioli, Roberto Magnani, Andrea Mordenti, Alessandro Renda. Light design: Vincent Longuemare. Stage design and costumes: Ermanna Montanari, Cosetta Gardini. Production: Biennale di Venezia, Ravenna Festival, Ravenna Teatro. 4 La mano. Written by: Luca Doninelli. Director: Marco Martinelli. On stage: Ermanna Montanari, Roberto Magnani. Music: Luigi Ceccarelli. Concept: Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari. Set design and costumes: Edoardo Sanchi. Light design: Vincent Longuemare. Production: Le manège mons/Centre Dramatique, Ravenna Festival, Ravenna Teatro, Le Phénix-Scène Nationale de Valenciennes, Festival delle Colline Torinesi, Comune di Ravenna. 5 Ermanna Montanari, Interview with Gianni Manzella, Il Manifesto (April 7, 1995). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

96 Chapter Five and the Holy Ghost, the feminine in Eisler’s thinking acquires its own space at the right side of the Father and it communicates its position by means of a phonetic bridge.6 In 1991 Montanari launched a short-lived yet successful multidisciplinary project entitled Il Linguaggio della Dea (The Goddess’ Language). The project encompassed seminars held by preeminent feminist theorists and journalists, and performances by leading female theater-makers. The vital need for such a dialogue is evident in Montanari’s own declaration:

I have always been fascinated by those who never rose to center stage, those who did not leave visible traces behind, history’s nameless beings: animals, plants, women. [...] I have often found myself rejoicing in this anonymity, savoring the freedom that comes from not having a history to honor. Yet I have also suffered from the symbolic disorder, the painful awareness of belonging to a tradition of the subtracted and the cutthreads.7

In this interrupted genealogy, Montanari enacts characters that try to regain independent agency by assessing the role of women in the making of the social, political, and cultural productions of meaning. Through her performance of female characters, she embodies women who have been resurfaced to the pages of myth and history—the Medieval nun Rosvita, Beatrice Cenci, or Alcina—and she places them in a condition of marked visibility by emphasizing in them transgressive behaviors that highlight the link between the characters’ actions and their quintessentially female interpretation of the world. Through her stage work, Montanari reconstitutes a unity of genders based on the re-framing of the mythological cluster of Christianity. This reconstitution resonates with her deep immersion in the Catholic milieu of her birthplace, Campiano, a rural village in Emilia Romagna, towards which the actress’s performances express the combined feelings of attraction and repulsion. In fact, it would be impossible to fully understand Montanari’s work without acknowledging the comprehensive role that Roman Catholicism plays in contemporary Italy as both the framework of reference for the social discourse on gender, and as a pervasive cultural cage in which the female has traditionally played a strictly secondary role. Montanari contextualizes her performances within this cultural atmosphere

6 Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 79-92. 7 Ermanna Montanari, Introduction to the pamphlet Il Linguaggio della Dea, unpublished.

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 97 as she knows that her audience can immediately relate to it, yet she also disrupts their familiarity with the cultural framework by reforming the constitutive elements of Christian mythology in which she frames her performance: she accomplishes this effect by using visual and textual signifiers that she switches around, reframes, and challenges. One can fully appreciate Montanari’s accomplishments if one perceives them within the framework of the practice of Teatro delle Albe. For Montanari, I argue, Teatro delle Albe is a “community” in the sense that Jill Dolan attributes to Biddy Martin’s and Chandra Mohanty’s locating of the configuration of home, identity, and community. The two feminist scholars define “community” as always in tension between “being home,” at a “place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries,” and “not being at home,” which presupposes a realization that “home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself.”8 The work of the Italian company constantly acknowledges the local roots of its Romagnole identity (a sense of rural domesticity, the encounter between Catholicism and Communist ideology, and the use of dialect on stage) and, as such, pays homage to a local tradition of experimentalism that can be traced back to both historical avant-garde and to the performance art of the late 1960s. Yet, the creative minds of Teatro delle Albe have never been afraid to launch themselves into unknown artistic, linguistic, and ethnic territories. They believe strongly that leaving the safe space of home projects the subject towards the end of illusion, a process that involves a necessary, yet painful, self- criticism. The thoughts on modernity, as they appear in the poetics of Teatro delle Albe, dwell upon the relationship between: the materialistic production of objects and the production of sociality; the creation of meaning and creation of memory; and the unabridged technical/mechanical inventions of an epoch and the related exhibition of aesthetic experiences. This site- and time- specific poetic confronts the idea of the past in a respectful, yet parodying, frame of “repetition with a difference.” Even as this framework exhibits a dynamic confrontation with the present, it also limits the possible pitfalls of extreme self-reflexivity.9 Consequently, in

8 Biddy Martin and Chandra Mohanty, qtd. in Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 67. 9 On this, see, also, Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (New York: Metheun, 1985), and Margaret Drewal,

98 Chapter Five the Teatro delle Albe practice, saying and doing do not necessarily presuppose an act; rather, they gesture a density of signifiers that surrogate stability, certainty, and linear evolution. This approach recalls what Jean Paul Sartre considered an effective performative act: “There are no images in the theater but the image of the act, and if one seeks the definition of theater, one must ask what an act is, because the theater can represent nothing but the act.”10 On the one hand, the desire to honor one’s own history requires the possibility of owning a culture and its history—the right to claim participation in the production and circulation of cultural traits that define the community to which one belongs. Nowadays, it has become somehow cliché to talk of hybridity as a postmodern phenomenon through which individuals, communities, and nations undergo a multicultural makeover— a process that has been praised by some and resisted by others. Anxieties about the “postmodern condition” construct traditional cultures as cohesive islands of stability and, hence, selectively forget a long history of transformation that has been violent and that has engendered a free exchange among people of ideas and beliefs. On the other hand, people have to investigate, on a daily basis, an intellectual heritage consisting of stratified layers of self-produced and externally directed levels of consciousness, a heritage which thus appears to be or must be treated as being tentatively stagnant.11 To put it differently, they must live in that

“The State of Research on Performance in Africa,” African Studies Review 34, no. 3 (December 1991): 1-64. 10 Jean Paul Sartre, “Beyond Bourgeois Theater,” The Tulane Drama Review 5 (March 1961): 3. 11 Reasons of space do not allow me to entertain an extended discussion of the notion of culture. Stuart Hall’s analysis of the dominant paradigm in Cultural Studies defines culture as “both the meanings and values which arise amongst distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they ‘handle’ and respond to conditions of existence; and as the lived traditions and practices through which those ‘understandings’ are expressed and in which they are embodied.” Qtd. in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds., Culture / Power / History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 527. Hall echoes Raymond Williams’s exploration of the interactions between social practices at any given time, which he names “structures of feeling,” in The Sociology of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.) It seems to me that in the last decade the main cultural question has shifted from “what is culture” to “where is culture located.” See Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practices: Thinking Through Theater in an Age of Globalization (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000); James

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 99 discursive relation between marginality and liminality in which one, according to postcolonial thinker Homi Bhabha, is constantly aware of differences within a vernacular cosmopolitanism.12 I place the work of Ermanna Montanari in the latter territory. The theatrical encounters of Teatro delle Albe lead to métissage—a term that Montanari and Martinelli prefer to other synonyms in order to define the intra-cultural, hybrid formation of their ensemble, made of people coming from different latitudes, belonging to different generational groups, and embodying different cultural backgrounds. Albe’s métissage is a socio- aesthetic attack against ethnic absolutism and against the perpetuation of racial/gender/generational boundaries of exclusivity. It fully acknowledges that the notion of rejection depends largely on the ideologies and power relationships that separate cultures into categories of the dominating and the dominated, the mainstream and the marginal, the global and the local, and the central and the peripheral, among others. In her work, Montanari adopts a ritualistic approach to stage crafting; recuperates the unity of theater as a shared social, religious, and artistic act; and embodies the ancient Greek vision of actors as “Dionysus’ technicians.” Her thematic interests in female consciousness and her performing technique are at once an energetic, orgiastic explosion of Dionysian power, as well as a rigorous, coldly mechanical training of the mind and the body. As such, Montanari reconfigures the ancestral values of theatre-making that were to inspire respect and dignity for the human being. By acts of creative imagination, she places a spur in the pervasive form of late capitalism that has extended its scope of activity from economy to formation of social consciousness through an accretion of meaning portrayed in cultural commodities. Providing a voice and a body for mythic female figures of the past, Montanari balances the functionalist historical discourse on the Other that, according to anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo, limits individuals to the value of their labor and restricts their

Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); and, Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 12 Bhabha argues that “the vernacular cosmopolitan takes the view that the commitment to a ‘right to difference in equality’ as a process of constituting emergent groups and affiliations has less to do with the affirmation of authentication of origins and ‘identities,’ and more to do with political practices and ethical choices.” Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), xvii.

100 Chapter Five ability to contribute to, and hence to impact, national progress13—a discourse from which women have been excluded historically because they were prohibited from inhabiting the public space. Cenci takes place in an enclosed space. Although this space is not public but private, it metaphorically evokes the larger picture of the socio- historic role of women in determining a radical cultural (r)evolution. The set for the play consists of a bare room, the visual emptiness of which works effectively to unravel the love–hate relationship between a daughter and a father, plunging into the complexity and depth of inter-gender relations. The show is very much the re-creation of Beatrice’s inner world, her memories and desires, of an intimate search for meaning which powerfully fills up the empty room of the palace that had once belonged to the Cenci family in Santarcangelo di Romagna.

First Movement

Beatrice Cenci stands against a brick wall. She has one hand on her throat, and the other hand holds a hammer up in the air. As the audience wonder whether the space in which she is enclosed is a cell, a prison, or a monastery, they soon recognize it to be a tomb. Beatrice stands up only to collapse again, and then crawls towards a dead body on the dirty floor. As she approaches the dead body, [the body] reacquires life. It is her father’s body. He feeds her and then pulls up his shirt. On his chest, Beatrice sees a graffiti-like writing stating: “Scratch me.” And so she does: She scratches her father’s body, all the while holding onto the hammer.

Black out.

Beatrice Cenci (1577-1599) was the youngest aristocrat heir of one of the wealthiest and most ancient families in Rome. She committed patricide in 1598, killing her father Francesco Cenci, a man whom historical accounts have transmitted to us as having been sadistic, violent, lustful, and incestuous. Beatrice’s murder of her father culminated in her being sentenced to death along with her siblings and step-mother, which caused the extinction of the entire Cenci family and secured Beatrice “immortality” in the cultural imaginary.14 The story of Beatrice inspired

13 Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 18-22. 14 A conspiracy theory actually questions Beatrice’s patricide. According to some scholars, her trial was a scheme conceived by Pope Clement VIII in order to take possession of the Cenci family’s wealth. See Belinda Elizabeth Jack, Beatrice’s Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004);

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 101 many plays about the character, of which Percy B. Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) and Antonin Artaud’s Les Cenci (1935) are the two most famous examples. She also inspired many fictional representations and an extremely popular portrait by Guido Reni.15 Her inscription in the collective consciousness has turned her, the Roman aristocrat, into a tragic heroine, a myth (in the sense in which the myth is a repository of symbolic values such as honor and self-respect), and an embodiment of the long- lasting fight for the emancipation of womanhood from the violence of men. An Antigone-like figure, Beatrice is pushed towards transgression by the impulsiveness and inexperience of her young age, although she transgresses the filial law only to free herself from the hideous injustice of incest and moral monstrosity. Montanari’s Cenci stages a representation of Beatrice that closely resembles the traditional figure of a teenage girl living under her father’s imperative scrutiny. The performance collapses the system of Christian values—respect for the father, in the first place—with the Renaissance world that Beatrice inhabited. This version of Beatrice’s story presents an emotional journey through the many allegories contained in the Bible, foremost among which is the tension between vengeance and forgiveness. While, on the one hand, Montanari’s rendition of Beatrice reminds spectators of the traditional figure, on the other hand, the character of her father Francesco is distanced from the exaggeratedly negative, grotesque image of the historical–mythic character. In Montanari’s interpretation, Beatrice’s father is a young, normal man—one of the many peasants who can be found in the Romagnole countryside. Unlike the original character, he is not a monster, but a man who lives by the precepts of an overtly misogynist culture, lacks formal education, and lives out the gendered stereotypes that fulfill the proper allocation of social roles. The violence perpetrated by Francesco Cenci is not rooted in any specific act of repression, but in his position in a patriarchal society as the bearer of a socially recognized masculine power that was entrusted to him by a long Catholic tradition.

Stephen C. Behrendt, “Beatrice Cenci and the Tragic Myth of History,” in History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 214-34. 15 Herman Melville described the portrait as “a quivering of minute pains in rounded leaps [...] the sweetest and most moving of all female heads,” a painting that summarizes beauty, murder, love, violence, father, daughter, the family and the State. Melville, Journal Up the Straits (New York: Colophon, 1935), 123. Some dispute the attribution of the portrait to Guido Reni, but this is still the most accredited theory.

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It is in this re-orientation of the traditional Cenci family myth–history, which has been interpreted as presenting a fight between absolute good and absolute evil, that the core elements of Montanari’s poetic lie. Through her rewriting of the paternal figure, Montanari searches for a reading of the dynamic between Beatrice and Francesco that is less abstract and less mythical, and that, instead, is more real, and hence, more human—a story of Beatrice and Francesco, of a daughter and a father like any other. At the same time, the actress highlights the emotional power of Beatrice’s suffering and does not categorize it as the suffering of just one girl. Through this version of the story, Montanari fully recuperates the mythical aspects of Beatrice’s emotional trajectory as delineated in the original myth and embraces its universality in performance. The program notes for the festival of Santarcangelo di Romagna, where Cenci debuted in 1993, read:

There are a father and a daughter. An angel-face father, generous, violent in his good willingness and justice. A father that sets the measure, a sublime sense of life. There’s a daughter yearning for love, in need of being accepted, possessed, who wants to abandon herself to the obedience of the father, so that she can worship him as a divine emblem, or hate him, thorned in mind and body. There’s the beauty and cruelty of the words of the Ecclesiatico: “a daughter is to her father a secret worry, and the troubles that she causes refrain him from sleeping.”16

The tension at stake in Montanari’s rendition of the myth is a love–hate relationship, a condition dictated, not by physical or moral abuse, but by a generational disparity mounted upon a distinction of genders normalized in everyday society. Beatrice, following a common pattern in the daughter–father relationship, idolizes Francesco as an immortal hero only to discover that he is a human being with limitations. Beatrice’s childish dream of her father shatters and is transformed into a teenage rejection of the father figure. I suggest that, whereas the generational gap usually finds its climactic resolution at the point when the daughter finally reaches adulthood and is able to reconcile the father figure with the reality of his human limits, Beatrice acts out her resentment against her father before she evolves into an adult. She kills Francesco because he cannot live up to her imagined standards. His humanity exposes him as a ruler whose power is largely sanctioned by an ideology of masculinity that the dominant culture constructs in direct opposition to womanhood. It is only after the

16 Ermanna Montanari, House Program of the Festival of Santarcangelo di Romagna, unpublished.

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 103 murder, which in Montanari’s Cenci functions as an off-stage preamble to the action, that the climactic recognition happens. The dramatic action thus takes place post-mortem, in an enclosed space that is at once material and metaphorical. It is clear that Beatrice’s physical confinement to the prison cell is imposed upon her by an abusive masculine power: the religious and positivist law administered exclusively by men. The young girl cannot speak, because centuries of imposed silence have deprived her of a voice through which she can be heard. In Montanari’s performance, Beatrice’s voice is as subtle and sharp as a blade. When her voice erupts, it is a soft, metallic, striding squeak, as if the hammer that she used to kill her father was now plunged in her throat. Her first words are: “This cell feels like heaven, now that you are gone. I am free as the air surrounding the earth. Universal as light. Fixed as the center of the world.”17 These images of vitality and energy create a primordial connection with a feminine axis mundi—Mother Earth, a nurturing element of life that is born from a woman’s womb. By this temporal extension, Montanari not only projects Beatrice’s myth into the present (she performs her story in 1993), but also positions the young Roman aristocrat in a mythic-genealogical line with the past, evoking allegories of female creation—Mother Nature—against the Catholic construction of the “male” birth of humankind. Soon enough, however, the resurrection of Francesco’s corpse crushes Beatrice’s dream of freedom. The scene moves quickly from a tender moment of fatherly love (Francesco feeding Beatrice), to an imposition of his will over hers. He orders her: “Scratch me!” His body advances a request, and Beatrice faithfully obeys. She enacts the good daughter’s behavior, paying respect to her father’s will. In applying the notion of performativity to the study of gender, Judith Butler has argued that “the subject is constituted through the force of the exclusion and abjection—which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.”18 Based on this theory, Beatrice’s independence requires at once a fight against the fatherly power and a self- critical awareness of her own interjection into the production of him as a dominant masculine model. I argue that this is the reason why the patricide is, in Montanari’s staging, a preamble that is not shown to the audience.

17 Ermanna Montanari, Cenci–Monologo (Ravenna: Edizione del Girasole, 1995) and the video recording of performance. 18 Judith Butler, “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe and Discursive Excess,” in Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drucilla Cornell (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.

