T.C İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Bölümü İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı
Yüksek Lisans Tezi
Stories of Endlessly Rewritten Selfless Selves: Mary Swann & Lady Oracle
Çerağ Şahin 2501030338
Tez Danışmanı Yard. Doç. Dr. Şenay Kara
İstanbul, 2010
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ÖZ Toplum kadına temelde yalnızca bir eş ve bir anne rolü yüklerken, o, kendine atfedilen bu rollere içinde bulunduğu çevrenin de baskısı ile alışmış ve özbenliğini yitirmeye başlamıştır. İster kendi ayaklarının üzerinde durabilen çağdaş bir kadın olsun ister ekonomik olarak yaşamındaki erkeklere bağımlı biri, ataerkil toplum içerisinde kadın, kendi öz kimliği ile toplumda var olabilmek için kendisi ve olması gereken kişi arasında sürekli bir mücadele içindedir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, ele alınan iki yapıt üzerinde yapılan çözümlemelerle, erkek egemen toplumlarda kadın ve erkek kimliklerinin, toplumsal cinsiyet kimliklerinin, toplum tarafından yapay yollardan oluşturulmuşluğu gerçeğini vurgulamak ve aynı zamanda da bu kimlik yapılandırmalarının toplumda yalnızca kadına değil, aynı oranda erkeğe de ne kadar ağır yaptırımlarda bulunduğunu da gözler önüne sermektir. Carol Shields ve Margaret Atwood’un postmodern romanları dil ve söylem üzerinden yapılan yapılsalcılık sonrası çözümlemeler ile kadına ve erkeğe yüklenmeye devam edilen bu yapay kimlik oluşumlarını bir kez daha görmemize olanak vermektedir.
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ABSTRACT
As society stereotypes the female and assigns to her basically the role of a wife and a mother, the woman, under the oppression of the environment, gets used to these pre-determined positions and begins to lose her true identity. Whether it be an independent female who can stand on her own feet, someone who has a strong socio-economical stance in society or a woman who is economically and socially dependent on males in her life, still she is observed to be in an ongoing struggle between who she really is and who she has to become so as to survive within the existing patriarchal system. The purpose of this study is to emphasize, within the context of the analysis of the two works, the artificiality of the male and female identities, of gender roles, to focus on the contrived nature of binary oppositions which are formed through conscious processes by the patriarchal/capitalist society and, besides, to reinforce the notion as to how the gender constructions not only victimize the female but the male as well. The post-modern novels of Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood, based on a poststructuralist analysis of discourse and language representation, provide the reader with the opportunity to see the constructed identity representations one more time.
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FOREWORD
This study consists of a thorough examination of two postmodern novels written by Carol Shields and Margaret Atwood with regard to their exposition of the constructed nature of gender roles. Showing, on the one hand, the artificiality of binary oppositions, the novels also provide the reader with the chance to see how those contrived male and female identities are used as tools to exploit the male and the female equally so as to ensure some socio-economic and political profit to those who have and preserve their power by the workings of the established system, in other words, within the male-oriented/capitalist society. And this is what makes the act of questioning issues concerning the designed gender roles through post-modern discourse so significant and vital.
I would like to thank, first of all, to my mother and father for giving me their constant love and support all through this long, hard yet, enjoyable study. I would, also, like to thank my friends for their patience and for their ever encouraging words which have kept me up in my times of need. I am thankful to all my professors at the University of İstanbul for helping me see that reading between the lines is a way of perceiving not only the essence of literature and art, but it is also a way of understanding that there is more to everything than one sees to it in the world that we live in. Finally, and most of all, I would like to give my thanks to my supervisor, Assist. Prof. Dr. Şenay Kara, who has been the most important source of inspiration to write my thesis by her lovely teaching since she has made me love literature even more than I had already done by her undeniably profound knowledge on postmodernism and literature. And I would also like to thank her for encouraging and guiding me all through this study with all her patience and with her endless knowledge on discourse, poststructralism and feminism.
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CONTENTS
ÖZ ...... iii ABSTRACT...... iv FOREWORD ...... v CONTENTS...... vi
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Chapter I: “Producing/Writing Selves for the Sexes: Gender Construction” ...... 5
Chapter II: MARY SWANN: The (Re)written Self Hidden Behind The Kitchen Linoleum: Mary Swann ...... 18
Chapter III: LADY ORACLE: The Self-written Death of Joan Foster Delacourt ...... 51
CONCLUSION...... 83
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 88
vi INTRODUCTION
This thesis presents a detailed analysis of the processes in which artificial gender roles are constructed and how they are reflected in the acts of narration and writing. In other words, the two post-modern novels of Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields reflect upon the disadvantageous position of the female within the male-oriented and capitalist cycle. The protagonists of both novels provide the reader with the image of female figures who come across many obstacles during their attempts to write not only the works of literature they have been trying to create but also to write their own selves. With the culturally constructed roles tried to be imposed on them, the two women struggle to survive with their poems and novels they create. As they resist the society which have already burdened them with all the pre-determined roles assigned to women, their writing becomes their weapon. However, their feeble attempts to expose their existence as women writers fall short to express themselves with a language of their own since whenever they try to express themselves, to express their own selves in opposition to the conventional understanding of a woman, they are both exterminated either literally or metaphorically and as they are erased from the arena, what they have left behind could only be the rewritten selves.
The two novels, Mary Swann by Carol Shields and Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood, presenting the reader with two major female characters, openly display the invalidity of binary oppositions through deconstructing them since, as also Jane Flax points out, “postmodern discourses are all deconstructive in that they seek to distance us from and make us sceptical about beliefs concerning truth,…the self, the language…that often serve as legitimation for…western culture.” (Flax, 1987: 41). Thus, these two novels become significant so as to exemplify the female attempt to write her own identity within the male-oriented gyre as she strives for a way out of the oppressive patriarchal, capitalist discourse.
In Chapter I, the background information regarding feminism in connection with gender construction is given. The chapter basically clarifies the
1 fallacy about the gender differences as also discussed by M.E Bailey who openly states that “gender differences between male and female roles are social rather than biological, they are changeable by human agency.” (Bailey, 1993: 100). That the culturally and politically assigned identity roles are a burden on the shoulders of both men and women is noteworthy since identity construction brings with it fixed, pseudo traits to be acted out by the male and the female all through their lives in order to meet the requirements of the system that feeds on these contrived types of gender identity with the aim of establishing the socio- economical balance to the benefit of the capitalist male-oriented authority. In other words, the concepts such as the characteristics of a male or a female, their attributes as different sexes which are very clear-cut within the society they are born into, their roles considered as unchanging and unchallenged are all a product of constructed values of the patriarchal system. They are no more than cultural and political formations given existence by the ongoing cycle and ironically derive power from the very male and female who are oppressed by it since, perhaps, they are to conform to the canon to live their lives in the best way that they can and survive, both socially and financially, in welfare.
In Chapter II, how the identity of Mary Swann, the protagonist of Carol Shields’s novel, is consumed by the male-oriented /capitalist system is analysed in detail through a deconstructionist perspective. For, as Judith Baxter states, “theories on deconstructive criticism…are useful to feminism because they offer a method of questioning and decentring the hierarchical oppositions that underpin gender.” (Baxter, 2003: 24). The chapter brings forth the significant issue concerning how the dominant system brings about the both metaphorically and literally tragic death of Mary Swann as she attempts to object to the roles that are assigned to her and as she endeavours to express herself through her own vision of life through the works of art-her poetry- she secretly struggles to give life to. Drawing the attention on the protagonist Mary Swann, the analysis not only helps to see the hierarchical identity constructions but it also displays how both Mary
2 Swann and the survivors who seem more powerful compared to her are both the victimizers and the victims of these institutional discourses.
Chapter III presents an analysis of the ongoing journey of Joan Foster, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, during which she creates multiple selves and hence is doomed to a metaphorical death. The chapter exposes the mechanisms of the gender identity construction in that the protagonist of the novel finds her‘self’ trapped in a vicious circle where she is in continuous escape from the labels attached to her, taking refuge in many selves she gives existence to. Thus, the postmodern novel, as also Judith Butler argues, becomes an important example of “gender parody [which] reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is itself an imitation without an origin… it is a production which, in effect, that is, in its effect, postures as an imitation.” (Butler, 1990: 324). To be more precise, the novel -Lady Oracle- sets a very crucial example for the postmodern issue of questioning the beliefs pertaining to the existence of one original source of truth, of identity that does not change from one person to another, from one socio-historical/cultural context to another. As postmodernism also casts seeds of doubt about the “existence of a stable, coherent self” (Flax, 1987: 41), the protagonist of the novel Joan Foster takes the reader to a journey, both metaphorical and literal, and it becomes one of the most striking examples that opens a discussion regarding the possibility of a ‘real’ self, the ‘true’ nature of femininity within the framework of a postmodern context. The section is significant due to the fact that it paves the way for a clear analysis of the female killing her own self (her identity) and, as also Ann Snitow points out, the chapter is important for “seeing identity as [a] hopelessly compromised” (Snitow, 1996: 515) formation within society. Perhaps it is crucial to state that it is a hopeless compromise since the agreed upon identity, in other words, the identity the female has to represent herself with within the male-oriented society is in accord with the cultural, literary, political canon that the woman chooses or surrenders to in order to survive despite the suffering that this self-repression brings.
3 Finally, the conclusion provides, through a poststructuralist, postmodernist and feminist perspective, one last look at and an invalidation of the processes of artificial gender/identity construction through language/representation as exemplified on the both novels.