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To physically display this act to the audience would resignify Beatrice’s murderous act within the male dominated world, since she would performatively subsume within herself the most destructive aspect of manhood: physical abuse. Such resignification distracts the audience from apprehending Montanari’s primary interest in this performance—namely, to indicate that Beatrice’s tragic destiny is, like Antigone’s, inscribed in her attempt to cross the gender line and to inhabit a space of self- representation. Beatrice’s deed is a step that no constituted power can accept without fearing the disruption of the very fundamentals of the social contract. As such, Beatrice has to die so that the abjected who had gained political agency can be reinscribed into a condition of submission. Yet, the death sentence incumbent on her acts as a signal of weakness of that same male-centered structure of power. The tension between repulsion and fascination, which appears as a trope in many accounts of encounters with the exoticized Other, reflects the need to construe a stable subjectivity by maintaining minorities at the margins and by delineating the geographic, cultural, and psychological limits that the Other should never be allowed to cross. By contrast, Butler has argued for “the contentious practice of ‘queerness’” as not only an “example of citational politics,” but also as “a specific reworking of abjection into political agency.”19 This assessment is relevant to my argument as Butler refers to the resignification of marginality as a political intervention by means of symbolic signs that do not enclose people into a reifying cage, but rather create a space for transformation. The key, she says, is to “think of the symbolic as the temporalized regulation of signification and not as a quasi-permanent structure.”20 Therefore, in Cenci, the visual and ideological elements that stand for the fight for power between a woman and a man are always contextualized in a spatial location—the “here” represented by the bare room, and a temporal coordinate, and the “now” expressed by the absence of any historically bounding reference in Montanari’s monologue. This naturally leads me to the second section of the show, where symbolic signifiers of power assume a pivotal role.

Second Movement

Francesco is sitting down with a big open book on his head while Beatrice continuously repeats with a hypnotic voice her monologue. Francesco slowly closes the book and starts to sing a Gregorian chant. In response,

19 Ibid., 21. 20 Ibid., 22.

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 105

Beatrice kneels down and rises repeatedly, a constant movement she undertakes with increasing speed. She kisses the hammer as if it were a crucifix, placing it on her forehead, her mouth, and her heart. Then she runs towards the brick wall and finds that she is trapped. Francesco moves toward her and pours on her some white liquid. He then carries Beatrice’s body to the center of the stage. She seems unconscious.

Black out.

This is the section of the show that most transparently calls attention to the Catholic framework in which the myth of Beatrice Cenci operates in Ermanna Montanari’s interpretation. Both the hammer and the book belong to the symbolic repository of revolutionary power, the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, or the freedom bestowed upon humanity by the written revelation of the word of God. Yet, as Montanari’s appropriation of the hammer and book convey, the expectations of liberty that these systems of thought had cherished, have failed against their distorted applications. During the Cold War, the East European Communist regimes had implemented a repressive rule of the community over the individual, just as much as the Roman Catholic Church had used the Gospels’ missionary project to justify the Crusades first, and colonialism later, as responses to the claims that the word of God would reach the end of the earth (Matt. 28:19) and that there be but one flock and one shepherd (John 10:16). Objects are not evil or good in their nature, rather it is how they are framed and appropriated that connotes their “morality” through their representation. Cenci examines intertextually the dualistic nature of these symbols. The hammer frees Beatrice from Francesco, but accompanies the young girl throughout the performance as an extension of her arm and a constant reminder of her guilt. The book discloses Francesco’s condition of supremacy as the one who bears the knowledge, while his act of reading it out loud recalls a father putting his daughter to sleep with a bedtime story. Moreover, the book and the hammer evoked a much larger context for the audience of Santarcangelo di Romagna. The rural community of Campiano, where Ermanna Montanari was born, embodies the cultural tensions of post World War II Emilia Romagna, suspended between Communism and Catholicism. Many young people from the region had contributed to the Resistance movement against the Fascist regime. Thrilled by Marxist philosophy and Antonio Gramsci’s writings, they fought for democracy within the framework of the empowerment of the proletariat. Various elements contributed to the fame of Emilia Romagna

106 Chapter Five as the red headquarter of the Italian Communist Party (PCI): the region’s primarily agricultural economy; a long history of unionism; and, the fact that many leaders of the PCI were born there. Nonetheless, the fields of Emilia Romagna have a recognizable patter of thousands of little villages built around the Church campanile. Roman Catholicism has had the power to build communities and set the pace of their daily activities by means of collective gatherings, masses, and religious festivities. To participate in these events was to acquire social recognition and to be a legitimate member of the community. If Catholicism and Communism were not dialectically compatible, it was in Emilia Romagna that the clash surfaced in the most obvious and performative way.21 This short excursus on post World War II Emilia Romagna finds its reasoning in the interwoven threads of life and art appearing in Montanari’s work, which highly affects her re-appropriation of Beatrice’s myth. Since the beginning of her career, the actress developed her dramatic poetics in collaboration with Marco Martinelli. Together, they came to theorize an approach to performance that does not construct a show around the concept of mise en scène, but around that of mise en vie. They do not put on stage a text or a character, but rather bring them to life. The performance is thus always an encounter between a text’s essential meaning and the actress’s most genuine reactions to its significations. In Teatro delle Albe performances, the characters’ tragic destiny meets the echo of truth that the actors hear in them; history, personal experiences, and interpretation collapse into one another. The life of the actors becomes the lens through which the essence of drama reacquires social and artistic value; as such, actors “are” on stage, they do not “play” a role. Beatrice steps out of the realm of iconic representation to embody the real woman that Montanari identifies in her story. According to Montanari and Martinelli, actors “are” because they participate in a teatro di carne (flesh theater), one in which acting is at once a fanciful game and a serious investment of physical and spiritual energies. Nothing is left of the reassuring bourgeois theater; the actions and texts inflict a wound on the spectator’s safe and allegedly passive positioning. In various conversations that I have had with Ermanna Montanari over the last two years, it has become clear to me that she instinctively enacts

21 The Romagnole humorous writer Giovanni Guareschi found in this tension the inspiration for the fictional characters of Don Camillo, the village priest, and Peppone, the Communist major, who fight over the control of their people’s soul. Guareschi published four full length books on this topic between 1948 and 1969: Don Camillo (1948), Don Camillo e il suo gregge (1953), Il compagno Don Camillo (1963), and Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi (1969).

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Joseph Roach’s dialectical relation between history and memory. Cenci works in this direction, too. By means of her final solution, Beatrice’s political agency finds echoes in personal memory and history, and it inaugurates the kind of permanent counter-narrative that Joseph Roach defines as “the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences.”22 The acting of Montanari’s female body in a performance constantly makes the explicit decision to bear the consequences of the construction of a counter-narrative to a general, dilute, cowardly cultural policy of theater-making. The actress reworks her personal memories and reframes them within the scope of the performance text. Hence, Francesco loses his aristocratic background to become a figure truer to Montanari’s experience—most likely an embodiment of the actress’s memories of her grandfather, who was the authoritative household head during Montanari’s childhood. Beatrice embraces her own freedom by rebelling against the abuses of manhood. Likewise Montanari finds in theater-making the painful, yet vital, space of her coming to age in opposition to her family’s disapproval. Still, the memories of her conflictive relationship with a patriarchal father figure represented by her grandfather and of a childhood spent in her rural village immersed in the grey foggy winters of Emilia Romagna linger, and Montanari uses the mise en vie process to come to terms with them. The mise en vie technique also highlights the connections between Montanari and much of the experimental theatre of the 1960s and 1970s that underscored a culture of the body, as opposed to a culture of the mind. The former corresponds to the image of an individual as a cohesive being in which all the parts act simultaneously, in no hierarchical sequence; the latter indicates the old-fashioned mantra that emphasizes the positive attributes of the reason against the negative aspects of the physical body. From the 1970s onward, the culture of late capitalism has further exacerbated the concurrent processes of industrial outsourcing, mechanization of the production system, privatization, gentrification, and the pervasive global influence of financial strongholds. These combined forces lie at the core of the mind–body split, and map the ideological and cognitive backdrop against which theater-makers politicized their bodies and denounce the discriminatory norms of power differentials in race, class, and gender.23

22 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 26. 23 Martin Randy, Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (New York: Bergin & Garvey Publications, 1990), 51-2.

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Thence Montanari describes her work in the following terms:

To be an actor is to live at once, in a short time span, life and death. Extreme conditions. Yearning, burning. Weaving the life of an invisible being that will die soon. [...] To be an actor is to lack something. It is frightful, stuffed flesh playing with fear. The actor is terrified, he is an earthquake survivor often unable to control his body and his voice. [...] To turn one’s own body into a cross. Shattered body. Measured body. Obsessed by the measurement of life and time.24

Montanari’s teatro di carne appears as a self-imposed harsh discipline, a quasi-existential suffering linked to the disconnection between the need to be both the self and the Other; the process of bringing to the surface that which does not visibly exist; and, the intervention of the unexpected, which spotlights the actor as a vulnerable human being. The actress further elucidates the tension at the heart of her art by proclaiming that, “beyond the extreme lucidity of the actor (total awareness of space, lights, or audience reactions),” there is “a warm and obscure bottom, a shadow of passion, feelings, madness, that one can express only by means of a rational and cold artistic technique.”25

Third Movement

Beatrice is sitting on a bale of hay. Francesco covers her head with a light blue veil and slowly drops coins on her, all over her body. As Beatrice narrates a recurrent childhood dream, her father kneels down next to her, his back towards the audience, and softly repeats his prayers. Beatrice wraps the blue veil around her dark black hair, places it on her eyes, and then pulls it from behind. She sways as if sitting on a rocking chair and forces her own body off balance, but she never falls. She stops with her legs and arms loose in the air, as if she were suspended over an abyss that does not fully embrace her.

Black out.

Beatrice and Francesco are inexorably linked beyond death. Her nightmarish recounting of a childhood dream is pregnant with Christian

24 Ermanna Montanari, Interview with Lea Melandri, “Il Linguaggio della Dea. Come liberarsi di un mito,” Lapis: Percorsi delle riflessioni femminili (June 26, 1995): 27. 25 Ermanna Montanari, Interview with Maria Giovanna Maioli Lo Perfido, Come Eravate (Ravenna: Danilo Montanari Editore, 2001), 28.

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 109 iconography. In this dream, Beatrice is naked in a dark room. Beside her, a voracious beast observes her while it breaths heavily. Beatrice eventually starts to run and look for the light, the only element that can save her from the beast. Montanari’s play-writing deploys literary techniques, such as leaps and repetitions, to create dramatic tension, which is reinforced by the constant changes in the tonalities of the actress’s voice, from high squeaking peaks to low cavernous echoes. The actress’s search for the light recalls the initial monologue of the play in which Beatrice embraces her newly found freedom, declaring that she herself has become the universal light. Yet, the connection between the childhood dream and the resurrection of the father resonates with the heartbreaking invocation that Antonin Artaud wrote for his Beatrice in the play Les Cenci. In the final scene of Artaud’s play, Beatrice cries out before she is beheaded:

Oh eyes, on what horrible spectacle will you disclose your sight once dead? Who can guarantee me that, in the depth of the afterlife, I will not find my father again? This thought makes my death more bitter, because I fear that I have become like him.26

Montanari’s Beatrice faces the actualization of that fear. Critic Cristina Ventrucci wrote in her review of Montanari’s show: “There can be no peace in that cell. Even after her patricide, neither confession nor self- suggestion will free Beatrice’s consciousness. [...] Murder is not the end, and death makes the horror more real rather than erasing it.”27 There is a sense of physical inactivity and energy-charged emptiness that lingers throughout the performance. Beatrice, the history-less being whom Montanari recovers from the silence of the past, acquires visibility when she attempts to efface the generative power of manhood. The visual reading of the show, though, contrasts with that visibility because Montanari transforms her Beatrice into a veiled Madonna, who is an embodiment of devoted faith but also a limited agent dependant on the seminal power of men. Even as the patricide may symbolize Beatrice’s reconciliation with an archaic matrilineal and matriarchal genealogy, she is still acted upon by Francesco, his presence being the projection of the daughter’s fantasy or perhaps the religious resignification of resurrection. Montanari’s act of covering her eyes with the veil symbolizes her blind acceptance of the fact that male and female exist only contingently with one another, given that the visible should not be equated with the tangible.

26 Antonin Artaud, Les Cenci, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 78. 27 Cristina Ventrucci, Il Messaggero (July 4 1993): 16.

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Fig. 5-1 Ermanna Montanari as Beatrice and Marco Martinelli as Francesco in Cenci Santarcangelo di Romagna (Palazzo Cenci), July 6th, 1993 Photo: Giampiero Corelli and Massimo Fiorentini Courtesy of Ermanna Montanari, Ravenna Teatro/ Teatro delle Albe

The scene is replete with religious symbolism. The blue veil that covers Beatrice’s head places her into the iconography of a Madonna-like figure. This transfiguration reclaims that the substantiation of the word of God was only possible by means of a female generative body. The coins that Francesco disperses onto her body cast her even more symbolically in the figurative representations of the Madonna. Traditionally, statues of the Madonna are covered with jewels and bills by worshipers in processions in many Italian cities as an act of devotion. Yet, in Montanari’s rendition of the Madonna through Beatrice, there emerges a discrepancy between the significance of the religious imagery and what can be interpreted through the same image as the subtext of the myth: Francesco is an incestuous father who “pays off” his daughter by placing coins on her body. The juxtaposition of both readings in the image of Beatrice brings to the

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 111 surface the multiplicity of meanings created in this part of the performance: Is this the culmination of an ex voto or the payment for a sexual favor? Either way, a univocal answer is impossible, because the performance willingly stages a web of symbols that apparently contrast one another, but that, even so, are very much linked by their co-existence in the mainstream systems of cultural reference. What Cenci accomplishes best is to highlight that the female body functions as the preferred site of such an interaction, where the mythical figure of Beatrice can naturally recall a cluster of seemingly oppositional meanings: Christian values, a Renaissance legend, Communist ideology, and the mundane commodification of women by patriarchy. I argue that Montanari’s Cenci contains moments of problematic reading because the show represents a complexity in the trace of Dwight Conquergood’s theorization of dialogical performance. Conquergood demands that performers and ethnographers strive for dialogical performances that “bring self and other together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another.” Such practice, he argues, is “intensely committed to keeping the dialogue between performer and text open and ongoing,” whereby “dialogical understanding does not end with empathy.”28 Conquergood’s conceptualization brings me back to Montanari’s own take on her feminist agenda, one that strives, not to obliterate men from the pages of history, but rather to individuate the role of women in acts of creation—not only in terms of fulfilling a biological call but also in terms of gnostic participation. Whereas men have relegated women to the marginal positions in society, Montanari engages dialectically her social and artistic positionality, but she knows that she cannot perform such a claim within a dichotomy that separates right from wrong as if they were monads.

Fourth Movement

Beatrice pushes the bale of hay with great effort. When it is finally against the wall, she backs away from it and kneels down, very slowly, in the center of the stage. The veil still covers her face.

Black out.

Beatrice reveals the impotence that can be read into a speechless existence such as hers. As she becomes invisible through such an

28 Dwight Conquergood, “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance,” Literature in Performance 5, no.2 (1985): 9.

112 Chapter Five existence, she increasingly blends in with the few objects on stage. The hammer, which she had used to kill her father, can now be seen as an extension of her arm. She further “extends” into the wall against which she leans and into the bale that she pushes and on which she sits as if it were a domestic altar. For Montanari, the annihilation of Beatrice Cenci does not climax in her physical death, but rather in the dissolution of her body, which is to be read as significant as the poor objects that accompany her in her confined existence. Femininity has to mediate constantly with normative masculinity, coming to terms with it in a dynamic format without historic closure. This is evidenced in the fact that Beatrice has no escape and that the wall entombs her in a never-ending confrontation with Francesco’s ghost. The notion of performance implies a way of knowing as well as a project to reach that knowledge, a project which is epistemological as much as methodological. Performance provides an opportunity to reflect on ourselves and to engage in what feminist theorist Maria Lugones calls “world travelling”—an act of identification that enables the comprehension of different subject positionalities through the symbolic, aesthetic, and physical travelling to each others’ “worlds.” This act maps out a critical analysis of marginality, multiple identifications, desire, and social change.29 Whereas Lugones speaks of desire in psychoanalytic terms, Montanari’s work seems to acknowledge its role in recording the unconscious forms of identification only to emphasize that these do not assimilate the Other into a coherent sociability, but rather fragment and destabilize it. On this note, the actress’s approach closely reflects José Muñoz’s notion of disidentification, which he defines as the “recycling and rethinking [of] encoded meaning” that can only imagine new worlds on the basis of pre-existing reality. Hence disidentificatory practices are necessarily rooted in and positioned against the codes of heteronormativity, whiteness, and male dominance.30 In the case of Cenci, the disidentificatory practice is related to the codes of Catholicism and masculinity. Suspicious of absolute relativism, Montanari recuperates pluralism as a contribution to the notion of resistance in performance, as long as it is grounded in historical understanding. As such, she actualizes the concept of gylania: the linguistic union of male and female that acquires a constitutive function for those who strive for the cultural transformation of the

29 Maria Lugones, quoted in Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 87. 30 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Colors and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31.

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 113 superficial perception of difference. The dynamic of disidentification pertains to other aspects of the Teatro delle Albe dramatic practice. While avant-garde historically relied on ideology in order to proceed to an analysis of the world, since the mid- twentieth century, experimentation has grown more and more disenchanted with political commitment in the form of party alignment. The Albe’s vision refused the political structure to embrace the “politttttttical,” with seven “t”-s. As Marco Martinelli described it to me:

Years ago we chose to define our work as politttttttical to signify a scene that does not provide answers, but rather opens questions, anxieties, disembodiment, containing as many t-s as there are twists in reality. The Albe constantly blends tradition and innovation. We know that Aristophanes represents avant-garde (if evoked properly) while Duchamp possesses the gaze of an old shaman. So how shall we define our theater? Maybe [...] simply theater, an ancient art, an art still able to rant, to affect the spectator’s heart, an art still very “necessary” in an era of emptiness and televised simulacra.31

This is a theater in which the actors—the people who make it a theatre—are central to constructing the meaning of play. Their official proclamations underscore the relevance of human figure, as the Albe argue: “The untamed actor, in the vision of Teatro delle Albe is an ancient mask, that, at the same time, possesses a face that speaks of contemporaneity.” This performer, they continue, is “creating worlds, not merely interpreting them. Inspiring the playwright-director, not simply listening to his suggestions.” Such figure is “[a]n athlete of the imagination, an anti-psychological puppet, a ‘cruel’ comedian, an artist immersed in his own era.”32 This line of thought reads a dramatic text in a wide range of forms: bodies, scripts, lights, costumes, and gestures. The positionalities of the co-participants and the physical location of the event combine to enrich the meaning of the actions. This is why the actors of Teatro delle Albe believe that performance should move beyond the act of showing; it must overflow into life, or, rather, bring life within the frame of the stage. Montanari’s stage language recuperates the body as a site of negation and subtraction—a theater that privileges space, movement, and bodies as sites of urgency and danger. The famous Italian actor and director Carmelo Bene used to talk about a corpo disfatto, an empty nullified box that held

31 Personal email communication, received from Marco Martinelli on May 26, 2004. 32 House Program of Teatro delle Albe’s Mighty Mighty Ubu, performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, June 9-10, 2005, unpublished.