4 Chapter I:
“Producing/Writing Selves for the Sexes: Gender Construction”
Throughout history the discussions of the female identity seem to have never reached an end. However, it is undeniable that the deeper one indulges into the study of women the clearer s/he observes how, especially in some certain more disadvantageous socio-cultural contexts, few things have changed in terms of the perception of women’s existence in society all through the years, how, as Beauvoir also argues, through history “women have been reduced to objects by men” (Beauvoir, 1952: 1404). Their capacity of handling life’s burden has somewhat been underestimated. Their significance in life has almost been defined in terms of housework, childbearing and motherhood. To be more specific, they have been treated as the weak, the other, as beings who can exist only as long as men do since:
[w]ith men there is no break between public and private life: the more he confirms his grasp on the world in action and in work, the more virile he seems to be; human and vital values are combined in him. Whereas woman’s independent success is in contradiction with her femininity, since the “true woman” is required to make herself object, to be the other (Beauvoir, 1952: 1414)
Hence, as in many other aspects of social life, the traditional roles attributed to men and women have been quite clear-cut and are still influential in determining many aspects of the lives of both the female and male alike: men as active, outgoing, rational, as the “bread-winners” of the family; women as passive, obedient, emotional, irrational, as the core of the house. Hence, the female identity appears as “so terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression” (Woolf, 1984: 1025).
In fact, it is possible to observe “the requirement” for women’s passivity and for her suppression in many novels, where “man occupies a privileged situation in this world, he is in a position to show his love actively; in marrying her he gives her social standing.” (Beauvoir, 1952: 1411). As one examines the
5 works written in previous eras, the disadvantageous position of women becomes more apparent. To mention only a few very well known examples among numerous others, although she seems to have resisted the power of patriarchy and she is seen to have a more independent character, the novel ends with a happy marriage, “a reward”, for Jane Eyre or, in Evelina, the history of a young girl’s entry into the world, the story of the protagonist does not go beyond her entry into the male-oriented society where, all through the novel, she is presented to the male in order to be picked up by the one man who is most suitable for her. Thus, the female in literature as well as in real life, appears as the sensitive, domestic being who needs ultimate protection by the strong male figure and who, if she rebels against the patriarchal order, is doomed to learn her lesson, to go through painful experiences, and in some cases even to die or be punished with the death of her loved ones such as the little illegitimate Sorrow’s death in her mother Tess’s arms in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of The D’urbervilles. Hence, literature is full of women characters “who are married against their will, kept in one room and to one occupation” (Woolf, 1984: 1024) which is mostly the domestic chores that she has to deal with.
Nevertheless, if one is to question whether or not all these characteristics as to women’s frailty and men’s wisdom and strength that are observed in life and in works of art are the exact inborn qualities of those sexes, one can clearly observe that the characteristics associated with men and women are nothing more than constructed gender roles. They are traits attributed to both the male and the female for the continuation of the patriarchal society since “to identify woman with [a]ltruism is to guarantee man absolute rights in her devotion, it is to impose on women a categorical imperative.” (Beauvoir, 1952: 1408). As also discussed by the feminist deconstructionists:
Patriarchal society, sets up oppositions between men and women linked to other oppositions such as nature/culture in order to create specific meanings of gender…[t]hese naturalised characteristics are quite unrelated to actual biological or psychological features of women. Inevitably cultural representations in literature... encode, or are built on these oppositions and in turn cultural representations affect the
6 way we feel about our sexual identities and those of others. (Humm, 1994: 146) Thus, writing comes to the fore as a source of power, a means of controlling and imposing on society the “right” kind of characteristics for men and women. The binary oppositions that are reflected in many literary works which set a clear-cut definition of different sexes, are determined by the male oriented society and they are artificially formed roles indicating how a female or a male is supposed to feel or act under different circumstances. The culturally defined roles for both sexes are somewhat internalized by society and they influence the way we perceive not only our own sex but also the other.
When one examines what can be defined as traditional “male writing”, which is named as such due to the fact that writing is “suspected or admitted [to] [be] run by a libidinal—hence political, typically masculine economy” (Cixous, 1975: 2042), it is manifestly “to celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men”(Woolf, 1984: 1028). As it is also stated in A Room of One’s Own , when Woolf indulges in one of the books that is stated to be a man’s writing, after some time she feels the burden of the male dominance within the book:
..[b]ut – here I turned a page or two, looking for something or other – the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter “I” all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But... she has not a bone in her body... Shall I finish it, “But – I’m bored!” but why was I bored?... because of the dominance of the letter “I”... (Woolf, 1984: 1026-7)
Hence, a literary work becomes a kind of medium that also reflects the role of men and the role of women in society. It becomes the kind of product that “reinforce[s] a masculine perspective as metaphors of woman and [man] are used phallocentrically” (Humm, 1994: 147). To be more specific, it is clear that the male “I” within the text that Woolf examines is very dominant and has the liberty to exist within (as well as outside) the text without restriction, just like the male in a male-oriented society who has “never been thwarted or opposed , but [has] had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it like[s]” (Woolf, 1984:
7 1026) as opposed to the female who is, almost all through history, confined by all sorts of socio-cultural restrictions.
Moreover, when one examines some of the works produced by female writers, once again it is possible to see how the roles assigned to men and women are mostly based on phallogocentrism and hence the constructed male/female binary oppositions. For instance, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice the first female that appears on the scene is Mrs. Bennet whose only concern turns out to be marrying her daughters with appropriate male-figures. However much Mrs. Bennet appears as a caricaturized or satirical character within the novel, as the reader learns that although Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have five daughters, the estate of Mr. Bennet is entailed to a male nephew, once again the unequal gender roles assigned to men and women come to the fore. Hence, one more time the fiction reflects the constructed gender roles which have indeed been accepted as the factual characteristics of both sexes by societies throughout centuries.
In fact, the works of art that focus on the “strength” of male identity and hence serve the benefit of patriarchal society become kinds of products that mass- produce constructed identities. They can, from that aspect, be considered as not only serving the benefit of the male-patriarchal system but also the capitalist system which is also a male-dominated arena. The idea of literature serving the strong, the patriarchal capitalist system can be discussed within the framework of a Marxist approach to literature as well since “the prevailing ideas, beliefs and values in society are those of the dominant class.” (Hebdige, 1979: 2446). Thus literature, with its artificially produced definitions of gender roles, once again, shows the “power of the ‘real’ world and its impact on literary imagination” (Humm, 1994: 75). With regard to this notion, most canonical literature or in a more general sense established, traditional works of art serve to the masculine power. Works, in that sense, seem to stand as commodities produced and shaped by the patriarchal discourse showing females as emotional, irrational, weak, and unreliable, with a tendency to hysteria, beings who “fail to make themselves anything.” (Beauvoir, 1952: 1411). In other words, in a considerable number of
8 works, the female is shown as a helpless sex who is unable to stand for her own self. With the culturally constructed binary oppositions, the sexual opposition seems to “[have] always worked for man’s profit of reducing writing, too, to his laws.” (Cixous, 1975: 2046). From another perspective, not only women are the ones who are assigned some attributes as being the fragile, the weak and the silent. However, It is true that they have been suppressed by the culturally constructed roles and have been pacified by culture, history and have been denied the right to write about their own selves, as, for instance, exemplified by the female authors who have used pseudo names such as George Eliot and many of whom have written in accordance with the rules of the male-oriented system.
The notion of the “construction of femininity by men” (Humm, 1994: 36) is discussed in depth by Beauvoir in The Second Sex, which focuses on the idea that the male is always considered as the powerful side as opposed to the female who is merely ‘the other’, and is carried to another level when it is examined with regard to male writers:
It is the parallel which de Beauvoir draws between representation and construction- that men need to represent (in myth or literature) before they can construct women’s dependence... male writers share a deep conservatism about women. In other words, de Beauvoir claims, male writers write about women only to learn more fully what they are themselves. (Humm, 1994: 39)
As a matter of fact, with regard to de Beauvoir’s statement, it is almost impossible not to notice the authority of the male within the existing system since the male is observed not only to display the female characters as ‘the other’ or ‘the weak’ but they also construct an identity for them in order to create a contrived dependent entity whose whole existence is shaped according to the requirements of men. To be more specific, even when there is the mention of a female within a work of literature, men has all the power to represent women on behalf of them and narrate them in the way women are supposed to be and the way they want the female to be. Thus, they recreate a ‘she’ who is nothing but a rewritten form of men’s perception of the female, reshaped according their own needs and desires.
9 In other words, the woman turns out to be a pseudo identity that lacks a full representation of the female.
As far as language representation is concerned, the suppression of the female within the system is also taken to a further or, in other words, a more passive aggressive level since the restriction and oppression on the female is not a direct and physical one but it is insinuated through the male discourse. As it is also clearly stated by Kate Millet:
[P]atriarchal power is ubiquitous. There is a deeply entrenched politics of sexuality, beginning with the reproduction of patriarchy through social conditioning in the family, which operates in all cultural structures…literature reveals the sexual mastery of men over women in symbols and patterns of dominance and subordination; in other words, that forms of thought and means of expression are made and controlled by men. (Humm, 1994: 44-5)
The re-produced forms of male dominance within literature, the mass-production of socially pre-designed roles assigned to men and women exposed within most works show the female as the hysterical figure in fits of extreme emotions. Thus the female is always observed to be somewhat pacified through male discourse in texts written by the male.
On the other side of the coin, there is also the effort of the female who is trying to express herself through writing and literature. Nevertheless, as also
Helen Cixous states, when one considers the female writing,
it comes to the same thing – that the act of writing is equivalent to masculine masturbation (and so the woman who writes cuts herself out a paper penis…[hence] [it] [is] to admit that writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death. (Cixous, 1975: 2047)
In fact, the female writer’s attempts to create a literary work as purely female results in the woman’s satisfaction in writing by using the male discourse only. Within the same phallogocentric system she cannot escape but produce something that is reminiscent of the male. Within the pre-designed patterns of language and
10 discourse, together with the culturally assigned roles on her, she is torn between who she is and who she has been transformed into by the vicious patriarchal and capitalist cycle that has become a part of her own identity and language. The struggle of the female writer, from that aspect, reminds of the efforts of Sisyphus in Greek Mythology. Just like Sisyphus’s ongoing damnation of carrying a huge rock up the same hill and seeing that it rolls back again, the female within the efforts to create a female discourse, fails in her attempts to express the female identity outside the contrived gender roles. Yet all these efforts, however much pessimistic they may look, are still a significant step towards feminist criticism in order to be able to diagnose the problematics within the system and to realize how the women, whether it be in the society or in literature, are most of the times, “vulnerable to the sexual politics of men.” (Humm, 1994: 50).
The effort of the female to write herself has always been considered a significant issue since it is expected to bring a new dimension to language and literature with regard to female discourse. According to Héléne Cixous:
…women must write through bodies they must invent the impregnable language…that will wreck regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word “silence,” the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word “impossible” and writes it as “the end”. (Cixous, 1975: 2049)
With regard to Cixous’s statement, the female is somewhat destined to find a way to express who she is through her body, through her difference if she wants to put an end to voicing her feelings, her works, through the phallogocentric discourse. Her solid existence should, in a way, become the word itself which speaks about the so far unsaid, the ‘true’ female self which has been suppressed by the public discourse building up pseudo identities for both sexes. As also stated by Jane Hoogestraat, “speaking silence can [also] be the beginning of narrative, of finding a voice for one’s experience…what is permanently missing or misnamed in received cultural and personal history.” (Hoogestraat, 1995: 27).
11 The idea of a female-writing, a discourse which reflects women with all their previously ignored, repressed characteristics, qualities, desires and sexuality, comes to the fore as a significant issue especially in the last decades of the twentieth century as Cixous states in The Laugh of Medusa:
To write, [a]n act which will not only realize the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure. (Cixous, 1975: 2044)
This implies for the female who has been fighting for centuries to express her real self a way to break free from the suppression within the male oriented cultural arena. It is certainly significant for the female to be defined as she really is without being stereotyped since women have been and perhaps still are treated as the ones who are to be the followers of the footprints of the male; the superegoized structure. Even the most supreme, the highest source of power, the omniscient and omnipotent being according to the pervasive monotheistic beliefs, God, is assumed to be a “He”, a male and consequently, the female is constantly being watched by an invisible male existence in every second of her life. Hence, woman is “reduced to being the servant of the militant male” (Cixous, 1975: 2044) in every part of her life. Therefore, the possibility of creating a new language which “surpasses the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system,” (Cixous, 1975: 2046) is vitally significant.
Nevertheless, it is obviously open to doubt whether it is possible to create a pure female discourse without the already existing one since in order to create that language it is inevitable to use the already existing one. As Héléne Cixous suggests:
Everything turns on the Word: everything is the Word and only the Word…No political reflection can dispense with reflection on language. For as soon as we exist, we are born into language and language speaks (to) us, dictates its law…; even at the moment of uttering a sentence…we are already seized by a certain kind of masculine desire. (Worthington, 1996: 107-8)
12 However much écriture feminine seems promising in terms of opening the way for women to express their true identity through their true language, still one needs to be aware that it can also be considered as an alternative to “male domination, [by] construct[ing] a women’s language which can exemplify sexual difference.” (Humm, 1994: 108). The search for a female language can be considered as a step to liberate women from the male suppression in every field of life and in writing and speech. What is more, it can be a way of shattering the binary oppositions which have determined female as the weak half of the male. However, when the emphasis of écriture feminine on the difference of the female is taken into consideration, or its method of focusing on female body and sexuality through speech and writing, it seems to, in a way, repeat the already existing structures “organized through a series of binary oppositions (light/darkness, presence/absence, [male/female], etc.), the first term of each being desirable and the other shunned” (Cioxus, 1975: 2037) since even if there is a possibility to form a purely female language, once again,
one half of the opposition is essentially destroyed for the other half to make sense. If this is so, then both sides of an opposition are defined in terms of one of its elements. Thus anyone simply trying to unrepress the obscured term— here, the feminine— is likely to reproduce the very structures he or she is resisting. (Cixous, 1975: 2037-8)
Yet, it is an undeniable fact that, as long as it does not lead to another, a reversed sort of biological essentialism, in terms of liberating the suppressed, the silenced female, the idea of creating a female language is still a spark of hope for the female who should be writing “...her self: must bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away – woman must put herself into the text— as into the world and into history— by her own movement.” (Cixous, 1975: 2039). As Maggie Humm suggests, “these powerful hierarchies cannot be undone by simply replacing texts by men with texts by women.” (Humm, 1994: 135). Yet, “If gender constructions can be deconstructed by literary critics then gender identities in writing, as in any other form of expression, might at some time be ‘free’ of misogynist constructions.” (Humm, 1994: 135).
13 On the other hand, it should also be taken into consideration that the representations of men and women that seem to serve the benefit of men cannot be thought of as providing men a life full of ultimate satisfaction since the male is also, in some way, under suppression. He is confined by the expectations of society from “man”. His identity too is fictionalized within society and within most works of literature. These fictional gender identities can be seen, in Susan Bordo’s words, “as a perniciously symbiotic polarity which denies full humanity to both sexes.” (Bordo, 1990: 147).
Deconstruction focuses on discourses and, through the constructed codes in cultural and literary context, exposes their artificiality. It is also made clear by the French feminist Irigaray who clearly states that binary oppositions all “function as an exploitation” (Humm, 1994: 148) which serve only the benefit of the patriarchal and capitalist systems. Similarly, postmodernism also “questions universal certainties… [it] refuses to give essential or single explanations for cultural representations.” (Humm, 1994: 155, 159). Postmodernism, in fact, provides the opportunity to question the boundaries between fact and fiction. With regard to literary works, the contrived nature of male and female identities within them can be brought into the light because both
feminists and postmodernists attack the notion that art is a separate and superior realm from life. Both argue that social institutions construct values as much as they reflect truths and in any case represent white Western masculine thought and experience. (Humm, 1994: 158)
A feminist poststructuralism becomes crucial since it points at the “pervasiveness of dominant discourses of gender differentiation…[that] fix women/girls in positions of relative powerlessness, despite ‘breakthrough’ moments of resistance and empowerment.” (Baxter, 2003: 32). In other words, even in a novel where the reader can witness a female protagonist who leads a socio-economically independent life and seems to have a strong stance in society is observed to stand on her own feet only so long as she becomes a part of the existing male-world. Her economical, social stance mean something only if she conforms to the rules of the capitalist cycle and it is at this point where
14 poststructuralist feminism becomes significant since it displays all the variants of such contexts and draws the attention to the “ambiguities and confusions of [those] particular discursive contexts where females are located as simultaneously powerful and powerless.” (Baxter, 2003: 32). To be more specific, it brings forth the powerlessness beneath the somewhat illusionary power of the female.
Whether it be a purely female discourse or another alternative language to challenge the already existing one and upset all the balance within the existing capitalist cycle, still so as to be able to open the way for a new system of thoughts and ideas, using the already existing language, in other words, the word is indispensable since the moment a person is exposed to language, he acquires it through its rules and regulations. To be more specific, together with one’s acquisition of a language, comes the pre-determined definitions of sexes, choices of words fit for the ‘male’ or the ‘female’. Hence, the individual, in connection with the existing culture, forms a concept about the gender identities in his mind. Thus, either the female or the male, the language is reshaped to the benefit of the dominant power as each individual acts accordingly and as the Word is uttered, the individual is left with nothing but the repetition of the discourse which defines her/him as a person “[(s)he] never was.” (Humm, 1994: 49).
From a wider perspective, as also stated by Deirdre Lashgari:
For a woman writing from the margins,… acceptance by the literary mainstream too often means silencing a part of what she sees and knows. To write honestly may thus mean transgressing, violating the literary boundaries of the expected and accepted. (Lashgari, 1995: 2)
The female artist’s efforts to create a work, her struggle to be heard as another voice within the male-oriented society, end up in her clash of ideas opposing the ongoing cycle since she is in-between what she truly wants to express and the expressions which are expected of her by the system. In fact, the female seems to have been stuck between her own perception of thoughts and ideas and the already -culturally and politically- formed notions as to art and gender identity. If she is to use a language of her own, she is to go against the literary canon and
15 hence, she is to risk her own career as a female writer who wants to survive and to be heard/read within the dominant patriarchal system. On the other hand, if she chooses to stay within the limits of the existing system, she has to continue writing through a kind of self-censorship, silencing her own vision and perception of art, in order to provide society with what is expected of her as a female author in the capitalist system.
Working for the benefits of the socio-economically powerful (for the existing political) system in order to benefit from it and hence survive within the existing capitalist cycle has never been easy for both sexes. However, having to choose between destroying the already established order by courageously displaying one’s own identity and carrying on submitting the role that is assigned to them, it is mostly easier to decide on the latter for the ones who consider themselves as the socio-economically privileged within the system or for the ones who want to live a life content with whatever is given to them by the society. Nevertheless, the vicious capitalist circle keeps both the ‘powerful’ and the ‘weak’ in its captivity since however much a man or a woman is observed to live a life of freedom within the patriarchal system, still they are independent so long as they accept the pre-designed roles upon them as the male and the female. Whether it be silencing her own self or expressing/exposing her individual identity as clearly as possible, it has always been and perhaps it always will be a continuous struggle especially for the female to exist for her own only, that is to say; free from all the restrictions of the dominant patriarchal cycle which keeps on reshaping her both in daily life and in the literary field.