114 Chapter Five something of the biomechanic input of Vsevolod Meyerhold and of the body as art-piece of the visual arts. Yet, the corners of experimentation inspired by the privileging of full physical commitment to theater framed the death of the body as a sacer space: the fragment became the privileged status of existence. Montanari’s Cenci and her “body-performance” invoke a solution to collective amnesia and recuperate memories of a mystic rural world in which religion goes beyond the institutionalized word of God to build a syncretic structure of the magic, the supernatural, ancestral beliefs, and the irreverent parody of coded claims of truth. This is the world that Beatrice will inhabit forever in her entombing cell, through a never-ending search for the liberating contact with the elements of Nature, all in order to construe an alternative approach to culture and history.

Bibliography

Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized World. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Artaud, Antonin. Les Cenci. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Bartolucci, Giuseppe. Teatro come poiesis: Linguaggi della scena anni ottanta. Ancona: Bologna, 1987. Behan, Tom. Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theater. London: Sterling, 2000. Behrendt, Stephen C. “Beatrice Cenci and the Tragic Myth of History.” In History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature. Ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. 214-34. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practices: Thinking Through Theater in an Age of Globalization. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Butler, Judith. “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe and Discursive Excess.” Feminism and Pornography. Ed. Drucilla Cornell. 487-508. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cappelletti, Dante. La sperimentazione teatrale in Italia tra norma e devianza. Torino: ERI Edizoni Rai, 1981. Chinzari, Stefania, and Paolo Ruffini. Nuova Scena Italiana: Il Teatro dell’ultima generazione. Roma: Castelvecchi, 2000. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Conquergood, Dwight. “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance.” Literature in Performance 5, No. 2 (1985): 1-13.

Ermanna Montanari Performs Beatrice Cenci 115 di Leonardo, Micaela. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Dirks, Nicholas B., Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, eds. Culture / Power / History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Dolan, Jill. Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Drewal, Margaret. “The State of Research on Performance in Africa.” African Studies Review 34, No. 3 (December 1991): 1-64. Eilser, Riane Tennenhaus. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. Grande, Maurizio. La riscossa di Lucifero: Ideologie e prassi del teatro di sperimentazione in Italia, 1976-1984. Roma: Bulzoni, 1985. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985. Jack, Belinda Elizabeth. Beatrice’s Spell: The Enduring Legend of Beatrice Cenci. London: Chatto & Windus, 2004. Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Lo Perfido, Maria Giovanna Maioli. Come Eravate. 27-32. Ravenna: Danilo Montanari Editore, 2001. Mango, Lorenzo, Giuseppe Bartolucci, and Achille Mango, eds. Per un teatro analitico-esistenziale: Materiali del teatro di ricerca. Torino: Studio Forma, 1980. Martinelli, Marco. Ravenna Africana (Il Teatro Politttttttico delle Albe). Ravenna: Essegi, 1988. —. Teatro Impuro. Ravenna: Danilo Montanari Editore, 1997. —. Jarry 2000: Da Perhindérion a I Polacchi. Milano: Ubulibri, 2000. Melandri, Lea. “Il Linguaggio della Dea. Come liberarsi di un mito.” Lapis. Percorsi delle riflessioni femminili (June 26, 1995): 1-35. Melville, Herman. Journal Up the Straits. New York: Colophon, 1935. Montanari, Ermanna. Cenci—Monologo. Ravenna: Edizione del Girasole, 1995. MuĖoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Colors and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Ponte di Pino, Oliviero. Il Nuovo Teatro Italiano, 1975-1988: La ricerca dei gruppi, materiali e documenti. Firenze: La Casa Usher, 1988.

116 Chapter Five

Randy, Martin. Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self. New York: Bergin & Garvey Publications, 1990. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Sartre, Jean Paul. “Beyond Bourgeois Theater.” The Tulane Drama Review 5, No. 3 (March 1961). Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Ventrucci, Cristina. Il Messaggero (July 4 1993): 16 Watson, Ian. Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural Debate. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Williams, Raymond. The Sociology of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

CHAPTER SIX

THE CASE OF NGUYEN NGUYET CAM’S TWO CAKES FIT FOR A KING: FEMALE APPROPRIATION OF VIOLENT AUTOCHTHONOUS MYTHOLOGY THROUGH AESTHETIC TRANSMISSION TO THE DIASPORA

HANH N. NGUYEN, USA, AND R. C. LUTZ, ROMANIA

This we have learned: With Heaven rest all things. Heaven appoints each human to a place. If doomed to roll in dust, we’ll roll in dust; we’ll sit on high when destined for high seats. Does Heaven ever favor anyone, bestowing both rare talent and good luck? In talent take no overweening pride, for talent and disaster form a pair. Our karma we must carry as our lot— let’s stop decrying Heaven’s whims and quirks. Inside ourselves there lies the root of good: the heart outweighs all talents on this earth. —Nguyen Du, Tale of Kieu1

Folktales and oral literature often embody a culture’s historic self- defining artifacts and, hence, may be commonly referenced as national literary treasures once national self-consciousness and general literacy have reached a self-reflexive state. Viet Nam is no exception. Its contemporary population relishes a sense of a colorful and long history

1 Du Nguyen, The Tale of Kieu, ed. Huyn Sanh Tong (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 167. 118 Chapter Six grounded in autochthonous traditions based on myths, legends, and folktales.2 Vietnamese culture had to resist a millennium of Chinese political domination (207 B.C.–939 A.D.). It also endured the subsequent centuries of Sinophile cultural emulations by Vietnamese ruling elites.3 As such, Vietnamese literary culture found it even more necessary for its oral tradition in folktales, myths, and legends to survive and thereby to perpetuate a native sense of self-understanding and cultural self- awareness. Vietnamese folktales, myths, and legends have also survived a century of French colonization (1858–1954), the infamous Viet Nam War (1959– 1975), and now the post-war, post-colonial Communist period. In the present, even as Viet Nam is taking a more active position in preserving its oral literature, the existence of a widely spread diaspora of Vietnamese people raises new challenges to critical thinking about the preservation of oral culture. Inevitably, second and third diasporic generations tend to lose access to the original language of their ethnic cultural heritage. The task of transcribing autochthonous Vietnamese cultural material, such as the rich body of Vietnamese oral literature, into a language that is accessible to these younger generations is no easy endeavor. Fortunately, there are select active agents facilitating this transformation, and this essay will focus on one of them.

Nguyen Nguyet Cam: Translator, Transcriber, Enscripter for the Diaspora

Can we begin by asking then, about the question of location, of the relationship between social ontology and epistemology? Is there a connection between an author’s historical project, knowledge framework and the author’s sex, class, and “race” privileges? Is it automatically “always already” the case that a knower’s language and knowledge framework are unrelated to who she/he is?4

2 We use the indigenous name of Viet Nam here and throughout instead of the Westernized contraction of Vietnam. 3 After national liberation from Chinese rule in 939 AD, Vietnamese elites still looked to Chinese culture, fashion and law with great desire of emulation. For Vietnamese, Chinese culture played a role of an idealized model desired to be copied, comparable to that of Western antiquity during the European Renaissance. 4 Himani Bannerji, “Politics and the Writing of History,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, eds. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 291.

The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King 119

Generally, in the field of oral literature, the act of enscribing an original oral text into a definite written form constitutes an act of authorial appropriation of a collective subject matter with a concomitant authorial empowering of the transcriber. Regarding the case of Viet Nam, in her acclaimed collection Two Cakes Fit for a King: Folktales from Vietnam (2003), Nguyen Nguyet Cam has realized the potential for the female appropriation of collective mythological texts that exerts a special valence for the readership in the English-speaking diaspora.5 Nguyen’s collection of a total of ten folktales, myths, and legends in Two Cakes Fit for a King contains a well-rounded portion of Vietnamese oral literature that is rendered in English for the first time. Nguyen’s authorial power encompasses the act of selecting from among a very rich body of possible texts ten stories she has deemed fitting for her target audience. Since Nguyen’s Vietnamese source material exists in many different oral versions, and in the absence of any one authoritative written Vietnamese version, Nguyen’s translation went beyond acts of rendition to include many choices of recording, greatly empowering the role of the compiler and translator. This exploration reveals how Nguyen used this position with great circumspection to downplay the possible misogyny in many of her selected folktales, myths, and legends. Her goal was to render the stories as attractive to contemporary young readers as possible without violating the core narrative, plot, and characterizations of her oral sources. In doing so, Nguyen embarked on a powerful female appropriation of a representative part of Viet Nam’s national mythology, giving it a distinctive shape for the diasporic reader. Nguyen further renegotiates historical notions of authorship and attendant authorial power by closely collaborating with another woman editor of a different ethnicity (Dana Sachs) and a fellow Vietnamese male illustrator (Bui Hoai Mai) in the project of preparing the text for its encounter with the reader in the West. The question posed by Himani Bannerji, noted in the introduction to this section, has a direct correlation to the educational background and academic position of Nguyen, as she is a scholar who is well-versed in and is equipped with the knowledge to carry out the task of preserving the oral literary tradition of Viet Nam for Vietnamese residing in the diaspora. It is also relevant to note that all three collaborators on the book dedicate the collection of folktales to their children. This is critical as, traditionally, folktales, myths, and legends are

5 In Vietnamese, surnames appear first, followed by middle and first names. In academic and scholarly documentation, the author’s name appears as Nguyen Nguyet Cam, so we have decided to follow suit for the sake of consistency. One should be mindful that Cam is the author’s first name.

120 Chapter Six relayed from generation to generation in any culture. For Nguyen, however, it has become especially necessary to help pass down these Vietnamese oral traditions in a written text form for her own children who live in the West. On one level, then, this project is aimed at Vietnamese children and young adults or Vietnamese of any age residing in the English-speaking diaspora, to allow them to regain or to get in touch with a sense of cultural rootedness. On another level, this text places Nguyen in a privileged position within academic context. She is able to pass along and preserve what is left of Vietnamese oral tradition in folktales, myths, and legends for today’s younger generations living in the diaspora. Nguyen’s bilingualism ensures her a privileged position as collector of the original tales, as their translator, and as a subsequent critical authority on them. Since Vietnamese folktales, myths, and legends have always relied on oral storytelling for their transmission (although they do exist in written form in Vietnamese in many varieties, contexts, and versions), Nguyen does assume a certain authorial position in her effort to lay down a cohesive, and at least somewhat authoritative, version of these rich folktales in the English language. She has taken upon herself a rather burdensome responsibility as an arbiter and transmitter of an important part of a national literary tradition. As many of these folktales project violent content and connote a misogynist and feudalist character, Nguyen’s editorial negotiation of this violence through acts of recording and rendition is of specific interest. While she accurately translates the narrative core of classical violent Vietnamese folktales into a language and meaning that is accessible to contemporary generations of diasporic Vietnamese, she nevertheless imbues these texts with her contemporary female perspective, both as an editor and as a post-oral, non-exclusively-Vietnamese language storyteller. But Nguyen’s retelling is not reductivist, as she neither transgresses nor discursively obliterates the meanings that can be interpreted from the original texts. Rather, her editorial process is characterized by a subtle renegotiation of the historically and culturally determined misogyny. The roots of many of Nguyen’s selected folktales can be traced to the era of Viet Nam’s rather progressive Hong Duc Code passed in 1483. The Hong Duc Code rejected the misogynist Confucian doctrines and revived distinctly Vietnamese traditions emphasizing women’s rights and a more balanced legal view that fostered gender humanism among its subjects. Quite different to the situation in China at that time, the Vietnamese Hong Duc Code, for example, gave daughters and sons equal inheritance rights, defined and punished statutory rape, abolished the requirement of parental

The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King 121 consent to marriage, and gave spousal immunity in court. In 1815 this code was replaced by the Sinicized Gia Long Code, the legal framework of which informed subsequent Vietnamese socio-political morality. Initiated at the end of civil war and during the reunification of Viet Nam under the Nguyen dynasty, the Gia Long Code adversely affected the status and rights of Vietnamese women. Equal inheritance rights among daughters and sons were abolished, fathers (not mothers) had to approve marriages, and women’s legal status in courts was lowered. Some existing folktales were altered to reflect the paradigmatic prescriptions of the new Code—a process that Nguyen has sought to counterbalance in her translation of these stories into the English language. Her enscription and rendition of the tales can thus be judged as a restorative act that strips the traduced texts of some of their later misogynistic overlays, thereby installing more liberal ways of thinking about women and their rights in Vietnamese cultural imaginary. Confucianism quite bluntly sought to enscribe into law and to enforce in culture a decisively misogynist ideology relegating women to an overall social, economic, personal and political inferior status that had not been seen in Viet Nam until the passing of the Gia Long Code. Women’s subordination under men—first her father, then her husband, and finally her son—were as tightly enforced after 1815 as Confucian doctrine imported from China demanded. Yet more positive traditional Vietnamese views on women’s rights survived, in part also in the deep layers of the old folktales that resisted misogynist revisionism. Nguyen’s collection of ten folktales, myths, and legends in Two Cakes Fit for a King offers a well-selected portion of Vietnamese oral literature that has been passed down in order to preserve Vietnamese lineage and to forge in the future generations of Vietnamese a new sense of culture through what Haunani-Kay Trask refers to as telling the “stories through the great bloodlines of memory.”6 Thus it is important to note that Nguyen’s female editorial agenda in Two Cakes Fit for a King does not only challenge the later Confucian misogynist layers of those myths, but also seeks to empower culturally Vietnamese youth globally. This double agenda in her recording and rendition of folktales successfully transmits a significant part of autochthonous Vietnamese heritage and identity that may help diasporic readers to shape their post-colonial and post-war selves, both male and female, in a self-assertive approach—an approach that would allow for a recognition of the valor of a distinct ethnic and

6 Haunani-Kay Trask, Notes From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii, rev. ed. (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 118.

122 Chapter Six cultural heritage sui generis amidst the centrifugal processes of globalization. Thus Two Cakes Fit for a King is a carefully compiled text that tries to represent a well-rounded Vietnamese collection of oral tradition in storytelling. Its texts can be interchangeably called folktales, myths, and legends. This exploration considers five titles that best represent what many Vietnamese, and Nguyen, too, see as important elements of Vietnamese folk fiction. The selected tales focus on female roles that have exemplified traditional Vietnamese values and that have cast a model of human goodness. Each of the protagonists in the five selections also represents a prototype, although stereotypical, of a strong, resolute, yet feminine and beautiful, Vietnamese woman. Her counterpart is often a masculine, intelligent, and reasonable Vietnamese man. The stories are told against the backdrop of contextual elements that contribute to an understanding of Vietnamese national heritage, such as food special to wet-rice agriculture and the geographical coordinates of such space.

Striking a Balance in Filial Piety between a Father and a Husband: A Woman’s Struggle

The first tale in Nguyen’s collection, “A Daughter’s Love,” exemplifies both the effects of the editorial position in interpreting historically gendered roles for women and Nguyen’s agenda in transmitting a gendered subject matter. Following the original opening of the tale, Nguyen’s text begins with a Vietnamese king, An Duong Vuong, who fortifies his capital against Northern, that is, Chinese, invaders. However, in a fashion typical of folktale narration, his and his soldiers’ efforts prove useless because each day’s work on their wall is mysteriously undone each night; this “undoing” occurs until a divine being instructs the king in his dream to build the fortification in a shape “that wraps into itself like a snail’s shell” from where to shoot his magic bow.7 Once the king builds the wall in this manner, he succeeds in erecting an edifice that lasts. Meanwhile the Chinese enemy king, Trieu Da, sees the fortification and realizes the futility of a military assault against An Duong Vuon’s kingdom. Instead, Trieu Da decides to carry out a subterfuge against the king. He offers his son, Trong Thuy, to marry the Vietnamese king’s daughter, Mi Chau, to create an alliance with the Vietnamese king.

7 Nguyen Nguyet Cam, Two Tales Fit for a King: Folktales from Vietnam,co- author Dana Sachs (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 20.

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Enchanted by each other’s beauty and musical skills, the two young people fall in love. An Duong Vuong is moved by the sincerity of their love and hence permits the young couple to marry. Not long into their marriage, however, the prince asserts his marital prerogative and badgers the princess into transferring her loyalty from her father to him, her husband. The prince then tricks the princess into revealing the location of her father’s magic bow trigger, steals the bow, and prepares to abscond with it. He substitutes the real bow with a fake bow, and in doing so fulfills his father’s original desire to bring down his father-in-law’s kingdom. As the prince and princess bid farewell to one another, the princess tells her prince that she will leave a trail for him to find her (if need be), and then sheds copious tears at their separation as sincere lovers do in Vietnamese traditional tales upon such occasions. When, subsequently, the Chinese king Trieu Da invades the Vietnamese kingdom, the Vietnamese king An Duong Vuong attempts to use the fake bow to defend his kingdom, but fails. An Duong Vuong and his daughter must flee to the coast to avoid being captured. Desperate, the Vietnamese king prays to the divine spirit to assist him. The spirit appears and tells him he should look behind himself to discover the cause for his undoing. An Duong Vuong discovers behind him some white goose feathers that his daughter had plucked from her coat to create a trail by which her husband could find her. Angry at her betrayal of him, the king decapitates his daughter and then commits suicide by plunging himself into the sea. Soon after, the prince arrives and searches for his wife, only to find out that she has been killed. In despair, he, too, commits suicide by throwing himself into a well. The tale can be interpreted in its most traditional sense, as relaying the fatal outcome when a male power struggles to possess the female body through violence. Yet Nguyen’s rendition suggests an alternate interpretation that offers a less misogynistic view of the woman. The suicide of the prince is of critical note as it gives rise to a legend that valorizes the act of procreation as engendered by the mutual sacrifice of both a male and a female. The legend holds that after the prince has killed himself, the dead princess’ blood flows into the sea where it is drunk by oysters; those oysters produce pearls that only shine when washed with water from the well where the prince drowned himself. The symbolic content of the legend is clear. The blood of the princess signifies blood from her womb, which bleeds regularly from menses and once from the act of defloration. The shedding of her blood produces an egg (a “pearl”) that realizes its full potential only when fertilized by the “watery sperm” of the prince. Thus the misogynist feudal tale of a woman being the root of

124 Chapter Six all evil and harm for the men in her life is transformed into a tale in which the procreative interplay of both the male and the female bodies ensures the continuation of the nation and the species. Although the significance of the tale (to Vietnamese scholars and historians) may lie in its reference to issues of self-defense, tribal alliance, and political maneuvers, for ordinary Vietnamese listeners, including those in the diaspora, a moral emerges in the story that focuses on the love and loyalty of a child. On the one hand, the princess only reveals the secret of her father because her husband tells her that there should be no secrets between a husband and wife, forcing her to choose between her love for father and husband. On the other hand, the husband betrays his own wife and submits to his father because his first loyalty is to his father, not to his wife. The gendered difference in loyalty depicted here reveals how a woman’s love specifically may be guided to demonstrate loyalty to both her father and her husband. The absence of a mother to mediate her daughter’s loyalty, and perhaps to secure it to her father, reveals how a home governed purely by masculine power may be doomed to end in tragedy. Nevertheless, the principle of human procreation, of which the woman is a central part, triumphs, as the continuation of nation and society. Amenable to contradictory readings, “A Daughter’s Love” highlights a key function of the written folktale, that of rendering the social context of folklore. William R. Bascom observes that such recording of “a series of related facts” is necessary “if the problems of the relation between folklore and culture or the functions of folklore, or even the creative role of the narrator, are to be analyzed.”8 Translated into the English language, Nguyen’s version of “A Daughter’s Love” carries a subtly larger cultural and ontological meaning. In her rendition of the tale, any pejorative formulaic references to “the weakness of woman’s heart” that exist in other versions of the myth are omitted; instead, the princess, Mi Chau, is presented as a young woman who must stoically accept her husband’s demands. Nguyen’s enscription refuses to blame the heroine for any deliberate betrayal of her father or even for scheming against him with her husband the prince. Instead, the princess’ decision to acquiesce to the demands of her husband is depicted as the only possible, logical choice for a woman under Confucian doctrine: The woman’s loyalty to her husband supersedes any that she might have for her father without question.

8 William R. Bascom, “Four Functions of Folklore,” in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 281.

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Nguyen’s version of the tale hence shifts the blame of the tragedy from the princess to her husband and focuses on his performance of duty in the narrative. In Nguyen’s rendition of the tale, it is the husband who clearly violates his duties to his wife. He does not emerge in the narrative as overly sympathetic, as he is never shown agonizing over his impeding betrayal or searching his soul before rushing into almost perfunctory suicide. As such, Nguyen’s translation characterizes the prince as acting quickly and coolly, out of duty to his father even as it warrants the betrayal of his wife. In addition, most folk tales allow their male characters to rave and rail (sometimes in comic terms) against the “fickleness” of the female characters who are characterized as betraying them and even to commit violence against the women for their betrayal in a manner that justifies the violence. Nguyen’s translation denies that narrative trope to the Vietnamese king. Instead, in her translation of “A Daughter’s Love,” she highlights the father’s beheading of his daughter, not as a morally justifiable act, but as an act of atrocious violence and hence as an act that is incorrect against her. The trope of the male conquest over a woman’s body is at the core of other Vietnamese folktales that Nguyen has chosen to translate for her anthology. As noted, in Confucianism, a woman is multiply subordinated: first to her father (as are her brothers), then to her husband, and ultimately to her son, should her husband die before her. Traditionally her path to self-determination is barred, unlike that of her male siblings who can aspire to occupy the role of the father. Nguyen’s subtle shading of her characters’ motivations for their actions reveals the poignancy of this subordination lore. In her transcription, the father never entirely yields his power over the daughter’s body, as he is the one who murders her. At the same time, Nguyen highlights that even as the daughter’s/wife’s actions adhere to the Confucian code, she nevertheless suffers a violent end. Such closure serves to “awaken” the audience to the limitations of the code; the heroine’s ostensible adherence to the code thus enacts a critique of the code itself.

Land and Water: Human Survival

Nguyen’s translation of the “The Anger of the Waters” also mitigates against misogyny. In this tale, a contest is tied mythically to two natural signifiers that have traditionally determined much of Viet Nam’s cultural self-understanding: the highland and the sea. The Vietnamese term equivalent to the Western concept of “Father- or Motherland” is “mountains and rivers.” In their national mythology, the Vietnamese see

126 Chapter Six themselves as the descendants of a Mountain and an Oceanic deity. Thus in this folktale the God of the Mountain, Son Tinh (literally, “mountain wizard”), and the God of the Ocean, Thuy Tinh (“water wizard”), vie for the hand of a beautiful princess, Mi Nuong. Mi Nuong’s father, the king, instructs both suitors to bring her gifts. Because he is just a little bit ahead of his rival, Son Tinh wins Mi Nuong’s hand from her father. Even though the woman in question has no role in determining the outcome of this contest, the inevitable loss of one male triggers a vengeful reaction causing human suffering. In Nguyen’s translation, the consequence of this male struggle is that “the ocean god never forgot his great disappointment in love” and that he annually “causes the waters to rise again and flood;” this rendition suggests a clear allusion to the monsoon season in Viet Nam.9 In the cultural imaginary, the Vietnamese people have allied themselves with the victor in the battle over the princess’s body. As a result of this event, we are told, the Vietnamese “developed […] their traditional ways of fighting the floods. They’ve built great river banks and dikes so that they can always protect themselves from [the Ocean god’s] anger.”10 Thus the myth reflects a particular achievement in the Vietnamese material culture: the conquest of those forces of nature (precipitation) which are at once necessary and threatening. The introduction of supernatural elements such as gods and their contests into the folklore presents a symbolic means to relate the story of how to tame nature and to make it serve human needs through community effort. Such mythic-symbolic dramas often center around economic well-being because the peasant class depended essentially on successful rice harvests. “The Anger of the Waters” is no exception. As evidenced, “The Anger of the Waters” fulfills another function of a mythic folktale as identified by Bascom. According to Bascom, mythic folktales validate a culture, justifying its rituals and institutions to those who perform and observe them. Bascom argues that the need for such stories is particularly acute “when dissatisfaction with or skepticism of an accepted [social] pattern is expressed or doubts about it arise.” It is in such situations that a myth or a legend arises.11 Bascom’s argument resonates with the initiation of the tale about “the anger of the waters.” The demands placed on the traditional Vietnamese community by wet rice agriculture were immense, giving root to their dissatisfaction with recurring bad harvests. The behavior of landlords and government bureaucracy indeed led to a popular rural dissatisfaction with the existing social order in the

9 Nguyen, Two Tales Fit for a King, 32. 10 Ibid., 32. 11 Bascom, “Four Functions of Folklore,” 292.

The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King 127 mid-second millennium Viet Nam, where the roots of the handed-down version of this myth lie, according to Nguyen’s interpretation. Thus, following Bascom, we can interpret the myth of “The Anger of the Waters” in terms of material culture: In a period of crisis, recourse is taken to a tale of the supernatural to validate the present structure of communal labor efforts, such as erecting and tending protective dykes and maintaining irrigation systems. That the divine battle over a woman is at the center of this myth points to a recognizable tradition of the objectification of women in myth. As a material-symbolic narrative act, “The Anger of the Waters” is typical of myths that Vietnamese parents tell their children to prepare them for monsoon seasons, especially in the countryside and around the river deltas. Nguyen’s inclusion of the story in her collection is a successful choice. Nguyen’s rendition of this folktale serves a younger readership, and it is noteworthy that she downplays the possible misogyny that be read into it in favor of a straightforward narrative ending, highlighting the alliance of the people with the new family of the princess. But Nguyen also omits the reproachful tone of “Confucian” versions of the myth, which charge the princess with enticing the love of the competing, violent gods by showcasing her assets and her beauty. In Nguyen’s reading, the princess is not blamed for this event. The young gods fight, it is implied, as it is in their nature to fight. Through Nguyen’s recording, the symbolism of the woman can be interpreted in a way that does not emphasize as its primary objective tenable lessons or a Confucian-inspired patriarchal moral framework about femininity in a reader’s quotidian life. Here again, Nguyen affects a subtle, but significant, shift away from a possible misogynist rendition of the tale.

Making a Case for Strong Willed, Assertive, and Violent Vietnamese Women

Nguyen’s rendition of “Princess Lieu Hanh, Tea-Seller of Ngang Mountain” epitomizes how the relationship of violence and women can be invested with a variety of meanings, including those of alterity and valorization. Nguyen begins her rendition of the tale with the common folk statement that “in Vietnam, people have long believed that life in Heaven is the same as life on Earth.”12 The tale concerns a rebellious Princess named Lieu Hanh who with her family resides in Heaven. She defies the Confucian family order and decorum. This rebellion is

12 Nguyen, Two Tales Fit for a King, 43.

128 Chapter Six symbolized by her tendency toward acts of violence. In one violent outbreak, she smashes a jade cup against the wall and shatters the object that turns out to be her father’s favorite. Through this image, Lieu Hanh can be seen as bringing violent disorder to her patriarchal society. As punishment, Lieu Hanh is banished to Earth for one hundred years. Turning her punishment into a rare opportunity for self-actualization and undeterred by possible hardships, she sets up a tea stall on a remote, but busy and dangerous, road on Ngang Mountain, which sits between North and South Viet Nam. The fairy tale highlights her “strong desire to help people,” so her choice of occupation, while implicitly yielding material income, is one of succor and provision of nourishment, akin to the trope of mother’s support for her children.13 Lieu Hanh conducts business, however, in a dangerous atmosphere, where mountain bandits prey on male merchants traveling in convoys. Yet this setting is necessary to emphasize Lieu Hanh’s surprising resilience combined with her supernatural strength. In the midst of this dangerous environment, Nguyen depicts Lieu Hanh’s tea shop as a safe place. Nguyen describes: “Travelers who only stopped to eat or drink would have no problems” at the tea shop, quite to the contrary of what they would expect to find in such a liminal space. Yet as Nguyen’s preceding sentence implied and prepared the reader for, those among the travelers who desire something else of Lieu Hanh were punished: “But anyone who tried to flirt with or harass the tea- seller would either go crazy or die.”14 The original text makes clear that Lieu Hanh is a woman who is able to defend herself, by supernatural violence if need be, against any potential sexual violence that might be directed against her. Nguyen’s rendition reinforces this key idea by grounding Lieu’s language in contemporary American discourse. Nguyen transforms the commonly used Vietnamese words in the original tale “tan” and “de dam,” meaning “to woo” and “to accost,” into what may be construed as more modern words such as “flirt” and “harass,” as they are likely to carry more familiar connotations for Nguyen’s young readers than the more historically accurate, but quaint, original words. Likewise, in Nguyen’s more “modern” rendition of the tale, Lieu Hanh can be interpreted very easily as the embodiment of anti-Confucian behavior. Nguyen reinforces this aspect of the tale by strongly asserting a woman’s right to object to male sexual violence against her body. Unlike the doctrines prescribed by Confucianism, the solitary and unattached woman in the tale remains visible, economically active, and in a public place.

13 Ibid., 44. 14 Ibid., 45

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Nguyen’s rendition emphasizes these points, rather than glossing over them as it happens in the more Confucianized versions of the tale. Lieu Hanh’s sexual self-determination is eventually challenged by a prince, described as “proud and stupid,” who had decided to prey on her.15 In the original tale, and rendered so by Nguyen, Lieu Hanh’s response to the prince gives two warnings to him—one mystical and one realistic. For the first, mystical warning, Lieu Hanh escapes from the prince by turning herself into a peach tree bearing just one luscious fruit, where the sexual connotations of the fruit are obvious. Upon her transformation, the lecherous prince orders a servant to pluck the peach. Yet to his surprise, once he touches it, it “began to shrink” and “within only a few seconds, it had completely disappeared.” The disappearance of the peach is traditionally understood to warn the prince that this “fruit” is not accessible to him; at another level of interpretation it can indicate that it is only by disappearing or physically transforming herself out of her human shape that a woman can escape, deflect and reject the unwanted approach of men.16 Yet after this first warning in the tale, Nguyen records the next step when Lieu Hanh reappears and proves that she does not need to disappear in order to deflect the advances of the prince. Now, the prince enters her tea stall, is served “a twelve-course banquet for himself,” demonstrating utter selfishness, upon which the prince expresses his desire to sleep in the tea shop. In telling him off, in the original Vietnamese version, Lieu refers to herself as “elder sister,” as was socially customary in Vietnamese language. Thus she literally answers to the prince: “elder sister lives here alone.” Yet in Nguyen’s rendition of the tale, Lieu Hanh replies: “I live here alone. I don’t want men to sleep here,” symbolic of Lieu Hanh’s self- assertiveness and that of the merchant class against an insolent nobility.17 Nguyen’s rendition represents Lieu’s refusal as even more self-assertive by having her use the first personal pronoun to refer to herself, and hence to draw attention to herself, as well as to her own choice and self-agency in the situation, as might a contemporary English speaking woman do in the West. Nguyen’s choice to employ the pronoun “I” makes the tale and feminine figure of Lieu Hanh more familiar to the world of her contemporary readers. It can be argued that if she had used the correct, but apparently more self-effacing, original term to describe Lieu Hanh, Nguyen would have stayed only true to the words, but not to the spirit of the tale.

15 Ibid., 45. 16 Ibid., 46. 17 Ibid., 47.

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Yet the prince insists on sleeping in the shop, ignoring Lieu Hanh’s refusal, and becomes more bothersome before he settles down. Confronted with this aggression, Nguyen’s rendition describes the great anger of Lieu Hanh, which she does not suppress at all, contrary to some versions in which she is depicted as reacting outwardly more meekly. Defying the prince, Lieu Hanh runs outside, catches a monkey of indeterminate gender, and changes it into a beautiful young girl to take her place. When the prince forces himself on the girl, she “suddenly turn[s] back into a monkey, bare[s] her teeth, and bit[es] him.”18 The choice of a monkey as a substitute in the tale works well with its original audience as it ties in with the Asian notion of the trickiness and playfulness of monkeys, and Nguyen carefully keeps this detail. Humiliated by the trickery as well as the haunting specter of bestiality and sexual perversion, the prince is returned to the palace in a state of shock. However, upon the instigation of the prince’s mother, which highlights again female energy and resourcefulness, albeit in a negative way as far as the self-assertive Lieu Hanh is concerned, the previously passive king enlists the help of the Eight Diamond Generals, the offspring of a female Buddha, to break Lieu Hanh’s spirit.19 The battle between the Eight Diamond Generals and Lieu Hanh stalemates, and the female Buddha intervenes on behalf of her offspring. She offers the generals a magical bag into which, when opened, all of Lieu Hanh’s powers are drawn until she surrenders. When Lieu Hanh is brought to the king, she is still defiant. She tells him, in the contemporary words of transcriber Nguyen: “We all have a moral duty to punish men who harass young women.” Surprisingly, the King agrees to this with the caveat and replies: “You’re right […] as long as you never turn your powers on innocent people.” Now it is Lieu Hanh’s turn to make a surprise concession, referring not to her trick on the guilty prince but to her previous acts in heaven rendered at the beginning of the tale: “I have been guilty of unfairness and spite in my life,” and vows to have reached a new understanding of her obligation to fairness, while having elicited official sanction and approval of her right to punish those men who transgress

18 Ibid., 48. 19 The idea of a female Buddha represents a fascinating Vietnamese variant of an otherwise rather male-favoring Buddhist religion. Compare also the reading of the Lotus Sutra in the Pure Land Buddhism of Japan that has a woman changing into a male seconds before her thus facilitated ascend to Nirvana; in traditional Buddhism, Nirvana is unobtainable for any souls still incarnated into a woman’s body. Among the numerous studies of this phenomenon, perhaps the most widely accessible appears in Stanley Karnow, Vietnam (New York: Viking Press, 1997).