However, it is the awareness about the contrived nature of gender roles which is significant in terms of at least realizing the fact that none of the roles assigned upon the female or the male, the definitions pertaining to gender identities are innate qualities. And the female/ the philosophers/ the feminist writers, who stand up against this ongoing cycle, point out to the underlying corruptness of the male-oriented discourse that re-defines (wo)men to the benefit of the ones who dominate the system which in one way or another -literally or
16 metaphorically- silences women and define them over and over again until they turn into nothing but a selfless self of definitions. Thus, this study also becomes crucial to acknowledge one more time that no matter how the female have been silenced throughout centuries, now it is to be clarified, once again, that, as also stated by Jane Hoogestraat, “all silence has a meaning.” (Hoogestraat, 1995: 25) and it is to echo all through society either by way of the significant thinkers some of which are already mentioned or most importantly through postmodern literary works such as Mary Swann and Lady Oracle, which voice the issue within their influential aesthetic frameworks.
17 Chapter II:
MARY SWANN: The (Re)written Self
Hidden Behind The Kitchen Linoleum: Mary Swann
Mary Swann by Carol Shields, published in 1993, consists of five sections. The first four parts focus on the four main characters; Sarah Maloney, who is a feminist writer and a teacher at the same time, Morton Jimroy, who is a successful biographer, Rose Hindmarch, a librarian in Nadeau, Ontario and Frederic Cruzzi, who is a publisher- a retired newspaper editor- living in Kingston, Ontario. In fact, the reason why all these characters are presented in detail is that although they each have a life and career of their own the one thing they have in common is the person who gives the novel its name: Mary Swann. She is a dead poet brutally killed by her husband and whose works of art are in one way or another related to each of the characters in the novel since all these people come together at a symposium which is organised in the name of Mary Swann. The novel focuses mainly on these characters’ efforts to bring together both pieces of her work as well as pieces of information regarding her life until the symposium as she is dead and there is not much information about her works and life. Yet, the novel reflects glimpses of their lives and characters as well. The novel, through its narration and through the dialogues among the characters, presents clearly the constructed nature of the gender-roles as well as the artificiality of the distinction between fact and fiction.
As the novel commences, the reader is introduced to Sarah Maloney, who is a young woman of twenty-eight years of age, living alone. At the very early pages of the novel Sarah Maloney is understood to be a feminist writer. As an academician she also gives lectures to students most of whom are female, and as her PhD thesis The Female Prism becomes a bestseller she moves into a “Hansel and Gretel house” (Shields, 1993: 19) in Chicago. The fact that she associates her house with a children’s story, for the first time in the novel, gives hints as to the
18 idea that the line between real life and fiction is not that clear-cut since she adds a tale-like dimension to her new house by giving a name to it from a fairy-tale. As the novel proceeds, the details of Sarah’s private life also draws attention to the fact that this fairy-talish house also explains how she has come across the name- the dead poet Mary Swann- for the first time in her life. Sarah Maloney narrates how she has met Olaf Thorkelson. In fact he is one of the friends whom she did not like and who “kept hounding her to marry him” (Shields, 1993: 15). As she grows tired of his insistence, she is given the key to a cottage in Wisconsin by his sister, to relax and think about Olaf’s proposal one more time. As she experiences the silence and peace of the cottage forgetting about the thesis The Female Prism that she has to revise, she “discover[s] an odd book of poems written by a woman named Mary Swann [and] the title of the book [is] Swann’s Songs.” (Shields, 1993: 17). The details of Mary Swann’s life and works are gradually narrated as Sarah goes on talking about her through the novel:
At that time Mary Swann had been dead for more than fifteen years. Her only book was this stapled pamphlet printed in Kingston, Ontario in 1966. There are exactly one hundred pages in the book and the pages contain one hundred and twenty-five poems…[o]nly about twenty copies of Swann’s Songs are known to have survived out of the original printing of two hundred and fifty…[e]ven today Swann’s work is only known to a handful of scholars, some of whom dismiss her as a poéte naïve. (Shields, 1993: 17)
It is very clear that there is little information that Sarah can get about Mary Swann and her literary works. The fact that she is to present a paper about Mary Swann in the symposium in January seems to have caused difficulty for her. She believes Swann to be a successful poet, she believes in her “mystical ear for the tune of words… unearthly insights and spare musicality.” (Shields, 1993: 18). At first, Sarah Maloney appears as a distinctive female character who is a feminist scholar, a person who can empathize with another female, Mary, since she is the one who comes up with the idea of organising a symposium in the name of Mary Swann. Moreover, the other critics such as Willard Lang do not approve of Mary’s poetry and they “believe absolutely that Swann will never be classed as a major poet… [w]hat can be done, they say, with this rustic milkmaid” (Shields,
19 1993: 18). However, Sarah Maloney thinks that she is “going to be big, big, big. She is the right person at the right time for one thing: a woman, a survivor, self- created.” (Shields, 1993: 32). When Sarah Maloney’s opinions of Mary Swann are taken into consideration, it seems that as another female figure, she is giving Swann the somewhat sisterly support, seeing the poet as a self-created, talented woman who could survive all the daily difficulties of her life and has given life to hundreds of poems without having any private or professional support. In other words, “Sarah Maloney sees herself as Mary Swann’s “watchwoman” and believes that she needs to defend the poet against the biographer Morton Jimroy, who will try to catch her out or bend her into God’s messenger or the handmaiden of Emily Dickinson” (Hansson, 2003: 359). She states her ideas on the other critics and scholars, all of whom are male, openly:
A man like Morton Jimroy wouldn’t be bothering with her if he didn’t think she was going to take off. Willard wouldn’t be wasting his time organising a symposium if he didn’t believe her reputation was ripe for the picking. These guys are greedy. They would eat her up, inch by inch. Scavengers. Brutes. This is a wicked world, and the innocent need protection. (Shields, 1993: 32)
In fact, the first impression Sarah Maloney evokes in the eyes of the reader is that of a rebel against the male world. She seems to have realised how the patriarchal society can turn a work of art into commodity in order to use it for their own ends. She seems to have understood, how the male-oriented society rules authorship as well since, as also stated in The Laugh of Medusa, “writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural— hence political, typically masculine— economy.” (Cixous, 1975: 2042). She is aware of the fact that Morton Jimroy, as the biographer of famous artists such as Ezra Pound and John Starman, will try to idealize her to be appreciated as a successful biographer once again in his career. She seems also aware of the fact that Willard Lang, who is observed to find Mary Swann’s “context…narrowly rural” (Shields, 1993: 18), wants to make use of her since a symposium organised in a dead poet’s name will perhaps make him gain more social respect, money and status. Her reaction against her friend Brownie shows her way of defending Mary Swann even more apparently as Brownie, “a
20 dealer in rare books” (Shields, 1993: 13), wants to make use of Mary Swann’s book since he thinks it will be a good example on “the theme of castration in women’s books.” (Shields, 1993: 13). Brownie’s only concern, as another male figure, is perhaps shaping Mary Swann’s work according to his own needs because he is within the patriarchal system which favours men since “directly and indirectly all systems of exchange [are] based on masculine thrift.” (Cixous, 1975: 2046). His utilitarian approach is made more visible as Brownie’s ideas about other types of books are taken into account
real money, he told me, big money was in the vintage comic books he was depending on his Plastic Man collection to keep him in his old age. Poetry gave him pyloric spasms, economically speaking, and he only carried the biggies, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost.” (Shields, 1993: 14)
Brownie’s concern with art does not go beyond selling them and making profit. That he usually shows concern for some of the important male poets’ works of art; the biggies, one more time, shows how a male figure is serving both the patriarchal and capitalist systems. As also stated by Cixous- “…the capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against [the] [female].” (Cixous, 1975: 2041). In fact, as Sarah talks about all these male figures such as Brownie, who apparently thinks of books as a commodity and Jimroy, who is after Mary Swann’s work just because it is perhaps going to be a different and hence an attention-grabbing study among his other biographies of male artists, she sounds parallel to Cixous’s ideas.
Yet, Sarah does not obviously act more differently than these male figures, either. However much she claims to be a feminist writer, she cannot help but be a part of the already existing patriarchal system. When her PhD turns into a best seller, she becomes somewhat famous and even her mother cannot believe that “that mouth on the book jacket” (Shields, 1993: 20) is really hers. Her pictures are on the cover of a best-seller, not regarded anymore as a PhD dissertation but a book that is packed to be served to the market. Besides, after The Female Prism
21 takes its place on the shelves of bookstores, someone else decides on her behalf that she “should go on a book-promotion tour.” (Shields, 1993: 20). Thus, she becomes a product promoted all through countries. She, in a way, is turned into a marketing commodity. Besides, she gets angry at Brownie’s idea of using Mary Swann’s poetry within the theme of female castration. At first glance she is perhaps right because as a woman she does not want a man who sees works of art as commodity, to use a poet’s writing to his own ends. Nevertheless, on a symbolical level, not only Brownie but also Sarah castrates Mary Swann as they interpret her work in their own understanding. Brownie interprets some lines of Swann as proof of his conclusion that her poetry is reflecting a female castration whereas Sarah states that Swann “is talking about societal and family connections.” (Shields, 1993: 14). Although the difference between their comments on Swann’s poetry can be considered as their perception of life as male and the female, neither of them hesitates to ignore Swann’s genuine existence and to reshape her lines according to their own perceptions and preferences. They each create a Swann of their own. Thus, Sarah Maloney becomes one of the female castrators as she comments on Mary Swann’s lines. Another example that throws a light on Sarah Maloney’s existence within the male-oriented, calculating system is observed in her correspondences with Morton Jimroy:
It is a guilty secret of mine that I write two kinds of letters, one drafters and two drafters. For old friends I bang out exuberant single- spaced typewritten letters, all the grammar jangled loose with dashes and exclamation points and reckless transitions. Naturally, I trust these old friends…to overlook the awful girlish breathlessness… [b]ut in my two-draft letters I mind my manners, sometimes even forsaking my word processor for the pen…[f]or Morton Jimroy, the Morton Jimroy, biographer of Ezra Pound, John Starman, and now Mary Swann, I get out my best letter paper…[a]nd I always do a second draft. (Shields, 1993: 24)
She writes two different types of letters and in her formal correspondences with scholars and authorities such as Jimroy, she tries to choose the right words, she gives her letters a structure which is appropriate for the male discourse since she refers to the language she uses in her correspondences with friends as awful
22 girlish breathlessness. As Heidi Hansson states, she “consciously use[s] letter writing to create the picture she wants other people to have of her.” (Hansson, 2003: 364). Hence, by writing letters “that are graceful and agreeable” (Shields, 1993: 23), she, in a way, “is likely to reproduce the very structures she is resisting.” (Cixous, 1975: 2038). Although the impossibility of a purely female language is indisputable, she cannot escape but be a part of the patriarchal system she criticises by consciously constructing another self through the language she uses in her letters.