The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King 131 against her, an important victory highlighted strongly in Nguyen’s rendition.20 With this exchange, Lieu Hanh leaves. Nguyen’s rendition does not comment on the fate of the traumatized prince at all, dropping him off as an irrelevant character psychologically marked by Lieu Hanh who has gained an official right to defend herself and has achieved emotional evolution and maturation at the same time. At the end of her one-hundred- year penance, Lieu Hanh re-enters heaven. Tying the folktale to folk beliefs, Nguyen closes the tale with the revelation that the site of Lieu Hanh’s supposed tea stall on Viet Nam’s Ngang Mountain still has a popular shrine where people implore the help of Lieu Hanh, who is now deemed a heavenly princess. The petitioners are always careful not to arouse Lieu Hanh’s proverbial anger and avoid touching anything in the shrine, a taboo symbolic of respecting the integrity of her body and personality. Compared to other selected titles in Nguyen’s compilation, “Princess Lieu Hanh, Tea-Seller of Ngang Mountain” is the longest and most detailed in its English translation. This particular mythic folktale is especially rich in details that have to do with those facets of Vietnamese beliefs, values, and principles that people have deemed important for social order throughout the ages. Nguyen has chosen to translate this title in rich details because it can relate to many Vietnamese readers, young and old. By empowering Lieu Hanh even further and by giving her a speech that resonates positively with contemporary young adult readers, Nguyen underscores the essentially anti-misogynist nature of the tale that survived post-Gia Long Sinophile tampering. What could be misread as a vestige of female self-effacement, the avoidance of the “I,” is not permitted to stand under Nguyen’s authorship. For younger readers, such as diasporic Vietnamese children who are beginning to learn about Vietnamese oral literature, the colorful character of Lieu Hanh may demonstrate how unruly behaviors from any child will face appropriate punishments. Nguyen’s rendition strikes a careful balance between contemporary language and attitudes and the older core values of Vietnamese culture and tradition that may appear alien to a young and mischievous, diasporic Vietnamese child. As told by Nguyen, patience and thinking before acting upon impulses are to be praised and rewarded more than throwing tantrums, crying, and being spoiled. Details such as banditry, supernatural powers, trickeries, and magical spells are fruitful contrivances to fascinate young children, but they also serve to showcase

20 All references, Nguyen, Two Tales Fit for a King, 51.

132 Chapter Six popular Vietnamese literary inventiveness. On a deeper level, these points that the young children may take with them to foster them into better adults later on are rendered in accessible language that avoids obvious, alienating moralizing while also trying to instill in the young reader certain examples of good moral code of conduct for growing up and developing individually no matter where they live. Yet, to the argument of this exploration, transcribing this tale into English, Nguyen’s translation offers a special significance concerning the valorization of strong Vietnamese women to challenge the stereotype of a silent, submissive Asian woman that pervades diasporic spaces. When Confucianism entered every aspect of Vietnamese culture and society from the reign of Gia Long, women were relegated to a role that was controlled and manhandled in a patriarchal world. While traditionally Vietnamese culture celebrated women on the same footing as men and while their importance in the outside world was no less than in the domestic sphere, Confucianism thought to put an end to it. To further validate this new social order of things, existing folktales, myths, and legends featuring strong women were appropriated and altered to fit into the new doctrine. As a sign of the resilience of these texts and of their appeal to the popular imagination of the oppressed and disadvantaged, the old texts refused to go away completely. Rather, storytellers chose an overt adaptation and assimilation to Confucian values over a more subtle integration of those values into the culture. Such an emphasis necessitated a visible emphasis on certain restricted behaviors for women in culture, as evidenced in the original versions of the myths explored thus far. In time, the traditional folk texts did remain relevant during the heavily Confucian-influenced time in Viet Nam. Although Nguyen’s present rendition has restored some of their original ideas, valuations, and emphasis, with this tale about Lieu Hanh, Nguyen challenges the stereotypes of women encoded in those same myths by showcasing and, to some degree, by resurrecting strong female figures in Vietnamese literature to transform the type of knowledge about Vietnamese women that is transmitted to non-Vietnamese speaking generations. By her specific rendition of the tales, Nguyen is adding to and expanding the heritage of diasporic Vietnamese and reminding them of the power of their own narratives to show that Vietnamese women are not traditionally weaklings or a lesser half of Vietnamese men. Vietnamese women can achieve the status of Vietnamese men in both the public and the private spheres, as can be proven amply well in the history and folklore of Viet Nam.

The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King 133

The Other Side of Strong (Willed) Women: A Moral Tale of Confucian Didacticism

To balance out her other chosen tales that praise strong female role models, Nguyen also includes a folktale that points out the potential for violence in Vietnamese women in Vietnamese society. “Three Drops of Blood” is usually considered the most moralistic tale in the collection, and it has been suspected of Confucian propagandistic tampering. However, Nguyen’s transcription of the myth allows for an alternative interpretation of it, which need not contradict the Confucian values inscribed in the original one. Ostensibly, “Three Drops of Blood” is a tale of male sacrifice, where a man is punished by an insolent and emotionally and verbally violent woman. It is the story of a failed resurrection where a man brings back to life his wife only to lose her to another man of her choosing. Yet while traditional oral versions of the tale unequivocally blame the woman for her ingratitude, willfulness, selfishness and spite, Nguyen’s rendition carefully creates moments of alterity inviting a reader to consider a less misogynist interpretation. Traditionally as well as in Nguyen’s version, “Three Drops of Blood” begins when the sudden death of his beloved wife renders her husband “inconsolable.”21 The husband grieves over her body until an old man, a spiritual being, appears to him. The old man tells the husband to let go of his grief as there is future happiness without his wife. Moreover, if she had lived, she would have been unfaithful to him, the sage claims. Yet, despite the old man’s advice, the husband insists on resurrecting his wife and asks the old man to help him. Reluctantly, the divine old man instructs the husband to prick his finger and to let three drops of his blood fall into his dead wife’s mouth. The wife is resurrected by this action, and when she comes alive, she gushes forth with gratitude: “Darling, you saved my life. It’s yours now. I will love you and remain faithful to you as long as I live.”22 It appears that male-engineered and male-executed resurrection is a success. The moral of the story implies that when the husband resurrects his wife, she owes her life to him and hence, according to Confucian doctrines, she remains sexually subjugated to and dominated by him, as all “proper” women should be. Yet both the original and Nguyen’s versions of the folktale will demonstrate this assumption to be an illusion, as the story goes on to tell what happens after the wife’s resurrection.

21 Ibid., 61. 22 Ibid., 63.

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As the tale unfolds, Nguyen’s translation offers an opening through which the husband might be critiqued for the eventual disastrous outcome. This concerns specifically the fact that being overprotective of his resurrected wife he “refused to let [her] do hard work in the fields.”23 Nguyen’s version of the tale emphasizes that the husband unilaterally issues this injunction against his wife’s wishes, ascribing clear responsibility to him for the eventual result of his dictate. The husband’s decision, whether unilateral as in Nguyen’s rendition, or not, as in other versions where the wife happily agrees, can be read in two ways. In the first interpretation, the male’s denial of the woman’s participation in the economic- and power-generating activities of the household may have been the reason for which she eventually breaks out of the marriage. Another, more orthodox, interpretation highlights the lesson, in which an enforced idleness can lead to temptation. For, soon, the bored wife strolls to the harbor where she is courted, tempted, and bribed by a captain, whom she marries before they sail off. Her ex-husband pursues the pair. When he confronts the captain, the latter offers gold coins in exchange for the woman’s “body,” in essence commodifying her. When the ex-husband refuses the exchange, the captain suggests that he ask his former wife, who abuses her ex-husband. Her ex-husband resorts to asking her to give him back his three drops of blood with which he had resurrected her at the tale’s beginning. Derisively, the captain’s new wife assumes that her deserted husband is indulging in sentimentalism, forgetting that her resurrection was based on supernatural events and by his hand. According to her logic, she cannot be subjugated by him with a sentimental act. As seen, the collision of the wife’s and her ex-husband’s very different interpretations of the same event eventually ends in her disfavor. She gives him the three drops of blood. As she returns the three drops of blood to her ex-husband, the loss of the third drop of blood kills her. The reader is told that the captain soon remarries another woman of beauty. The quick timing of the remarriage reveals his indifference to the first wife, and, hence, speaks to the patriarchal, Confucian warning to women that men will be quick to discard them once they lose their virtue. At first glance, “Three Drops of Blood,” as rendered by Nguyen, appears to conform to Bascom’s categorization of another function of folklore, linked to those previously discussed. Bascom argues: “Folklore fulfills the important but often overlooked function of maintaining conformity to the accepted patterns of behavior.” Thus “some forms of

23 Ibid., 63.

The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King 135 folklore are important as means of applying social pressure and exercising social control” over those “individuals who attempt to deviate from social conventions with which they are fully familiar.”24 This tale clearly corresponds to Bascom’s idea in that the transgressive woman is punished with a (second) death. Yet the tale, also in its contemporary English rendition, invites an alternative reading. As noted, it can be viewed as a warning against the husband’s over-protective denial of his wife’s participation in the economic and labor discourse of their community. Objectified as an icon of beauty, she subconsciously embarks on the path set out by her husband for herself; she seeks to optimize her role as an ornament and falls prey to a male agent whose material position enables just such actions. Her callous, violent answers to her former husband’s desperate pleas resemble an internalization of the societal rules she had been confronted with: A woman’s value depends on her presentation of the mirage of beauty. The materially aided ornamentation of her body by things external is rationally desirable if the woman is subject to commodity exchange. As such, the wife acts according to the material paradigms of the nascent merchant class as opposed to the supernaturally based thought systems of the agrarian society. Her tragic fate is that she is too modern and too rational in a world still clinging to the magical, and in forgetting that she owes her resurrected existence exactly to the intervention of mystical patriarchy that shall jealously guard its privileges. After all, the magic old man condemned her soul as unfaithful before she even had the chance to live out her further destiny. With this folktale, Nguyen is balancing out a conflicting duality of strong and strong-willed Vietnamese women in literature. There are often two sides to any character trait in a person, in this case a Vietnamese woman. First Nguyen valorizes the strong character of Lieu Hanh. Now, in her decision to retell this particular tale and in her rendering of it, she seems critical of a frivolous and adulterous wife who is too strong-willed and who dies in part due to what is represented as her “selfishness.” This balancing act in Nguyen’s inclusion of certain folktales into her English anthology shows that she is interested in showing the full band width of traditional Vietnamese folktales, even those presumably tampered with by nineteenth-century Confucian misogyny. It remains for a reader to decide whether to read the woman’s action as a violent reaction to an oppressive society out of which she seeks to break and for which act she is punished, or as the orthodox portrayal of the flaws and treacheries displayed by some female characters in oral Vietnamese literature. Nguyen’s rendition

24 Bascom, “Four Functions of Folklore,” 294.

136 Chapter Six neither overtly denies nor affirms the Confucian criticism in “Three Drops of Blood” but stoically tells this moralistic tale. However, on a deeper level, it appears that Nguyen invites her readers to question the nature and the motivation for such display of imperfect human quality as done by the wife, and to examine what purpose this tale serves in its intended education of its audience. Is the husband justified to enlist spiritual help in resurrecting his wife? Should he pursue one that is fleeing him? Is his act of revenge justified? By refusing to add affirmative answers to these questions in the rendition of the tale, as the more didactic oral versions do, together with much lament on the evil side of women, Nguyen’s text challenges her readers with a portrayal of a violent, wishful woman who just may embark on a transgressive act of rebellion and self-actualization.

Cakes to Eat, Blood to Kill

The titled story of the collection, “Two Cakes Fit for a King,” is perhaps the most often recounted folktale in the Vietnamese oral literary canon. The potential for a violent struggle for feudal succession harming women and men of the land alike, as happened so often in Viet Nam’s history, is averted here through an ingenious gift of food. Food in the story alludes to the regenerative forces of the fertile soil irradiated by the life- sustaining sun; it indicates a community’s survival if female and male members act in coordination and balance, and also if generational harmony and succession is peacefully regulated. The food at the center of the story is symbolically gendered. One of the old King’s sons, Lang Lieu, chooses to marry Hoa, a beautiful peasant woman. Hoa lives with Lieu, and they work in the rice fields together, which may be interpreted to express a communal desire for a pastoral idyll, starkly in contrast to real historical aristocratic privilege, behavior, and abuse. The King holds a contest in which all his princely sons have to bring the best food for him to taste so he can give his throne to the one whose food will please him most. Unlike his brothers, Lang Lieu, after much contemplation, decides to make two kinds of cake from plain rice because, as he states: “only rice […] is the food that sustains us.”25 The square “banh chung” will symbolize the earth because the square resembles plots of land in which to grow rice. The round “banh giay” symbolizes the sun, as in Nguyen’s rendition Hoa herself is quick to add (some versions of the tale give that speech to her husband). Like the tale’s original communal audience, Hoa understands and explains herself that

25 Nguyen, Two Tales Fit for a King, 81.

The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King 137 the square cake symbolizes a mother, as it gives life, is fertile like the earth, and is like a womb. The cake contains a gift to the community—in this case further varied nutrition in the form of pork meat and bean string vegetables. Similarly, the round cake symbolizes the father whose light, or economic and physical support, enables the fruit of the earth to grow. Not surprisingly, the King chooses Lang Lieu. He and Hoa become the next king and queen of the land, fulfilling the yearning of the community for a non-violent, orderly transition of power. “Two Cakes Fit for a King” correspond also to another critically identified function of Vietnamese folktales, their role “in education, particularly but not exclusively, in non literate societies.”26 On many levels, the titled story functions as an educational tale for children and adults alike because it does express the most fundamental thoughts and the core value system of Vietnamese agrarian life in a gendered view. The square and round cakes are made both from rice, which is the staple of most Asian diets, indicating that female and male, respectively, possess commonalities. As in Vietnamese food culture, rice is the staple diet of every family, regardless of class, status, and income, so female and male are expressed here as a foundation of social life. The square and round cakes are to Vietnamese on the lunar New Year what the turkey is to Americans on Thanksgiving, so the necessity for female and male cooperation is expressed as much as Thanksgiving is presented as celebrating trans-ethnic friendship. Moreover, the square and round cakes are also symbols of the autochthonous Vietnamese moral and ethical code of honoring the land and one’s forbears. Because it touches the root of Vietnamese cultural self-understanding, Nguyen’s rendition of the tale is as direct and literal as possible. For younger Vietnamese readers, “Two Cakes Fit for a King” may be a cultural explanation of why the two traditional cakes are so important in Vietnamese food culture, especially during Vietnamese New Year celebration. And for young Vietnamese children who reside outside of Viet Nam, this story serves to perpetuate a celebratory heritage of comfort food. For a wider Vietnamese readership, this folktale can serve to represent all things Vietnamese that have to do with traditions, survival, and national economy, tying it to land and water, elements which were as much a part of Vietnamese survival and culture in ancient times as they are today. The tale’s elevation to the titled story of Nguyen’s anthology indicates the author’s sense of its lasting importance and relevance, and she has given it a form that emulates the attempt at transcendence of

26 Bascom, “Four Functions of Folklore,” 293.

138 Chapter Six concrete time typical of so many myths, folktales, and legends. By giving Hoa a voice in the presence of the King, explaining the meaning of the second cake rather than having her husband do all of the talking, as in some Vietnamese versions of the tale, Nguyen affirms a more equal celebration of marital cooperation beyond the gender divide among the younger generation. For the older generation, only the King speaks and the Queen is a silent presence, while Nguyen literally gives both young partners a voice in the matter of their lives.

Preserving Vietnamese Oral Storytelling Tradition

When it comes to the person who made accessible these folktales, myths, and legends into English, one should appreciate Nguyen’s formal education in Ha Noi, the capital of Viet Nam, which grounded her in a national cultural and literary tradition. Nguyen’s intellectual position has given her the mental privilege to first translate works from English into Vietnamese, and now from Vietnamese to English. Nguyen is currently teaching Vietnamese in the Department of South/Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. With her academic status and position both in Viet Nam and now in America, there also come special burdens. In the still relatively rarified field of Vietnamese literature in translation, too often one’s personal voice is in danger of being conflated and confused with the infamous “voice of the nation,” and the author is quickly subjected to multiple pressures and attempts at stratification. In addition, in the Vietnamese learned tradition, it is often believed that North Vietnamese, such as Nguyen, tend to be more intellectual, learned, and bookish as opposed to South Vietnamese. Cultural animosities lurk beneath a surface of benevolence. Yet in spite of all these challenges, the translation of Two Cakes Fit for a King can be seen as a momentous literary star in the Vietnamese diasporic reading culture. What better choice of literature than a body of carefully selected folktales, myths, and legends if one is to try to reach out to the heart of an autochthonous national self? Importantly, Nguyen’s rendition of the folktales mitigates against their overt, latent, and superimposed misogyny by rewriting the demeanor of her characters and redirecting the emotions in the myth to counter prevailing ideologies in classic Vietnamese culture as influenced by Confucianism. Nguyen’s translation also counters the traditional Confucian image of women as wicked and weak, to be blamed for social ills and personal misfortune, and in dire need of male control. It is not that Nguyen has created a feminist text, but rather she has chosen to mitigate

The Case of Nguyen Nguyet Cam’s Two Cakes Fit for a King 139 misogyny, some of which was added to the original tales at a later state to serve expediently political, cultural, and social pressures. In her translation, transcription, and enscription of the Vietnamese folktales, myths, and legends which she chose, Nguyen has fashioned a text that valorizes its female characters and makes them culturally accessible to a new generation of young adult readers.