The idea that Sarah Maloney is also a part of the patriarchal system as well as the males within the novel is also present in her search for the documents on Mary Swann. As she travels from Chicago to Ontario- the hometown of Mary Swann- she meets Rose Hindmarch who is stated to be someone who knows the poet. However much Sarah insists that all the others such as Syd Buswell and Jimroy are after Mary’s work in order to “violate her for [their] own gain” (Shields, 1993: 31), she too is trying to have information about the poet in order to use it in the Swann Symposium in January. As she is trying to start a conversation with Rose so as to get some information about Mary Swann, she uses an appropriate style to make her feel comfortable. Although she defines Rose’s living room “sweltering…[she] praise[s] the ferns in her window, the lamp on top of her colour TV…” (Shields, 1993: 42). At first glance, there seems to be no problem with the discourse since Sarah is trying to make her feel relaxed. Yet, the similarity between the letter writing and the interview catches attention in her confession:
I approached the subject delicately— especially her interest in the poet Mary Swann. In an hour she was won over, so quickly won over that I winced with shame…[a]s she talked, I took notes, feeling like a thief but not missing a word. (Shields, 1993: 42)
Sarah Maloney is again constructing a language not only to her own ends but also the male-oriented society’s as well since she is to gather information for the paper she is to present at the symposium which is to be approved by a male- Willard Lang- before she can present it to the audience: “Willard Lang has written me a
23 brisk, cosy little note saying my paper has arrived and been reviewed by the programme committee and deemed very suitable indeed.” (Shields, 1993: 58). Thus, she cannot help but become a part of the patriarchal system and, perhaps, for this reason she feels like a thief stealing information as to Mary’s life and somewhat betraying the sisterhood she claims to convey between herself and Mary. Thus, as she silently takes notes not missing a word Rose is saying, she feels ashamed since, in Susan Elizabeth Sweeney’s words, “beneath the feminine self-effacement and emotionality…lies the masculine voice of authority that the writer cannot inscribe openly.” (Sweeney, 1993: 20).
On the other hand, as she listens to Rose, the information she gets from her is observed to be limited to her knowledge and memories of Mary Swann. The facts about her life, apart from the birth and death dates and some information about her death and daily routine, are all speculations of Swann related to Sarah by Rose: “Some people in the district said Angus Swann beat his wife regularly…It was also said he burned some of her poems in the cookstove and so she took hiding them under the kitchen linoleum” (Shields, 1993: 43). Hence, the story of Mary Swann is somewhat shaped through the story-telling of Rose. Sarah constructs the information on Swann based on Rose’s reflection of the story most parts of which consist of rumours since Rose clearly narrates some parts of Mary’s story by what she has heard from the neighbourhood at the time. Of course, as Sarah takes note of these events she writes them down as a factual part of Mary Swann’s story. However, one more time, the facts of Mary Swann’s life as a dead poet merge with fiction and the constructed nature of the binary oppositions as to fact/ fiction is made visible since the fact is also recreated by the neighbours, then by Rose, then (will be created) by Sarah. Hence, the clear-cut line between reality and fiction is shattered by which “authoritative renderings of events are seen to be unreliable.” (Hansson, 2003: 366). Moreover, Sarah Maloney who is to make use of this information she gets from Rose in her paper about Mary Swann also becomes one of the people who is not only “revising [Swann’s] history” (Shields, 1993: 13), but also his-the male’s-story, forming a
24 piece of writing, a story, to be used in a symposium that promotes Mary Swann to the male oriented society as a marketing commodity.
As the novel proceeds, Rose and Sarah go to Swann farm as they go on talking about Mary Swann and her cause of death:
Towering above the bleak outbuildings was the silo where Angus Swann had dumped the dismembered body of his wife— head, trunk, and severed legs— before shooting himself in the mouth as he set at the kitchen table. No one knows for sure what happened between them. There was no explanation, no note or sign, but one of Swann’s last poems points to her growing sense of claustrophobia and helplessness. (Shields, 1993: 43)
Neither Sarah nor Rose seems to have sufficient data regarding the details of her life. Still, Sarah Maloney makes an exact statement that Mary Swann’s last poems indicate her growing sense of claustrophobia and helplessness. Thus, Sarah uses a piece of her poetry to fit it in the ‘reality’ of Swann’s life and as also Mary Eagleton states, “construct her as author according to [her] own needs and preferences.” (Eagleton, 2003: 313). In other words, Mary’s poetry- art- is used as a vehicle to reveal the pain she has suffered. Sarah Maloney not only reshapes Mary Swann’s life through her art but also reshapes her art through her not completely enlightened ‘reality’. Sarah is searching for drama and a mystery about Swann to catch the public attention in order to present Swann as an original and “self-created poet”(Shields, 1993: 32) in the Swann Symposium.
On the other hand, the parallelism between Morton Jimroy and Sarah Maloney’s acts is worth considering. In one of the letters they write to one another, Jimroy is observed to ask for one of the few documents that Sarah has of Mary Swann which is “a small spiral notebook, the kind sometimes described as a pocket scribbler,…its ruled pages covered with dated headings and markings in blue ink.” (Shields, 1993: 45). In fact, his willingness to examine the notebook of Mary Swann is quite natural in terms of having an idea about her works and life since Jimroy is a biographer who has started to work on Mary Swann’s life. As he writes a letter to Sarah Maloney informing her about his ongoing research on
25 Swann, he tries to persuade her to send at least a photocopy of Swann’s notebook and to share with him “its contents, at least partially.” (Shields, 1993: 26). As natural as his wish seems, his way of trying to convince Sarah Maloney catches attention since he uses Mary Swann’s words taken from one of her poems as he pleads for the notebook:
I would of course pay for photocopying and so on— would bring our graceful Swann out of the jungle of conjecture and, as she herself would say— Into the carpeted clearing, into the curtained light, behind the sun’s loud staring, away from the sky’s hard bite. (Shields, 1993: 27)
Thus, Jimroy makes use of Swann’s works in his own way creating another context. Hence, Mary Swann is pulled into the jungle of speculation by the male discourse that Jimroy creates with his words. Also, as he is writing this letter to Sarah Maloney, he is somewhat trying to convince her by another female’s words. Thus, he is also reconstructing his own self, reshaping his own language- ‘reality’- through fiction in search of something original about Mary Swann. Apart from the notebook, there appears one other source of data on Swann’s life and it opens to question the crucial concept of originality. As Sarah Maloney travels to the hometown of Mary Swann- Nadeau, Ontario- and interviews Rose Hindmarch, Rose gives her Swann’s “rhyming dictionary” (Shields, 1993: 45). Nevertheless, after she receives it and she is on her way back to Chicago the dictionary begins “to seem ominous and to lend a certain unreality to the notebook beside it. [She] stop[s] at the first roadside litter box and drop[s] it in.” (Shields, 1993: 46). The rhyming dictionary is clearly a material used by Swann in order to create harmony in terms of sound in her poetry. Considering the fact that Sarah Maloney thinks of Mary as a poet who is different from all others and imagines her almost as a heroine, she is obviously disappointed. In other words, Sarah Maloney thinks of her as a unique poet voicing the suppressed, silenced woman by her inborn talent and “heart-cracking persistence…box[ing] up her thoughts into quirky parcels of rhymed verse” (Shields, 1993: 31). Thus, she believes in the originality of her rhymes and verse. However, encountering the
26 fact of Mary’s rhyming dictionary disturbs her: “the possession of such a tool would make Swann a less original writer in the eyes of the world.” (Hansson, 2003: 362). Hence, in search of something original which is to serve the market, she appropriates Mary Swann in accordance with the needs of the system and recreates her ignoring her own ‘reality’. However much she claims that her “responsibility toward Mary Swann… is custodial” (Shields, 1993: 31), she cannot help but be a part of the dominant patriarchal and capitalist system.