Bibliography

Bannerji, Himani. “Politics and the Writing of History.” In Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race. Eds. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri. 287-301. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998. Bascom, William R. “Four Functions of Folklore.” In The Study of Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. 279-98. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice- Hall, 1965. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam. 2nd ed. New York: Viking Press, 1997. Nguyen, Nguyet Cam. Two Tales Fit for a King: Folktales from Vietnam. Co-authored by Dana Sachs. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Nguyen, Du. The Tale of Kieu. Ed. Huyn Sanh Tong. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1983. Trask, Haunani-Kay. Notes from a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii. Rev. ed. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Workman, Mark E. “Folklore and the Literature of Exile.” In Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory: Collected Essays. Ed. Cathy Lynn Preston. 29-42. New York, NY: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE LANGUAGES OF THE BLACK MEDUSA: DOROTHEA SMARTT AND INGRID MWANGI

MARIA CRISTINA NISCO, ITALY

Une icône ne se regarde pas. Elle s’embrasse, elle s’absorbe, elle se vit… —Julia Kristeva1

Every day we participate in what scholar Marina Warner defines as “a living allegory”: individuals become simulacra, cultural products following precise norms, canons, and stereotypes defining their being and behavior.2 Both in our public and in our private lives, we exchange ideas, aspirations, “proofs of status and badges of identity” through shared symbols and allegories.3 Warner defines allegory as a central part of speech in human communication, for it possesses two layers of meaning— one evident, the other hidden: allegory means “other speech” (alia oratio), it tells something that, while conveying one meaning, also says something else.4 Warner quotes Aristotle when she argues that “mimesis— imitation—brings about methexis—participation—and a constant exchange takes place between images and reality.”5 The icons and forms we interact with in our daily lives have adapted to the allegories coming from the past in order to find their own expression, not in ancient

1 Julia Kristeva, Visions Capitales (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998), 48. “We do not just watch an icon. We embrace it, absorb it, live it” (my translation). 2 Marina Warner, Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), xix. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 37. 142 Chapter Seven sculptures or paintings, but in contemporary and living “monuments”— bodies upon which myths of various traditions are projected. In her examination of the multiple significations attributed to the female form, Warner underlines that collective fantasies, desires, and fears have been built, gathered, and projected in particular on the female body. In her discourse, Warner examines female allegories in the form of the abstract nouns of virtue, wisdom, and justice in myths, focusing on the figures and images as different as the Statue of Liberty, Marianne, Margaret Thatcher, the goddess Athena, Pandora, Tiresia, and the Gorgon Medusa. Concentrating on one of these allegorical figures, Medusa, this essay will explore some of the different languages through which the myth of the Gorgon has produced meanings in the past and continues to articulate new cultural values in the present. This essay will focus on the re-appropriation of the mythical figure of Medusa as realised by the British-born Barbadian poet Dorothea Smartt and the Kenyan–German artist Ingrid Mwangi. Smartt’s poetic language and Mwangi’s visual language offer a means to explore the various possibilities for black women to articulate their own voice and image within and outside of the boundaries of the myth of Medusa. As black women, they both tell their stories and participate in a form of counter- narration. Smartt and Mwangi try to provoke symbolical fractures in the grand official narrations created by the West to represent and imprison otherness. They both perform acts of self-representation through a textual and a visual narration of the ancient figure of the Gorgon, which is then replaced by that of a Black Medusa, and thereby enact a subversion of representational practices and reactions to their experiences of violence. Through multiple creative forms of narration, Smartt and Mwangi articulate their identities by unveiling the complex cultural processes operating within the context of a norm-oriented society. In the attempt to tell their autobiographical stories, they become narrators and, as such, are obliged to face the hegemonic and universal male narrator petrifying and paralyzing what lies within his vision of their lives. The critic Sidonie Smith’s account of autobiographical practices is relevant to this context:

[T]he history of the universal subject and […] its normative (masculine) individuality [...] [speaks] as well of the tyranny of the arid “I”, which obscures [...] everything colorful that lies within its vision. And it implicitly issues a challenge to the woman who, in entering the textual space of that “I”, would appropriate the position of the autobiographical subject. [...] And there are certainly histories of the subject to be negotiated in that “I” space, histories that make trouble for her as she takes up that autobiographical “I.” Those histories may press her to silence or they may

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 143

encourage her to cross, crisscross, doublecross that “I” in order to move from silence to self-narrative.6

Identifying with the allegorical figure of a Black Medusa, both Smartt and Mwangi enter the space of narration, move from silence to self- narrative, and thus operate a re-writing of their stories.

From Myth to Psychoanalysis and Feminism

Medusa features all the characteristics of what has been identified as monstrously female in the patriarchal context as a symbol of female power, and thus as a danger and threat to the male and patriarchal order. According to the legend, she was a horrible monster with sparkling eyes and a gaze that could petrify those who looked at her. Medusa was one of the three Gorgons, the mortal daughter of Phorkys and his sister Keto. She was killed by Perseus, who cut off her head and escaped being petrified by Medusa by rising into the air with his winged sandals and using his shield as a mirror to avoid her gaze. In that process, Medusa’s viewing of her own gaze in Perseus’ shield eventually killed her; turned against itself, her power became her vulnerability. Latin poet Ovid, author of Metamorphoses (c. 8 B.C.), tells the legend of Medusa through Perseus’ tale:

Medusa once had charms; to gain her love a rival crowd of envious lovers strove. They, who have seen her, own, they ne’er did trace more moving features in a sweeter face. Yet, above all, her length of hair, they own, in golden ringlets wav’d, and graceful shone. Her Neptune saw, and with such beauties fir’d, risolv’d to compass, what his soul desir’d. In chaste Minerva’s fane, he, lustful, stay’d and seiz’d, and rifled the young, blushing maid. The bashful Goddess turn’d her eyes away, nor durst such impurity survey; but on the ravish’d virgin vengeance takes, her shining hair is chang’d to hissing snakes. These in her Aegis Pallas joys to bear, the hissing snakes her foes more sure ensnare, than they did lovers once, when shining hair.7

6 Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 3-4.

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According to mythology, Medusa was raped by the sea-god Neptune in one of the war-goddess Minerva’s temples. Even as the Gorgon was clearly the victim, she was nevertheless still punished later for the sacrilege by Minerva, who turned Medusa’s hair into snakes.8 Although the legend is generally associated with Roman or Greek mythology (the latter using the names Poseidon and Athena instead of Neptune and Minerva), the story is actually linked to Africa, where Medusa was worshipped by the Lybian Amazons as their Serpent-Goddess (in fact, in many of her visual representations, her hair resembles dread locks in connection to her African origins). Interestingly, Roman poet Lucan thus traces the story of Medusa in relation to Africa in his epic poem Pharsalia (c. 61-65 B.C.):

Why the Lybian climate, fruitful in deadliness, should abound in plagues so great, or what nature has secretly mixed in the noxious soil, our care and labour are not able to ascertain; except that a story, spread throughout all the world, has deceived ages, in place of the real cause. In the extreme parts of Libya, where the glowing earth receives the ocean warmed by the setting sun, far and wide lay parched the fields of Medusa, the daughter of Phorcys; not overshadowed by the foliage of the groves, not softened by the ridges, but rugged with rocks looked upon by the countenance of its mistress. In this body first did noxious nature produce deadly plagues; from those jaws snakes poured forth whizzing hisses with vibrating tongues, which, after the manner of a woman’s hair flowing along the back, flapped about the very neck of the delighted Medusa.9

Likewise, we are told that the Gorgon’s blood had the extraordinary power of paralyzing any living creature in sea, in sky, or on earth by turning it to stone. After slaying the monster and having to fly back to Minerva in order to consign the decapitated head to her, Perseus was forbidden to return across Europe considering the damage he would do passing over the land:

On seeing such a large object flying aloft, everyone would look up, and be turned to stone; the corn would also be ruined. So he wheeled about and with the West Wind behind him sailed across Lybia […]. […] Thus,

7 Ovid, Metamorphoses (Book IV), trans. John Dryden (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1998), 132. 8 Angela Cerinotti, Atlante illustrato dei miti greci e di Roma antica (Firenze: Demetra, 2003), 61, 73, 94-6, 156, 177. 9 Lucan, Pharsalia: Dramatic Episode of the Civil Wars, trans. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853), 364.

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 145

though the Lybian soil was sterile and the fields unproductive, they drank the poisonous blood, dripping from Medusa’s head….10

Medusa is a complex figure. In antiquity she not only symbolized female mysteries and creativity, but also destruction, for she represented the destroyer aspect of the Great Triple Goddess. The latter was seen as having her three personifications in Athena, Neith, and Anath, each denoting a stage in female development: the maiden, the mother, and the crone or destroyer. Thus, like a snake, an archaic symbol of vital energy and immortality that constantly sheds and renews its skin, Medusa had the ability to create and annihilate life.11 Patriarchal Greece then refused the holy image of the Gorgon, subordinating the sacred mother deity to a supreme father god. In this new context, the Lybian Triple Goddess was reduced to a single personification, Athena, who became Athenians’ patron goddess; she was divided from Medusa who was consequently presented as Athena’s enemy, her dark side. As scholar Tobin Siebers notices:

The queen of the city [Athena] and the queen of hell [Medusa] share a history of rivalry, which is dramatically stressed by the fact that the birth of Athena presents the mirror image of Medusa’s death. After either Hephaestus or Prometheus opens Zeus’s head with an axe, Athena, fully armed, springs from the wound. Medusa dies from the sword blow of Perseus, and from her head spring Pegasus and Chrysaör. These two scenes, by virtue of their similarity, again present the violent competition between goddess and monster. Both in the beauty contest and in the above scene, Athena must overcome Medusa to establish her own identity. [S]he is only marked by her conflict with the monster, as the Gorgoneion on her aegis so clearly witnesses.12

The reference to both Athena and Medusa as queens has also been suggested by author and poet Robert Graves who affirms that Medusa was a beautiful Lybian warrior-queen leading her troops into battle (and for

10 Ibid. 11 See Laura Griggs, “Medusa? Medusa Black! Revisionist Mythology in the Poetry of Dorothea Smartt,” in Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature, ed. Kadija Sesay (UK: Hansib, 2005), 180-1. 12 Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of Medusa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 65.

146 Chapter Seven this reason she was associated with the war-goddess Athena); she was then defeated and decapitated by the opposing commander Perseus.13 The story of the Gorgon has been widely adopted and differently interpreted in mythology, religion, history, anthropology, literary criticism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. Having in Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi their most famous representatives, many psychoanalytic accounts of the myth of Medusa describe her head as evoking symbolically the female sexual organ—for men, a source of fascination and horror at the same time. Freud and Ferenczi elaborated the theory according to which the many serpents surrounding the Gorgon’s head signify the absence of a penis—a fearful and alarming view evoking the threat of castration.14 In his essay “Medusa’s Head” (1922), Freud thus elaborates:

To decapitate = to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. [...] [I]t occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother.15

Yet the symbolism is bound to be more complicated from a female perspective. To begin with, whereas men can be evirated, the only part that can be symbolically cut off a woman’s body is her head or face, both of which reference her visibility in patriarchy. Thus Medusa’s decapitation may be also seen as representing a sort of sexual castration that in affirming the necessary subordination of women in the patriarchal order brings civil order to society.16 In her text “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), critic Hélène Cixous has revised Freud’s theory on Medusa by transforming Medusa’s image from that of a terrifying monster to a beautiful and subversive figure. Cixous questions categories of representation created by the Western patriarchal system of thought that have obliged women to interiorize a

13 Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), 243-246. 14 Sándor Ferenczi, “On the Symbolism of the Head of Medusa,” in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. John Rickman, trans. J. I. Suttie (London: Hogarth, 1926 [1923]), 360; Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), 273-275. 15 Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in The Medusa Reader, ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 84. 16 See Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 111.

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 147 definition of themselves based on what they lack, on what their appearance should be in order to gain them social acceptance. Cixous urges women to enter writing and history to free themselves from the censorship subjugating their bodies and their words; writing for Cixous becomes a weapon to enter History, to unearth other stories. Cixous invites everyone to look Medusa straight on to re-discover the myth, to re-read Medusa as “not deadly” but “beautiful and […] laughing.”17 Yet, as encouraging as Cixous’s position may be, theorist Teresa de Lauretis has warned us that to look at Medusa straight on is not a simple act because it implicates the very question of representation. She suggests that the role of woman presented in all classical mythology has been further restricted in ways that do not belong to the original myth. De Lauretis writes:

My question [...] how did Medusa feel looking at herself being slain and pinned up on screens, walls, bill-boards, and other shields of masculine identity, is really a political question that bears directly upon the issues of [...] the relation of female subjectivity to ideology in the representation of sexual difference and desire [and] the conditions of vision and meaning production, for women.18

The story of Medusa—a metaphor for the story of women—thus centers on the question of seeing and being seen. The (political, ideological, and social) implications of the myth concern the fact that Medusa is able to respond to and hence to address a murderous gaze that is usually a male (and Western) privilege.

Rewriting the Myth: Medusa? Medusa Black!

A social agency that contests what is sanctioned as “proper” for women in patriarchy must be attributed to Medusa in order to give a new life to the ancient myth. This can be ascribed to her by reconsidering myths and legends in which she has been misrepresented, and by questioning their authority as evidenced in the work of the British-born Barbadian poet Dorothea Smartt. Medusa is the central figure in Smartt’s collection of poetry Connecting Medium (2001). Smartt forges her personal relationship between Medusa and the black woman. Revisiting her childhood, she finds herself in the position of Medusa. When children in Brixton, London, where she was born, had called her “Medusa” because

17 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in The Medusa Reader, 133. 18 Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in The Medusa Reader, 199-200.

148 Chapter Seven of her hair, she began to look at herself through their eyes. Later she managed to associate her image to the mythic figure of the Gorgon. Smartt’s exploration of the myth of Medusa allows the poet to discuss the politics of representation, misinterpretation, and reinterpretation surrounding the myth with specific references to the position of black women in contemporary society. In Smartt’s exploration, the image of hair in both the myth of Medusa and in contemporary views of black women acquires mythical, symbolic, and sexual power. When interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman about the figure of the Gorgon in theatre and performance art, Smartt explained:

I thought to myself: Medusa was probably some black woman with nappy hair, and some white man saw her and cried: a monster! and feared her, and so told stories about her dangerous potential. To see her more clearly, I studied anthropology and thought about the first encounters of white men in Africa, and how they might have viewed and feared these strange and fantastic creatures: black women.19

Smartt problematizes the politics of representation that imposes on black women a double form of discrimination, deriving from their gender and skin color.20 She interrogates the denial of identity that takes place when the image of the black female body is manipulated by a system dominated by white privilege and patriarchy. The origin of Smartt’s “Black Medusa” lies in the life of any black woman, as suggested in her poem “medusa? medusa black!”:

medusa? medusa black! Medusa was a Blackwoman, afrikan, dread cut she eye at a sista mirror turn she same self t’stone. She looks really kill? Ask she nuh! Medusa would know. She terrible eyes leave me stone coal.

19 Smartt quoted in Lizbeth Goodman, “Who’s Looking at Who(m): Re-viewing Medusa,” in The Medusa Reader, 274. 20 On this subject see Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London, New York: Routledge, 1994); Black British Feminism: a Reader, ed. Heidi Safia Mirza (London: Routledge, 1997). See also Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, eds. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 255-277.

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Medusa lost looking for love kept behind icy eyes fixed inside the barricade for anybody who come too close, runnin’ from she own in case the worse thing happen an’ she see she self like them see she. The blood haunted: if you black, get back if you brown stick around... Is that okay? Being black your way, whitewashed an’ dyed-back black, am I easier to hold in an acceptable role? ...And if you’re white comelong y’alright... Make it go away, the nappiheaded nastiness too tuff too unruly too ugly too black ...Get back... Scrub it bleach it operate on it powder it straighten it fry it dye it perm it [...] Head? Fuck it, wild-haired woman, Straighten it fry it, desperately burn scalps. Banish the snake-woman the wild-woman the all-seeing-eye woman. [...] Medusa! Black! Get back.21

Smartt employs strong language (“scrub it,” “bleach it,” “operate on it,” “fry it,” “head? Fuck it,” and “desperately burn scalps”) to highlight the violence she reads in black women’s desires to conform to stereotypes created by a white male society. Everything must be done to fight and tame the “wild-haired woman,” “the snake-woman,” and “the all-seeing- eye woman” in order to allocate her into and keep her in an acceptable role. Smartt’s poem reveals how after hundreds of years after slavery, black women continue to be victims of racial oppression in a society that still haunts them with an old rhyme about color: “If you’re white, you’re

21 Dorothea Smartt, “medusa? medusa black!” in Connecting Medium (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2001), 57-58.

150 Chapter Seven all right. / If you’re yellow, you’re mellow. / If you’re brown, stick around. / But if you’re black, get back!”22 In her collection of poetry, Smartt constantly intertwines history, myth, and autobiography to produce and narrate new stories. In her poem “medusaspeak,” the Gorgon is described from a different perspective:

Trying to save the life that is one’s own, white foaming at her mouth, Medusa screams for you to hear her.

Her granite lips crash across teeth, sharper cries roar foaming, cross her meaning lost on the wind.

You turn run afraid. You refuse to be alone with her your terror leaves Medusa standing, molten tears across her rockface. How can she speak to you gently of hard things?

Every monster has her place. [...] Here she is standing ready to rip to claw to beat you to your monster self. [...].23

In these lines, Smartt offers us an image of Medusa that is completely different from the one we are familiar with: Doomed as she is to isolation, the Gorgon longs for a contact, a relationship, with someone. Her stare divides her from the world and encloses her, forcing her to be the prisoner

22 Rhyme quoted in Kathe Sandler, “Finding a Space for Myself in my Film about Color Consciousness,” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: The New Press, 1994), 105. 23 Smartt, “medusaspeak,” in Connecting Medium, 64-65.

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 151 of herself. The terror everyone experiences in her presence, the terror leading everyone to turn and run from her afraid seems here instead to petrify Medusa and to leave her astonished and bewildered, with “molten tears” streaming down her stony face. While Medusa emerges in Smartt’s logic as a silenced and misunderstood figure, she can be also interpreted to signify every woman (in fact, the poet explicitly defines her as “Everywoman”) in that, as a feminine figure, she questions any kind of ideological control—be it in the form of patriarchal myth or canons of beauty. In the act of rereading and rewriting the myth, Smartt brings to our attention other aspects of Medusa’s image. In particular, she surfaces a time when Medusa was viewed as a proud and positive figure, a goddess of matriarchy existing before the Greek patriarchal order was established.24 This is evident in her poem, “medusa: cuts both ways”:

medusa: cuts both ways Dread! An Afrikanwoman Full of sheself wid dem dutti-eye looks sapphire eyes Yes nuh! Believe it! she could turn a man t’stone some whiteman nightmare riding he mind across the centuries in turn turning we mad

Medusa dread anger welling up in her stare natural roots Blackwoman loving Blackwomen serious

He’d be frighten fuh dat mark wid d’living blood that bleeds and never dies turns blood our sweet honey from a rock

24 The term “matriarchy” is usually applied to a form of society in which the mothers of community have a leading role; “patriarchy,” in contrast, refers to a society where fathers have a primary role and authority.

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yes, that is sum’ting would frighten any man25

In this poem, Smartt evokes a different version of the myth of the Gorgon in which she reads Medusa as goddess of the cycles of time (past, present, and future), the cycles of nature (life, death, and rebirth), and of creation and destruction. In conjunction with Medusa, Smartt also mentions references to blood, menstruation, and childbirth, which constitute the origin of male anxieties over the female reproductive capacity. Yet in evoking such aspects of femininity, she restores Medusa to being a maternal goddess, a property which can be discerned even in Greek myth. The latter relates that, when Perseus cut off Medusa’s head, from her neck sprang the hero Chrysaor and from her blood the winged horse Pegasus, both conceived with Poseidon. Hence, the myth that is deployed in Smartt’s poem had positive connotations, before the Greek deconsacration. Yet Smartt also associates the Gorgon to other real, rather than mythical, female figures, and in evoking these women unearths what may be construed as a matriarchal lineage for black women; in that manner, Smartt produces a figure of Medusa with multiple faces and selves, as the second part of the poem shows:

And still it goes on and on and on around us inside us their voices whistling against our thunder across an eternal sky Medusa is Nanny Medusa is Assata Shakur Medusa is Cherry Groce is Eleanor Bumpers is Audre Lorde is Queen Nzinga Sarraounia QueenMother is godmother our mother Medusa is our mother’s mothers Myself all coiled into one Medusa is spirit Medusa in you is you in me is me in you Medusa is my shield impregnable my aegis –

25 Smartt, “medusa: cuts both ways,” in Connecting Medium, 59.

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no mythical aegenpeople shield this is my armour [...] my battle dress armour of serious dread26

The list of names to which the poet refers in “medusa: cuts both ways” recalls the sufferings and injustices experienced by black women in Western and patriarchal societies. Smartt reorients those trials by highlighting the history of how black women resisted those same challenges. As such, Medusa is envisioned in the images of Audre Lorde, American writer of Caribbean origins who defended lesbian black women’s rights, and of Assata Shakur, an unjustly-imprisoned revolutionary and leader of the Black Liberation Army. Medusa is envisioned as a leader and queen: Smartt calls her Nanny, leader of the Maroons, the black Jamaican community that fought against the British colonial regime and slavery in the eighteenth century. She is Queen Nzinga, queen of the present Angola, who fought against the Portuguese government in the first half of the seventeenth century. She is Sarraounia Queenmother, a West African queen who opposed French colonial troops at the end of the nineteenth century. Medusa finally represents the struggles faced by contemporary black women such as Cherry Groce, who has been paralyzed from the waist down since 1985 when she was shot by policemen in her house while they were looking for her son in Brixton, South London. Medusa represents Eleanor Bumpers, an old and obese African-American woman who was assumed to be mentally ill. She was killed by New York policemen in 1994 who were attempting to defend themselves from a knife she was holding when they broke in her apartment to reclaim a five-month rent payment.27 By re-envisioning Medusa in all these women, Smartt humanizes Medusa. In turn, through Medusa’s body, face, voice, or gestures, black women can reclaim and rewrite their own existence.

26 Smartt, “medusa: cuts both ways,” in Connecting Medium, 59-60. 27 Smartt does not give any information regarding the women mentioned in the poem, but all the details about their stories provided in the article are readily available in the public sphere.

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Multimedia Technologies of the Self: The Art of Ingrid Mwangi

Poetic language is only one of the ways through which the Black Medusa moves from silence to self-narrative. Sidonie Smith suggests that there are multiple modes to give voice to one’s autobiographical “I”:

In addition to the textual modes of autobiography, memoir, diaries, and journals, there are many visual modes–sculpture, quilts, painting, photography, collage, murals, installations, as well as films, artists’ books, song lyrics, performance art, and Web sites in cyber-space–that have not yet been recognized as autobiographical acts.28

It is through such visual autobiographical acts that the Black Medusa creates new cultural values, as evidenced in the multimedia language offered by the Kenyan-German artist Ingrid Mwangi. In Mwangi’s art, a Black Medusa expresses herself freely and provocatively in ways that cannot be easily defined without reference to the novel role of technology. Today, technology harbors fundamental links to our historical, social, and cultural practices, and, as such, it has become an inextricable part of our lives. What signals this new condition is the prominent position of the intersection between technology and the so-called technologies of the self.29 Technologies of the self are often proper technological devices— such as digital images, photographs, videos, and sound installations—that are actively involved in the construction of the notion of subject. In an interactive relation with the processes of self-recognition and self- fashioning, these new technologies sometimes offer ways to overcome the silences imposed by monologic logos, to question taboos, and personal or social identities. The multimedia artist Ingrid Mwangi, a contemporary Black Medusa, employs a variety of media and languages in her work “technologies of the self” ranging from photographs to videos, from installations to live performances. She presents herself as she tries to destabilize dominant representations and discourses, performing to excess to suggest different critical possibilities and perspectives. Mwangi was born in Kenya, where she lived until the age of fifteen. She currently lives in Germany where she works with her partner Robert

28 Sidonie Smith, Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance (University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 2002), 5-6. 29 See Michel Foucault, Un seminario con Michel Foucault: Tecnologie del sé (Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault), ed. Luther H. Martin et al. (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992), 11-18.

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 155

Hutter.30 Mwangi’s father was Kenyan and her mother was German; this family history underscores her exploration of both her African and European roots. As Mwangi’s body is literally the place where those worlds converge, she places her body or parts of it (hair, skin, voice) at the very core of her art. She is her own experimental subject and model, and thus she alters images of her body to question the oversimplified and stereotyped ways in which race, gender, and sexuality are usually decrypted. Multimedia technologies give her the means to participate in an active production of images—both to question the widespread Western aesthetic and to construct an oppositional aesthetic. The numerous representations of (what is commonly perceived as) alterity have produced stereotypes meant to mitigate the anxieties deriving from difference—cultural, ethnic, or more simply physical difference. Since Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the new World, the “Other” has been caught in the European gaze, and thus visualized as a beast or a monster. In a sense, the “Other” has been conquered through vision, and in vision has been captured by it and finally made knowable. Mwangi is aware that she is identified with the “Other,” with wilderness. She purposely works with such images, and in this process she actually subverts them by unveiling the perverse and deadly attitude inscribed in the Western male gaze. Within the context of Mwangi’s artistic production, performing the identity of the “Other” means facing the thorny question of cultural identity, uncovering what remains hidden in white people’s unconscious: the awareness that the West is a colonial and racist system pretending to be a model of democracy, freedom, and tolerance. Surprisingly (or maybe not?), a recent study by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence (Bielefeld University, Germany) states that “14 percent of all Germans still think that some groups of the population are inferior to others. And 16 percent think that white people are justified in leading the world.”31 Such views solicit the urging need to stage a constant dialogue between self and society, to promote what appear to be “necessary” changes to rectify the perseverance of such ideologies of hate. As an artist, Mwangi continues to question such ideas to provide an alternative to the many stereotypes conveyed by the media that support them. She performs this critique by exposing and demystifying the media images. In her work, she transforms herself into the beastly images inspired by the discriminatory imagination of the West

30 Since approximately 2007, they have signed their works collectively. Their new name is “IngridMwangiRobertHutter.” 31 Horst Gerhard Haberl, “Art is the Message,” in Your Own Soul: Ingrid Mwangi, ed. Berthold Schmitt and Bernd Schulz (Saarbrücken: Kehrer, 2003), 33-34.

156 Chapter Seven at the expenses of its non-European “Others.” Through this process, she resubmits to spectators stereotypical views of black people to force them to confront any prejudices they might harbor that might resonate with such stereotypes; through that confrontation, they might begin the process of questioning their belief in those constructions. Such a strategy underlines how any position people may occupy, any identity they may assume, is nothing more than a social fabrication that can be challenged. Mwangi, thus, fights the distorted images spread by the ideology of racism that still continue to influence relations—whether political, economical, or social— between white people and people of color in Western societies. The effects of a hegemonic and totalizing vision—working through racial stereotypes—are the main subject in Mwangi’s first DVD, My Heart of Darkness (collecting her works from 1996 to 2001), which includes the video-installation Neger Don’t Call Me (2000).32 In that video installation, Mwangi appears in a series of nine different self-portraits in which her face is covered with a mask constituted by her own braided, dread-locked hair emulating stereotypes projecting the dreadful nature of Medusa. Mwangi’s masks appear also threatening in the animal-like images they depict or in the chaotic images they surface by displaying facial characteristics of several ethnic groups at once. In front of the screen where the video is displayed, there are four chairs equipped with loudspeakers relaying Mwangi’s voice narrating the prejudices she faced as a teenager when she left Kenya to live in Germany. This narrative is characterized by fragmented and overlapping sentences through which she explains how she became aware of the color of her skin and mentions how (although at first she tended to identify with being black) she then realized that she was also white and German. In her monologue, Mwangi goes on to state that she has always had a bad feeling when somebody defined her as German, “Deutsche.” Paradoxically and provocatively, even as she admits to be both black and white, she denies all a-problematic and oversimplified labels, in that she refuses to be called either “Deutsche” or “Neger” (as the title of the video-installation overtly claims). In her use of the German word “Neger” (“the negro”), she specifically refers to a racist and discriminating ideology. Instead of avoiding the use of potentially controversial words such as “the negro,” Mwangi repossesses and uses these terms without shame, even as they explicitly surface the concepts of “the savage,” and “the primitive,” employed to subjugate people of color in the colonial era. Furthermore, the masks

32 One video projection, four chairs with loudspeakers. One DVD/pal – 11:34 min. loop, digital dolby surround sound.

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 157 created by Mwangi also recall the abstract white “masks” that, according to Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, the black, the colonized, the immigrant, are obliged to wear if they aspire to “exist” in a Western, but also in their own (incorporated) view. In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes the relationship between black and Caucasian people, focusing in particular on the inferiority complex operating in the colonized/immigrant’s psyche. What emerges in his discourse is the figure of a black person who is torn apart by interiorizing the mental models imposed by white colonizers. Fanon elaborates the expression “black skin, white masks” to account for this group’s psychological dynamics:

Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historical-racial schema. […] I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships […]. [C]ompletely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object.33

By displaying different masks and images of herself, Mwangi revisits Fanon’s delineation: She creatively opposes Western visual constructions through an ironic appropriation of normative masks. She shows divergent identities and performs destabilizing visions. Similar issues are explored in Mwangi’s video-installation, Cutting the Mask (2003), included in the DVD Within the Light, a collection of her works from 2002 to 2003.34 This video-installation consists of two screens projecting two different videos at the same time. Mwangi appears in the first video wrapping her dreadlocks on her face; her fingers plait her hair and create a mask that fully covers her face. The other video displays Mwangi staring into the camera, her face uncovered, while she cuts away each dreadlock, one by one, from her head. The impression given by this second video is that Mwangi is slowly performing a ritual act, urged by the need to symbolically free herself from something oppressive, like a mask, by cutting off her hair. Dreadlocks have long been deemed a sort of racial marker; they are often considered somehow “more authentically” black, namely closer to an imaginary black essence. In his book Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers remarks that “subordinate subjects have invariably been

33 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 111-112. Originally published in 1952 as Peau noire masques blancs. 34 Two videos on monitors, two bases. Two dvd/pal – 17:04 min. loop/ 9:05 min. loop (no sound).

158 Chapter Seven ordained to the stereotyped immobilism of an essential ‘authenticity,’ in which they are expected to play out roles, designated for them by others […] forever.”35 Commenting artistically on that dynamic, Mwangi concentrates on the dreadlocks, “cutting this mask,” a white mask that controls and dominates African otherness (as the one theorized by Fanon). When her dreadlocks are cut, the image of her face fades away, leaving on the screen the concrete-block wall that was behind her.

Fig. 7-1 and 7-2 Ingrid Mwangi, Cutting the Mask (2003) (DVD/pal – 17:04 min. loop/ 9:05 min. loop) Courtesy of IngridMwangiRobertHutter

35 Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 38.

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 159

Mwangi refuses the burden of celebrating what is usually construed as a “black authenticity,” and she questions the common understanding of what constitutes ethnicity and otherness. As a black woman in Western society, Mwangi has been defined primarily on a visual level. She is an image—just like Medusa—and it is exactly the value attributed to her image that determines the way she will be perceived. Hence, she uses images strategically to change that perception; she cuts the mask. The video Within a shadow lies what will fall (2003) further examines this problematic.36 This video again shows Mwangi cutting her dreadlocks, this time in a bigger frame that reveals more of herself (while in the previous videos, she was shown from the shoulders up). In Within a shadow lies what will fall, she is standing up and is surrounded by the dreadlocks that have already been cut from her head, which are now spread on the floor all around her feet. The visual suggests that she is surrounded by snakes, like a Gorgon, whose dreadful serpents are no longer dangerous as they lie harmless, devoid of their petrifying power. Mwangi stares at the camera, inviting her spectators to decide, once again, whether to turn and shield her gaze or to dare look at this Medusa. The image of the West capturing its “Others” through its petrifying gaze and the stereotyped image imprisoning a Medusean black woman seem to overlap. By cutting off her dreadlocks—her Medusean snakes— Mwangi performs a symbolic and metaphoric decapitation of the (white) power that had historically associated otherness and monstrosity to blackness and dreadlocks. She thus re-appropriates, on a visual level, the politics of representation and the processes of identification operating on all subjects defined as different in a normative society. Mwangi creates a tension between different identities and histories by continuously playing with her image. In the photo work If (2003),37 which is included in Mwangi’s DVD Within the Light, the artist offers her viewers another strategy of identification. Whereas in her previous works she took the place of the non-white “Other” to highlight her black and African roots, in If she identifies with the White subject to highlight equally her European roots. As Mwangi elucidates in her statement “About Eventualities. Statement to the photo If,” the starting point of this new artistic investigation is an unreferenced picture entitled “Hitler, admirers” that Mwangi claims she found while leafing through the

36 Video projection, dvd/pal, loop, sound. 37 Digital photography, c-prints mounted on aluminium and perspex, 168 cm x 125 cm.

160 Chapter Seven

German magazine Spiegel.38 The image, she explains, showed Hitler surrounded by a number of women who were leaning towards him, almost magnetized by him. Upon seeing the photograph, Mwangi wondered:

[H]ad I been there at the time, would I have been attracted to this man who was later called the personification of evil for the crimes he committed in the Third Reich? But a second thought brings reality into focus: if Ingrid Njeri Mwangi—the daughter of a Kenyan man and a German woman—had been born during the Third Reich, she would have been considered “of an inferior genotype” and classified as “degenerate progeny.” She might never have been born in the first place, as racial anthropologists were demanding the forced sterilization of mothers of Afro-Germans even before the rise of Nazism.39

Fig. 7-3 Ingrid Mwangi, If (2003) (digital photography) Courtesy of IngridMwangiRobertHutter

38 Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter, “About eventualities. Statement to the photo work If,” (accessed September 28, 2008). 39 Ibid.

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 161

In If, Mwangi has replaced the faces of all the German women around Hitler with her own face. By altering the photo in this manner, Mwangi creates a strong visual link between the main figure of an extremely racist and intolerant period in German and European history, and a black woman. Through this picture, German history, hence, becomes part of Mwangi’s own history; in that appropriation, she can associate German history with her black skin, and, in doing so, she pushes herself and spectators beyond any fixed identification with a specific race or identity. In fact, some viewers might find such identification disturbing or unacceptable; they might feel “paralyzed” as if an allegoric Medusa had turned her petrifying gaze towards them. But Mwangi’s aim here is to juxtapose unfamiliar and familiar images, and to expose people to their effects, to “douche” them with the history of inequity. Mwangi’s attempt is to put the viewers of her works in a condition of dislocation and uncertainty, the same condition in which she found herself. She captures the power of the photograph, of the image, to create a bond and to engage viewers in a new experience of themselves, their histories, and their relations with others. Theorist bell hooks underlines the connections between the construction of a black identity and the process of image-making in her reflections on the place of art in the lives of black people. In order to stress the importance of the visual, she claims that photography has historically been a powerful location for the construction of a counter-hegemonic world of images constituting a form of visual resistance, challenging racist stereotypes. In hooks’s words:

All colonized and subjugated people who, by way of resistance, create an oppositional subculture within the framework of domination, recognize that the field of representation (how we see ourselves, how others see us) is a site of ongoing struggle.40

Photography is vital in gaining equal access to representation and thus also to the control of societal imaging, hooks argues. Gradually, according to hooks, the camera becomes a central tool by which blacks can contest (mis)representations of them created by whites; insofar as black people can empower themselves through representation, the camera may be considered a “political instrument.”41 Such is the subversive value attributed to images.

40 bell hooks, “In our Glory,” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, ed. Deborah Willis (New York: The New Press, 1994), 46. 41 Ibid., 49.

162 Chapter Seven

Conclusion

Moving between myths, poems, and images, new perspectives are acknowledged. Traversing the boundaries between different historical periods, geographical locations, media, languages, and bodies undermines dominant models, so that Medusa lives again through multiple and subversive re-writings of the myth. Ancient and archaic stories always evolve into new and different ones to produce changeable meanings and values, and above all, to transcend the colonizing eye and its articulation of the voices and bodies embedded in them. Thus the mythic story of Medusa has travelled through the centuries, stretching to appear in the forms of the poetic language of Dorothea Smartt, and the visual and multimedia language of Ingrid Mwangi. As black women, Smartt and Mwangi offer their creative practices to articulate their own voices and images, subverting the confining boundaries of a patriarchal myth. They both allow for a straight on view of the Black Medusa that questions Western authority, and that gives visibility to and allows for the deployment of the multiple languages she employs everyday in contemporary society. Contemporary re-writings of the myth of Medusa enable for the emergence of multiple and other political, psychological, and cultural stories.