The concept of reality is also questioned by Sarah Maloney as she is turning back from a visit to her mother:
The word crepuscular pops into my head, then disintegrates…[a]nd here comes a gust of wind, knocking the leaves off the branches and leading me back to reality. Ah but what is reality?… and an answer comes dancing in front of my lips. Reality is no more than a word that begins with r and ends with y. Exactly. Oh, Lord! (Shields, 1993: 36)
In-between r and y seems to be all emptiness to be filled with various viewpoints and contexts. On a symbolical level, Sarah’s realization as to reality is, in a way, reflecting what is going on in the novel since between the r and y, Swann’s (as well as her fiction and the realities of other characters) are shaped according to the requirements of the characters in the novel. Sarah Maloney is shaping another self for herself in her letters to Jimroy. On the other hand, Jimroy is re-shaping reality as he is making use of Swann’s poetry in his correspondences with Maloney. Besides, each character presented up to this point in the novel are either shaping Mary Swann’s poetry to fit it into their own discourse or trying to reshape her life and works in order to adapt her into the dominant system/market. In fact, the society has already had attempts of reconstructing Mary Swann when she was alive. With their pre-designed constructed gender roles, both the society and her husband Angus, who is a strict representative of the existing patriarchal cycle, have tried to rewrite her as a conventional angel in the house. However, when they have not been able to succeed in their acts- the moment she rejected becoming a part of it; writing poetry, reading books, regular visits to the library, they have annihilated her. Thus, the silenced Swann who is deceased and who
27 does not have any other chance to write herself, is now ready to be reshaped by others. Nevertheless, the system apparently not only destroys the female but also the male himself which is openly displayed in the act of Angus Swann who shoots himself right after he murders her wife Mary Swann. Hence, although everyone is in search of the ‘reality’ about Mary Swann, in-between the r and y there is only the constructed existence of her since as Sarah holds in her hands the notebook of Mary Swann, she “puzzles for days over one scribbled passage, hoping for a spill of light, but finally decide[s] that the pen scratches must read “Door Latch broken”” (Shields, 1993: 49). Thus, Mary’s true self keeps on living in a crepuscular zone, her words- even though not clearly read- shaped by Sarah’s presumption of them. And as the first section ends, the notebook of Mary Swann is observed to be lost just like Mary Swann who is murdered by her husband and her artist self, dying slowly as all the critics and academicians are shaping and reshaping it according to their own needs.
The second section of the novel mainly focuses on the life and studies of the fifty-one year old biographer Morton Jimroy, who travels all the way from Winnipeg, Manitoba to California to stay for a year in order to communicate with Mary Swann’s only daughter Frances. He lives alone in a house “rented from a famous physicist, a Nobel Prize winner who [has] left earlier, for a year in Stuttgart.” (Shields, 1993: 73). On his arrival in California, he is welcomed by Marjorie Flanner, the physicist’s wife. She shows him the house and gives information about the garden and as they start talking, she asks Jimroy some questions about his latest studies. However, the one significant occasion with regard to his studies is that Jimroy’s luggage in which there are some papers he has written on Swann and a photograph of her is lost. In fact, he does not seem to worry about his papers since their photocopies are available and can be provided by his secretary. Nevertheless, the lost photograph of Swann makes him “suffer intermittent worry [since] it cannot be replaced and is one of the only two photographs over her in existence.” (Shields, 1993: 78). As he is expressing his grief over the loss of Swann’s picture, it is worth considering his attitude towards Sarah Maloney’s letters:
28 He needs the letters more than ever now…they stabilize him, keeping away that drifting sadness that comes up upon him late in the evening…It is then that he likes to reread her letters, letters that pulse and promise, that make his throat and swell with the thought of sex. (Shields, 1993: 78)
As a matter of fact, the correspondence between Sarah and Jimroy does not go beyond sharing their ideas on Mary Swann. From this perspective, Jimroy’s feelings for Sarah are his reconstructed image of her in his mind. Reading her letters he fictionalizes her real self as he imagines Sarah- a woman he has not even seen once- taking his clothes off and with “her soft lips [saying]…hurry let me do the zipper for you” (Shields, 1993: 79). On the other hand, with regard to the language Sarah uses, which is a deliberate construction of her own self, it is clear that Sarah reshapes her own reality in her letters by using her “well- governed wit, closet kindness, revealing that rouged, wrinkled Russian-like persona that [she] like[s] to think is [her] true self.” (Shields, 1993: 23-4). Thus, not only do they try to reconstruct Mary Swann by shaping her poetry to their own ends but they also rewrite their own selves and lives and become constructed, in other words, fictionalized characters who struggle to serve the existing system while trying to somewhat resurrect Mary Swann as a remarkable artist. Thus, while they, on the one hand, consume each other and their own selves as well, they are also, on the other hand, consumed within society.
In the following days of Jimroy’s stay in California, he is invited, as a successful biographer, “to address a group of graduate students and staff” (Shields, 1993: 80) about his studies. Before his speech “entitled The Curve of Life: Poetry and Principle” (Shields, 1993: 81) Jimroy’s thoughts about universities and theoreticians catch attention:
Dear God. How we love to systemize and classify what is rich and random in life…[s]cholarship was bunk— If they only knew. It was just a matter of time before theoreticians got to Mary Swann and tore her limb from limb in a grotesque parody of her bodily death. (Shields, 1993: 81)
29 It is noteworthy how Jimroy in his thoughts criticises the idea of categorising and classifying. He is aware of the fact that these acts of naming, categorising, classifying are all devices of control. However, as a biographer he systematically works on the life of Mary Swann and acts exactly in the same way as he “flips through his index cards once more” (Shields, 1993: 108) where the stages of Mary Swann’s life are laid before the eyes of the reader categorized from her birth to her “childhood, schooling, work, marriage, later life, [death] and [burial]” (Shields, 1993: 109) in detail. Besides, when the reason why he feels so worried about not having much information on Swann is considered, the degree of how much he is a part of the existing capitalist system becomes apparent since “even with the background material and critical commentary, this will be a thin book. A defeat.” (Shields, 1993: 109). Thus, he is interested in the book he has to present to the public and the number of the pages it will have when it takes its place in the market. It is a matter of victory or defeat, of success or failure for him. Hence, he falls into the very classification he strictly opposes as Swann’s “creativity [sits] like a head of cabbage on a wooden chopping block, ready to be hacked apart.” (Shields, 1993: 81). Not being able to “connect Mary Swann’s biographical greyness with the achieved splendour of Swann’s Songs…[is] a [d]efeat.” (Shields, 1993: 108-9). Thus, he has the motive to reshape Mary Swann’s life in order to reach his goal and present her in the most idealized and romanticised way that he can. The novel, in fact, openly shows how Jimroy is the one who reconstructs Swann’s identity and tears her from limb to limb just in the same way as the theoreticians whom he has criticised severely before for doing the same thing. The moment he realises that he cannot manage to gather enough information on Mary Swann, he starts to make imaginary additions to Swann’s biography:
Of course he can surmise certain things, influences for instance. He is almost sure she came in contact with the work of Emily Dickinson, regardless of what Frances Moore says. He intends to mention, to comment extensively, in fact, on the Dickonsonian influence, and sees no point, really, in taking up the Edna Ferber influence; it is too ludicrous. (Shields, 1993: 110)
30 As opposed to a biographer who is supposed to reflect the true information pertaining to Mary Swann’s life, Jimroy deliberately ignores them and bases his work on a guess denying the factual information he has received from Mary’s daughter Frances. In fact, in the novel, it is clearly stated in Jimroy’s interview with Frances that the poetry Mary Swann has read does not go beyond the one and only “mother goose” (Shields, 1993: 93)- a children’s fiction with nursery rhymes- and that she has not read any other poet’s work at all. Nevertheless, Jimroy is observed to idealize and reshape her whole identity as a female artist by adding up non-existing, imaginary information and omitting the parts such as Edna Ferber by finding it unreasonable since he is the experienced and prestigious biographer who knows well about the requirements of the canon, about the market, etc. To be more specific, as also Mary Eagleton states, “his biographies of Pound and John Starman, his three honorary degrees, and his recent role at Stanford as Distinguished Visitor have already won him considerable symbolic capital.” (Eagleton, 2003: 320). As a male authority he rules over the female life, identity and art to shape it and rewrite it according to both his and the society’s ends. In other words, the novel also emphasises the “slippage between fiction and biography [by] [openly] [showing] the discrepancy between the fictional “facts” and their explanation.” (Hansson, 2003: 353-4).
From another perspective, Jimroy is also victimised by the existing system although he is a male figure who is more privileged within the male-oriented society since the ongoing system steals away his values as well from him as he cancels out the fact that Mary Swann reads Edna Ferber and he adds up imaginary information just to idealize Mary Swann since this is “what a good biography demands” (Shields, 1993: 111). He, in a way, becomes a kind of male executor of Mary’s life and identity or a thief stealing away the part of her life- by not including it to his biography- when she read “Gone With The Wind or Edna Ferber” (Shields, 1993: 93) to her illiterate neighbour Mrs. Hanna. In fact, Jimroy seems to go even further than this when he truly steals the pen of Mary Swann in one of his visits to Frances’s house:
31
In a few minutes she was back with the teapot, and she had something else in her other hand, a little narrow jeweller’s box covered with blue velvet. “I thought you might want to see this,” she said. She opened the box. “It’s a Ma’s parker 51”… [w]hat he did next simply happened. He found his hand on the rounded velvet top of the box. Then he lifted the lid…[t]hen it was in his hand, then in the inside pocket of his new denim sports jacket. He closed the box and positioned it on the table… Thief. Robber…she would remember that he had been the last person to see it. But she would never believe him capable of common thievery, not Morton Jimroy, biographer, Distinguished visitor. (Shields, 1993: 113-4)
The pressure he feels about not having enough documents on Swann’s life somewhat reaches its climax since he steals the pen of Mary Swann regardless of the risk he is taking. In fact, the act of stealing the pen does not only turn him into a thief but also shows that he can give up on moral values in order to reach his goal to retain his status as the prestigious biographer and keep on being “seen as one of the agents of consecration.” (Eagleton, 2003: 320). Also, the fact that as a widely-known biographer he sees in himself the right “to make bogus claims” (Eagleton, 2003: 320), when he associates Mary with famous writers such as Emily Dickinson, it is very clear how much pressure he is under despite his advantageous position as a male professional in the publishing market. He feels obliged to do everything just to confirm his status even more in public because if he can find original information about Mary Swann such as the pen or the influence of significant writers such as Dickinson, he can catch attention as the biographer who found out some original pieces of material about her or who “perceived the line of influence.” (Shields, 1993: 320). Thus, one more time, on a symbolical level, a male steals away Mary Swann’s word as he steals away her pencil that she has written most of her poems. And he literally steals her words as he chants lines from Mary Swann “touch[ing] the fountain pen; the pen of Mary Swann. The pen that ha[s] written: Ice is the final thief, First cousin to larger grief.” (Shields, 1993: 114). As a matter of fact, he shapes her verse to fit it in his present condition. Hence, Mary’s works of art become a kind of tool to reflect his present situation. In other words, they are shaped according to Jimroy’s needs. In fact, it is very apparent that however much Jimroy claims to write a biography of
32 Mary Swann, he tries to reshape her identity, idealize her as a poet who has “in her middle period (1940-1955)…probab[ly] read Jane Austen” (Shields, 1993: 114).