Bibliography

Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Cerinotti, Angela. Atlante illustrato dei miti greci e di Roma antica. Firenze: Demetra, 2003. Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In The Medusa Reader. Ed. Marjorie Garber and Nancy Vickers. 133-134. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. De Chiara, Marina. Oltre la gabbia. Ordine coloniale e arte di confine. Roma: Meltemi, 2005. De Lauretis, Teresa. “Desire in Narrative.” In The Medusa Reader. 198- 200. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Ferenczi, Sándor. “On the Symbolism of the Head of Medusa.” In Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. John Rickman. Trans. J. I. Suttie. 360. London: Hogarth, 1926.

The Languages of the Black Medusa: Smartt and Mwangi 163

Foucault, Michel. Un seminario con Michel Foucault: Tecnologie del sé (Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault). Ed. Luther H. Martin et al. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992. Freud, Sigmund. “Medusa’s Head”. In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. 273-275. London: Hogarth, 1953. Goodman, Lizbeth. “Who’s Looking at Who(m): Re-viewing Medusa.” In The Medusa Reader. 272-275. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London: Faber & Faber, 1961. Griggs, Laura. “Medusa? Medusa Black! Revisionist Mythology in the Poetry of Dorothea Smartt.” In Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. 180-181. UK: Hansib, 2005. Haberl, Horst Gerhard. “Art is the Message.” In Your Own Soul: Ingrid Mwangi. Ed. Berthold Schmitt and Bernd Schulz. 32-41. Germany: Stadtgalerie Saarbrüc, 2003. hooks, bell. “In our Glory.” In Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography. Ed. Deborah Willis. 43-53. New York: The New Press, 1994. Kristeva, Julia. Visions Capitales. Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998. Lucan. Pharsalia: Dramatic Episode of the Civil Wars. Trans. Henry Thomas Riley. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Eds. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat. 255-277. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Mwangi, Ingrid, and Robert Hutter, “About eventualities. Statement to the photo work If.” Accessed September 28, 2008. . Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. John Dryden. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1998. Safia Mirza, Heidi, ed. Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1997. Sandler, Kathe. “Finding a Space for Myself in my Film about Color Consciousness.” In Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography. 105-112.

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Siebers, Tobin. The Mirror of Medusa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Smartt, Dorothea. Connecting Medium. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2001. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington- Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. —. Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance. University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 2002. Warner, Marina. Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.

EDITORS

Sanja Bahun-Radunoviü

Dr. Sanja Bahun-Radunoviü is Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, U.K. Her publications include: Modernism and Melancholia: History as Mourning-work (forthcoming); Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (Ashgate, 2008); The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism (Cambridge SP, 2006); To Icarus, With Love (Prometej Publishers, 1998); and On the Atomic Bomb, Pain, Spaghetti, and the Rest (Promocija Publishers, 1994).

V. G. Julie Rajan

Dr. V. G. Julie Rajan is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, U.S.A. Her publications include: The Phenomenon of Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence (Routledge, forthcoming); Reading the “Exotic”: South Asia and Its Others (Cambridge SP, forthcoming); Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (Ashgate, 2008); and The Home and the World: South Asia in Transition (Cambridge SP, 2006).

CONTRIBUTORS

Tudor Balinisteanu

Dr. Tudor Balinisteanu has recently completed his Ph.D. at University of Glasgow, where he taught in the English Literature Department and in the Comparative Literature Programme. He published in Irish Feminist Review, Irish University Review, International Review of Scottish Studies, Feminist Studies, The International Fiction Review, Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique appliqué, and in the volume Beyond the Anchoring Grounds: More Cross-currents in Irish and Scottish Studies (Queen’s UP, 2005). Another article is forthcoming in Angelaki. His research focuses on the relations between text, society, and myth in women’s narrative.

Siona Benjamin

Siona Benjamin is a painter originally from Bombay, India, now living in the US. Benjamin holds MFA in painting from Southern Illinois University and another MFA in Theatre set design from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with undergraduate degree from J. J. School of Art in Bombay. Benjamin taught at Trinity College and Southern Illinois University, and she conducted arts-in-education artist residencies through the Illinois Arts Council 1996-2001. Currently she is teaching at Drew University. She received a 2004 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Benjamin has exhibited in museums and galleries in the US, Europe and Asia, and her work has been featured in, among others, The New York Times, The Jewish Week, The Boston Globe, Art in America, Art New England, The Chicago Tribune. She regularly exhibits with Walsh Gallery, Chicago, and Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami.

Raffaele Furno

Dr. Raffaele Furno’s research interests entail history of experimental theatre, migration studies, and globalization theory. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples, M.A. in 168 Contributors

Asian Studies from University of California, Berkeley, and Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, US. His Ph.D. dissertation concerns the media and political construction of black migrants’ identities, and the ethical responses theatre, as the site of intercultural modes of representation, can offer to such state of affairs. Furno has published a number of articles on this topic in both English and Italian. He is also a theatre practitioner, co-founder of Italian theatre company Imprevisti e Probabilità, for which he has directed six original plays.

R. C. Lutz

Dr. R. C. Lutz teaches English and works as a consultant for Madison Advisors in Bucharest, Romania, after graduating with a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and teaching English and Film Studies at UOP. Academic output includes articles such as “Transformation of Trauma without Rehabilitating Failure: The Dual Attempt at Reshaping America’s Memory of the War in Viet Nam in Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers (2002),” in Transformations in Politics, Culture and Society (Rodopi, 2004). Lutz is also an active contributor to reference works on Pacific Rim literature, history and culture with a special interest in the relationship of Southeast Asia and the United States of America. Lutz is currently working on a book about French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung.

Erika M. Nelson

Dr. Erika M. Nelson is a John D. MacArthur Assistant Professor at Union College, where she teaches German language, literature, and cultural history. Her doctoral research, completed at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on issues of identity construction and sound in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Orphic poetry and was published as a book entitled Reading Rilke’s Orphic Identity (Peter Lang, 2005). Her current research explores transnational poetry, German spa culture, and modern renditions of mythic figures in literature and film.

Hanh N. Nguyen

Hanh N. Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate working on the question of national Vietnamese cinema in the English Department of the University of Florida, Gainesville. She holds M.A. in Film Studies from the University

From Word to Canvas 169 of California, Riverside and B.A. in English and Film Studies from the University of the Pacific at Stockton, California. Her most recent article, together with R. C. Lutz, is “A Monkey Bridge between Two Worlds: a Vietnamese Buddhist’s Crossing into America,” and is forthcoming in the book series Finding the Ox: Buddhism and American Culture, edited by John B. Whalen.

Maria Cristina Nisco

Dr. Maria Cristina Nisco has completed her Ph.D. in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World at the University of Naples L’Orientale. She works on the representations of the black female body as seen through literary and visual works. Her thesis analyzed the practices of re-signification that question the existing politics of representation of black women. She has published essays on postcolonial theory, George Lamming, Dorothea Smartt, Lucinda Roy, and she is presently working on African Caribbean Canadian writer and essayist M. NourbeSe Philip and the politics of translation.

Kirsten Sandrock

Dr. Kirsten Sandrock is Research Assistant in the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Göttingen. She got her Ph.D. from the University of Marburg. She has given papers in Europe and North America and published her work internationally. Her most recent publications include “Regional (Be)Longing in Canada—Newfoundland’s Unrequited Dream? Identity Politics in the Writing of Wayne Johnston” in Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 27, no. 2 (2007) and, with Astrid Lohöfer and Anca-Raluca Radu, “What’s in a Title? Translations of English- Canadian Titles into German” in Ahornblätter (2008).

INDEX

9/11 / September 11, 5, 50-51, 55, bow/bows, 89, 122-123 58, 69-70 brahmin, 15 Achilles, 83, 88, 90 Buddhism/Buddhist, 130 Adam, 16, 35, 42 Butler, Judith, 23, 47, 75, 103-104 Adonis, 27 Cam, Nguyen Nguyet, 7, 119-139 Africa/African, 98, 114, 148, 150, Campbell, Joseph, 3, 56-57 153, 155, 158-159, 162 Caribbean, 7, 153 African-American, 153 Cassandra, 4, 6, 73-74, 77-79, 80-90 Agamemnon, 78, 80 Caucasian, 157 agriculture, 122, 126 Cenci, Beatrice, 94, 96, 100, 105, Ahaseurus, 1 112 angelic, 16, 44-45, 102 Cenci, 94, 100, 102-105, 107, 110- Angola, 153 112, 114 Amazon, 88, 90 Cenci, 100-102, 109 Anglo-Irish, 33 Ceres, 32-34, 36, 38 Apollo, 52, 77 Ceyx, 58-60 Apollodorus, 26-27, 43 Chinese, 56, 118, 122-123 Aphrodite, 27, 89 Chrysaor, 145,152 Asian, 15, 18, 130, 132, 137-138 Cixous, Hélène, 75, 146-147 Asian-American, 18 Clytemnestra, 80 Athena, 142, 144-146 Cold War, 73, 84-85, 105 Attis, 27 communism, 105, 106 autobiography, 150, 154 culture, 2-3, 5, 7-8, 14-15, 17, 20, Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 6, 74-77 24, 46, 54-55, 75-77, 93, 98-99, Barbadian, 142, 147 101-102, 107, 114, 117, 120- Bene Israel Jew, 10, 12 121, 124, 126-127, 131-132, Black Medusa, 142-143, 148, 154, 137-138, 157-158 162 Cupid, 52 blood, 1, 36, 121, 123, 133-134, daughter, 25-27, 29, 31-37, 43, 77, 136, 144-145, 149, 151-152 83, 100-103, 105, 109-110, 120- body, 7, 29, 31-32, 40-42, 44-45, 125, 143-144, 160 53, 57, 59-60, 63, 74, 84, 90, death, 6, 17, 27, 35, 53-55, 57, 59, 94-95, 99-100, 102-103, 105, 61, 65-68, 80, 85, 89, 100, 104, 107-108, 110-114, 118-119, 108-109, 112, 114, 133, 135, 123, 125-126, 128, 131, 133- 145, 152 135, 138, 142-144, 146, 148, Demeter, 25-29, 31, 33-34, 37-38, 153, 155 44-45 Boland, Eavan, 5, 24-25, 31-38, 40- demon/demonized, 16, 41, 46-47 41, 43-44, 46-47 dialogism, 74, 76-77, 89 172 Index diaspora/diasporic, 7, 18, 118-121, incest/incestuous, 6, 95, 100-101, 124, 131-132, 138 110 Dracula, 24-25, 39-47 India, 5, 8, 11-15, 17-18 Du, Nguyen, 117 infertility, 32 East Germany, 86 intertextual/intertextually, 60, 64, Eden, 16, 36 105 Egypt, 13, 82 Irish, 24, 32-33, 36 Eleusinian, 26-30, 45 Isis, 27, 95 enchantment, 24-25, 27, 29-31, 38, Ishtar, 27 41, 43-47, 59 Jew/Jewish, 1, 4, 8, 10, 12-19 Esther, 1 Jewish-Indian, 8 Eumelos, 82, 83 Jung, Carl Gustav, 3, 57 Eurydice, 5-6, 53-55, 57, 60-69 Jupiter, 42 Eve, 16, 35-36, 42-43 Kaballah, 18 evil, 41, 102, 105, 124, 136, 160 Kenya/Kenyan, 7-8, 142, 154-156, fertility, 26-27, 29-31, 36-37, 42-44 160 folktales, 7, 116, 118-122, 124-127, Kenyan-German, 7-8, 142, 154 131-133, 135-139 Kore, 25-30, 34-37, 43-46 flood, 126 Krishna, 18 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 146 Kristeva, Julia, 54-55, 64, 141 fruit, 13, 15, 32, 34-36, 43, 67, 129, Kybele, 27 131, 137 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 3 generation/generational, 2, 12, 99, Lieu Hanh, 127-132, 135 102, 118, 120-121, 132, 136, Lilith, 16-17 138-139 legend/legendary, 13, 16, 33, 35, Germany, 6-7, 73, 85, 154-156 37-38, 52-53, 73, 83, 95, 101, German Democratic Republic 111, 118-123, 126, 132, 138- (GDR), 77, 80-81, 84-86 139, 143-144, 147 Gia Long Code, 121 Lochhead, Liz, 5, 23-25, 31, 38-47 gorgon, 142-146, 148, 150, 152, 159 Lybian Amazons, 144 Hades, 25-31, 34, 36-37, 42, 45-47, Madonna, 109-110 53, 61 male gaze, 155 Haman, 1 magic/magical, 37, 54, 59, 114, Hecuba, 77, 83 122-123, 130-131, 135 Helen (of Troy), 82 maiden, 17, 25, 139, 141, 145-146 Helios, 29 marriage, 27-31, 45, 121, 123, 134 henna, 18 maternal, 32, 34, 152 Hermes, 5, 53, 55, 60-68 Medusa, 7, 75, 142-154, 156, 159, Hindu/Hinduism, 5, 11, 13, 15-16, 161-162 19 memory, 5, 23, 32, 34, 51, 54-55, Hitler, Adolf, 2, 159-161 58, 94, 97, 107, 121 Homer/Homeric, 25, 27-30, 45, 78 metamorphoses, 60, 69 Hong Duc Code, 120 Metamorphoses, The, 5, 51-54, 56, humanism, 7, 120 69-70, 143-144 hymn, 25-30, 45 Midas, 52 Midrashic, 1,16 From Word to Canvas 173

Minerva, 143-144 Pomegranate, 5, 24, 26-27, 29, 32- misogyny, 88, 119-120, 125, 127, 38, 40, 43 135, 138-139 Poseidon, 144, 152 monologization, 6, 90 pregnant, 66, 108 monster,7, 89, 101, 143-146, 148, Priam, 77, 82-83 150, 155 priestess/priestesses, 46, 77 Montanari, Ermanna, 6, 93-97, 99, prophetess, 77, 80-84, 86-87 101-114 Psyche, 52 moral, 6-7, 101-102, 105, 111, 121, queen, 1, 28-30, 39, 59, 137-138, 124-125, 127, 130, 132-133, 145, 152-153 136-137 rape/raped, 16, 52, 88, 120, 144 Morpheus, 59 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 5-6, 53, 55, 57, Mother Nature, 103 60, 62-69, 70 mourning, 16, 52, 54, 58-59 Sabbath, 15 Mwangi, Ingrid, 7-8, 140, 142-143, Sappho, 80 154-162 seed(s), 26-27, 29, 43 Naples, 63-64 seeress, 6, 74, 78-79, 84 Narcissus/narcissus, 25-26, 30, 46, Sefer Torah, 15 52 serpent(s), 16, 144, 146, 159 nation/national/nationalism, 5, 11, shaman, 113 19-20, 32, 35, 73-74, 98, 100, Shakur, Assata, 152-153 117-120, 122, 124-125, 137- Sinophile, 118, 131 138, 148 sister, 18-19, 44, 83, 129, 143 nature, 27, 30, 41-44, 46, 55, 57, 62, Smartt, Dorothea, 7, 142-143, 145, 64, 66-67, 75, 95, 105, 114, 147-153, 162 126-127, 131, 136, 144, 152, snake(s), 16, 61, 143-145, 149, 159 156 Sozialistiche Einheitspartei Neptune, 143-144 Deutschlands (SED), 85 Nzinga, 152-153 spells, 131 Orpheus, 5-6, 50, 52-55, 58, 60-69 South/Southeast Asia, 138 Osiris, 27 South Vietnamese, 138 Ovid, 5, 51, 53-61, 64-65, 67, 70, stage/stages, 6, 52, 55-56, 58, 60-61, 143-144 66, 68, 85, 94-97, 99, 101, 103, Palestine, 12-13 105-106, 111-113, 145, 155 Pandora, 142 Stoker, Bram, 24-25, 39-42, 44-47 pastoral, 136 subculture, 161 patricide, 100, 103, 109 subversive, 4-6, 23-24, 38, 73, 85, performance, 4, 6, 28-29, 45, 52, 146, 161-162 60-61, 64, 68-69, 88, 94-98, sun, 53-55, 136, 144 101-107, 109, 111-114, 125, Tammuz, 27 148, 154 theater, 52, 93-94, 99, 107, 113, 148 Persephone, 5 24-38, 41-47, 53 tikkun, 14, 18 Perseus, 143-146, 152 Tiresia, 142 Persian, 1, 11, 14-15, 17 tragedy, 1, 62, 69, 80, 124-125 Phaeton, 52, 56 transcription, 125, 133, 139 Polyxena, 83 174 Index translation, 7, 52, 55, 64, 73, 80, 90, violence, 5, 7, 16, 24, 32, 38, 50, 63, 95, 99, 119, 121, 125-126, 131- 80, 86, 89, 94, 101, 120, 123, 132, 134, 138-139, 141 125, 127-128, 133, 142, 149 Tree of Knowledge, 36 virgin/virginal/virginality, 66, 143 Troy, 6, 73, 78, 80, 83, 87-88 Warner, Marina, 3, 141-142, 146 underworld, 26, 28-30, 33, 38, 53- water, 42, 60-62, 123, 125-127, 137 55, 58, 61-62, 64-65, 68 West Germany, 85 vagina, 28 Wolf, Christa, 4, 6, 73-74, 77-90 vampire, 40-41, 43 World Trade Center, 58, 69 Vashti, 1-2, 20 Zeus, 25-26, 30-31, 34, 145 Vietnam/Vietnamese, 7-8, 118-133, Zimmerman, Mary, 5-6, 51-52, 55- 135-138 70