His attempts to idealize Mary Swann becomes more apparent as every Wednesday he walks to Mary Swann’s daughter Frances Swann Moore’s beautiful house on Largo Lane:
He’d expected something hideous. A bleak sitting room with sagging furniture. Cheap siding damaged by the sun. He’d expected a stubborn fecklessness and narrowness to correspond with the narrowness of that farmhouse outside Nadaeu, Ontario where Frances Swann Moore (1935-) grew up. He had not allowed for upward mobility and the miracle of one generation leap. (Shields, 1993: 90)
That Mary Swann’s daughter is rich surprises Jimroy because he is in search of something original about Swann. He expects to observe a life in difficulty which is perhaps parallel to her mother’s life. He, perhaps, only then could get detailed information about Mary’s life since Frances would be a true reflection of it. However, he cannot find what he expects to see. Thus, he does his best to recreate the image of Mary Swann by omitting some of the information about her or making up new ones as “these scrawled notes, these delicate tangled footnotes, with a little more work…will evolve into numbered poems of logic and illumination.” (Shields, 1993: 114). Although there is not enough information about Swann and her works of art, apart from some of her poems in her first book called Swann’s Songs, still Jimroy is sure of himself to create a biography of logic and illumination. In other words, he is surely to shape Mary Swann’s life in such a way that when people read it, there will be no question in their minds that opposes logic. Hence, they will be content with it. As section two ends, one more time, it is apparent that “to create Swann, these critics manipulatively situate [her] in the space of artistic possibles, citing in relation to her works and authors no doubt unknown to her and, in any case, profoundly alien to her intentions.” (Eagleton, 2003: 321).
33 Section three introduces Rose Hindmarch to us as an unmarried middle- aged woman who lives alone in Nadaeu, Ontario. Rose is understood to have had more than one job within the place that she lives. She is not only known as a librarian but also has been a local telephone operator, a person who has worked in the Nadaeu United Church “in the guise of church elder” (Shields, 1993: 124) and a museum curator as well. As the section commences, Rose admits that she considers being a museum curator one of the best jobs ever since “her life has changed. She has connections in the outside world now, the academic world. Quite a number of scholars and historians have come to Nadaeu to call on her.” (Shields, 1993: 126). The reason why she catches the attention of academicians and historians this much dates back to her interest in Mary Swann because after Mary Swann is killed by her husband and her poetry is published by the famous publisher Frederic Cruzzi, Rose Hindmarch turns one of the two rooms in the old school in Nadaeu to “The Mary Swann Memorial Room.” (Shields, 1993: 128). With regard to her attitude towards Swann, she seems to care about Mary as another female or to her works of art as an artist who has lived in the same small town as herself. In other words, she is seen as a single woman who is trying to make people respect the poet’s memory and know about her as a remarkable poet of Nadaeu. However, when her way of composing the room is taken into consideration, she is also observed to be doing the same thing to Mary Swann as Sarah Maloney and Morton Jimroy do:
And so Rose was forced to use her imagination when it came to furnishing the Mary Swann Memorial Room. Russel Donegal encouraged her to help herself to anything in the house, saying she was welcome to the lot for all he cared…Rose took the kitchen table, two of the better kitchen chairs…and a few cooking utensils…she left behind the bent rusty carving knife and the nickel-plated forks and spoons. As for the other articles in the Memorial Room, she bought them from the Antique barn…: a pretty turnip masher,…feminine iron bedstead, and a walnut bookcase and the set of tattered dull-covered books (Dickens, Sir Walter Scott) that came with it. (Shields, 1993: 163)
34 Thus, Rose does not seem to act in a different way than Morton Jimroy who is previously observed to associate Mary’s work of art with “Jane Austen [or] Emily Dickenson” (Shields, 1993: 110-8), because the house Mary was killed in is a mess and most of her property was either sent to her daughter or “Professor Lang [has] carted off more than a sheaf of poems.”(Shields, 1993: 162). Rose consciously denies taking Mary’s really used household equipments and instead buys furniture which she thinks is appropriate for Mary’s image. Hence, she idealizes the poor poet who is claimed not to have even a washing machine in her house and was killed by her husband Angus Swann brutally “dump[ing] the dismembered body of his wife— head, trunk, and severed legs” (Shields, 1993: 43) in the silo built by him. What is more, just like Jimroy presumptuously associates Mary Swann with high-status authors, Rose places some books in the bookcase that belong to Dickens and Sir Walter Scott that will most probably, be associated with Mary Swann as people come to visit the memorial room and see them inside the bookcase. Thus, they will have a false picture of Mary Swann about the authors she has read and has perhaps been influenced by as she was writing her poetry. Hence, her truth, once again, is seen to be redefined by Rose Hindmarch. The memorial room, in fact, turns Mary Swann into an icon, a religious figure where people come, visit and respect her once physical yet at the present spiritual existence. And, one more time, the true identity of Mary is distorted by another person. Ms. Hindmarch “arranges the pieces in the memorial room according to her own image of what an author should be.” (Hansson, 2003: 363).
Besides, in the progression of her acts, Rose is observed to feel no guilt since she convinces herself of the idea that “these articles, after all, belong to the time and the region of which Mary Swann was a part, and therefore nothing is misrepresented.” (Shields, 1993: 163). In fact, her justification shows Rose’s innocence “[t]hat Swann’s personality and circumstances are mispresented never occurs to her.” (Hansson, 2003: 363). Nevertheless, her good intentions seem to be carried to another level as her feelings and acts after her first confrontation
35 with Morton Jimroy are taken into consideration when he for the “first time visits Nadaeu a year ago [and] invite[s] Rose out to dinner at the old Hotel in Elgin” (Shields, 1993: 146) specifically to talk about Mary Swann:
He was patient, waiting until she found the words and put her recollections in order. His eyes burned. “Remarkable,” he said, and made a note. “Priceless.” Then, go on…[h]e seemed altogether happy sitting there in the dining room of the Elgin Hotel, leaning forward so eagerly…[a]nd she? She felt a happy, porous sense of usefulness, as though joined for once to something that mattered…Rose Hindmarch, local expert on Mary Swann, a woman with an extraordinary memory and gift for detail, able to remember whole conversations word for word …[l]ater, in church, after Morton Jimroy returned to Winnipeg, she begged forgiveness from the pine pulpit rail. She had never meant to be untruthful. She had not intended to exaggerate her friendship with Mary Swann. Friendship! The truth was that she had scarcely done more than pass the time of day with Mrs. Swann. (Shields, 1993: 151- 2)
The conversation between Rose and Morton Jimroy is observed to be a professional one as Jimroy asks questions to Ms. Hindmarch concerning Mary Swann. However, the intentions of Rose Hindmarch do not seem to be similar to his. On that occasion Rose’s motives seem to focus on catching Jimroy’s attention since this is the first time she is having dinner with a man. As they continue talking over Swann’s life, Rose intentionally lies to him so as to be appreciated by a male with regard to her strength of memory and perhaps to her intimacy with an extraordinary poet like Mary Swann. However, as she makes up stories about her own self and Mary Swann, Rose Hindmarch does not only mislead Jimroy about Mary Swann’s identity but she also uses Mary Swann to reach her own goal just like the other scholars such as Sarah Maloney, Willard Lang and biographer Jimroy do. As she “fabricates information, because she wants Morton Jimroy to like her,” (Hansson, 2003: 362), she reshapes Swann’s identity since Swann has “not given Rose Hindmarch copies of her poems to read and comment upon. They had not— not ever discussed their deeply shared feeling about literature or about families or about nature. None of this had taken place.” (Shields, 1993: 152). Thus, Rose Hindmarch relates not the truth but narrates a story on herself and Mary Swann, fictionalizing both Mary and herself, reconstructing non-existing
36 contexts and identities. Besides, as Rose lies to Jimroy, the biography which is already fictionalized by Jimroy himself- based on presumptions of Mary’s reading of Jane Austen and Dickens- once again brings forth the idea that “both the documentary evidence they present and the narratives that make sense of this evidence are fictional.” (Hansson, 2003: 354-5).
In fact, the issue regarding how each character in the novel reshapes not only Mary’s identity but also her works of art comes to the fore as Jimroy, during the dinner with Rose Hindmarch, comments on four lines of Mary Swann’s poetry:
He opened the book again and read aloud …Blood pronounces my name, [b]listers the day with shame, [s]pends what little I own, [r]obbing the hour, rubbing the bone…“Well,” Jimroy said speaking rather loudly. This seems to be— now you may disagree— but to me it’s a pretty direct reference to the sacrament of holy communion. Or perhaps, this is my point, perhaps to a more elemental sort of blood covenant, the eating of the Godhead, that sort of thing.” Rose said nothing, not wanting to disappoint him…[s]he was unable to utter the word menstruation. She would have died first. (Shields, 1993: 148)
Jimroy’s comment on Mary Swann’s poetry does not seem to go beyond speculation since he reflects his own perception of Swann’s works of art with regard to how he thinks of her true identity which is made clear by his statement that he “see[s] her as someone whose faith was exceedingly primitive and mystical” (Shields, 1993: 148). Thus, his commentary on Swann’s poem is no more than drawing a parallel between her works of art and her non-existing identity since she is physically dead and there is no real study or research document that throws a light on what the imagery in her works of art may refer to. Even though it is a well-known fact that poetry is subjective and “it is the language which speaks and not the author” (Barthes, 1968: 1467), still Jimroy attempts to interpret Mary Swann’s lines basing his comments on the assumptions as to her identity. Thus, he presents a two-step mistake: First, he tries to draw parallelisms between the content of a work of art and the identity and the life of its author. Second, the identity and life that he is trying to find the traces of in her
37 poetry have already been proved to be constructions. Also, Jimroy’s attempt to associate Mary Swann’s poetry with religion hints at his purpose of idealising Swann as an artist even more since he wants to assign a god-like quality to Mary Swann in order to present her to the public as he openly states in his conversation with Rose Hindmarch that “It is their genetic disposition, a mutation, of course…which allows them to be filters of a larger knowledge…that you and I can’t account for. Call it an extra dimension if you like. A third eye.” (Shields, 1993: 149). Hence, talking about Mary Swann to Rose Hindmarch, he romanticises Mary Swann, he idealizes her as an artist as seeing what ordinary people cannot see or perceive in life. In fact he draws a romantic image of the artist where the artist “is considered a superior kind of person…feels more intensely than others.” (Beebe, 1964: 66-7).
On the other hand, Rose is observed to be very certain that the lines are a direct reference to menstruation. However much poetry is considered to be examined as separate from its author, their conversation is significant in terms of throwing a light on the gender differences since the perception of Mary’s poetry by Rose and Jimroy are completely different. As a male he, perhaps, does not even consider blood’s association with the menstruation period of women so, once again, they shape Swann’s work of art according to their own perception of them. Besides, that the same four lines are also interpreted by Sarah Maloney as a direct reference to the “inescapable perseverance of blood ties” (Shields, 1993: 50), shows the potential varieties in acts of interpretation. Thus, they reconstruct her poetry by making strict comments on the lines and trying to reduce her poetry into a document revealing a single truth about Mary Swann. Moreover, the fact that Rose Hindmarch cannot pronounce the word menstruation next to Jimroy, hints at the ongoing patriarchal system because of which it has always been “daring…a great transgression for a woman to speak.” (Cixous, 1975: 2044). To speak becomes even more difficult for a woman when it comes to speak about her body, her sexuality, which have traditionally been dissociated with sin, shame, immorality, and which, consequently, need to be hidden and experienced silently.
38 Thus, Rose Hindmarch also becomes a proof with regard to how the male- oriented system, with the roles it assigns to women, goes on pushing them to the point where a middle-aged, independent woman cannot express something which is feminine and a part of her own existence when she is next to a man. Hence, not only Mary Swann but also Rose can be considered as a symbol that represents the oppression of the female in the male-oriented system since when Rose “find[s] a pool of blood between her legs.” (Shields, 1993: 145), she is understood to be scared of going to the gynaecologist because of her last experience with Dr. Thoms who asks her some questions during the examination:
“Would you say your sex life is satisfactory?” She was tempered to whimper again… “no pain during the intercourse?” he pursued her. She shook her head and he made another check mark. “Libido falling off at all?...to this last question…she grimaced stupidly and gave the smallest of shrugs…[t]hat he was new in the area only made it worse for he was bound to find out who she was sooner or later, the virgin village clerk, the old-maiden librarian. She wondered if he could guess how she put herself to sleep some nights, her finger working. (Shields, 1993: 156-7)
It is true that Rose feels ashamed since she does not want to be referred to as the “virgin village clerk or the old maid librarian. Yet, her uncomfortable nature during her conversation with the doctor becomes proof about the destructive nature of the assigned gender roles on women since the female, from very early days of her childhood onwards is taught to hide her sexuality. In other words, “the little girls and their “ill-mannered” bodies immured, well- preserved…they have [been] lead to be executants of their own virile needs.” (Cixous, 1975: 2041-2). Hence, Rose is seen to be one of the representatives of the female who is taught to keep matters concerning sexuality a secret even from her doctor who is simply there to cure her since her excitement and discomfort are apparent on the idea that the doctor may notice the fact that she is masturbating. Even the thought of it makes Rose feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. Although she seems comfortable with her life as an unmarried woman, still the pressure she feels during the conversation with her doctor, hints at the still existing pressure of the male-oriented society over the female since she cannot express herself openly
39 in front of a male figure. To be more specific, Rose, with the elusive responses she gives to the doctor, hides her true identity, in a way shapes it in the way she wants to be recognized by her doctor. Hence, just like Mary Swann whose identity is shaped by different characters throughout the novel, Rose becomes one other female figure who not only hides her true self but also feels obliged to reconstruct her identity and to recreate Mary Swann’s by constructing memories about Swann’s life in order to be appreciated by Morton Jimroy. As the novel proceeds, just like Morton Jimroy and Sarah Maloney, Rose Hindmarch seems to use Mary Swann to her own ends since her only concern as a single middle-aged female is observed not to contribute to the information gathered on Mary Swann’s life and works of art but to be respected by the people in The Swann Symposium as “it is only two months away. She would like to lose her tired, wan look and appear lively and knowledgeable.” (Shields, 1993: 155). Yet, it is apparent that her knowledge of Mary Swann does not go beyond daily salutation with her and her understanding of Swann’s poetry is limited to the citations she chants during her traditional Christmas Day eggnog party which comes into her mind in a joyful moment with her friends: “A pound of Joy weighs more, [w]hen grief had gone before.” (Shields, 1993: 171).
The opening of section four introduces Frederic Cruzzi as an eighty year old Kingston publisher who is, together with his wife Hildë, the founder of The Peregrine Press where, for the first time, Mary Swann’s poetry has been published as a book titled Swann’s Songs after her tragic death. As the novel progresses, Cruzzi comes to the fore as an old man who is still writing articles for The Kingston Banner, the newspaper of which he was “the former editor.” (Shields, 1993: 176). Even though he is retired and he has lost most of his friends due to old age, he is observed to have a lot of friends and relatives that he keeps in touch with. In fact, one of the most significant things that catches attention as to his life is his correspondences both with his relatives and some of the scholarly people. The first letter that Cruzzi receives is an invitation from J. Wade Hollinghead; “the Ontario Bay Jaycees [who] are getting together for [their] annual blast-off
40 banquet.” (Shields, 1993: 183). They invite Cruzzi to their gathering since they have heard that “his after dinner speeches are a barrel of laughs and appreciated by one and all.” (Shields, 1993: 183). However, as he turns down their offer:
Dear Mr. Hollinghead… I am afraid you and I have both been ill- served by rumour. I am no longer editor Cruzzi, having retired from the Banner more than ten years ago. Laughs by the barrel have never been my commodity. I am a strict vegetarian, eschewing fowl as well as other animal proteins. I am long-winded and bad tempered and, since suffering a slight stroke, unpleasant in appearance. (Shields, 1993: 184)
The excuses of Frederic Cruzzi for refusing the invitation seem to justify him in the best way that it can since an old man who is suffering from a stroke and who does not eat any type of animal products may not be accepted to join a blast where people are served turkey and trimmings. Besides, as a long-ago retired person who is not fond of drinking and having long and cheerful conversations by the barrel, his reply is considered to be a decent and appropriate one. However, his reply to the next invitation that he receives from his friend Pauline Ouilette draws a completely different picture of the old editor since he accepts a dinner proposal where Pauline is seen to offer him “roast lamb and a bottle of wine” (Shields, 1993: 184) and in his reply Cruzzi openly states that he has written a letter to Mr. Hollinghead giving false information to him in order to refuse the invitation and he confesses that he lied to Mr. Hollinghead “claiming to be a vegetarian and a curmudgeon.” (Shields, 1993: 184). Hence, the correspondences gain significance in terms of throwing a light on the concept of his identity since in the letters that he writes to Pauline and to Wade Hollinghead, the reader sees two different pictures of Frederic Cruzzi one of which is a an ill-tempered aged former editor and the other an eighty year old former editor who is healthy enough to join a lady friend drinking alcohol and enjoying his meal. Thus, in his letters he constructs different identities of his own self and the letters which are considered to give factual information about Cruzzi turn out to be fictionalized pieces of writings of the old editor which he himself constructs. Hence, his act leads to questioning of
41 “the nature of truth, the possibilities and fallacies of life-writing.” (Hansson, 2003: 367-8).
Other letters arrive from scholars such as Willard Lang inviting him to The Swann Symposium and his replies to each of them are worth considering in terms of their connection to Mary Swann since Cruzzi claims that “Mary Swann’s work lies in its innocence, the fact that it does not invite scholarly meddling or whimsical interpretation.” (Shields, 1993: 186). However, Frederic Cruzzi, just like Sarah Maloney, Morton Jimroy, Willard Lang and Rose Hindmarch, most certainly meddles with Mary Swann the moment he reads her poetry which she brings to his door in a paper bag “in the afternoon of December 15, 1965.” (Shields, 1993: 208). For he does not publish them as they are:
Under the fish remains, under the wet heaviness of fish slime, were soaked remains of Mary Swann’s poems…with great care, with tenderness…A surprising number of poems became legible as they dried. From the puddles of blue ink, words could be glimpsed, then guessed at. If one or two letters swam into incomprehension, the rest followed…[t]he seriously damaged poems worried them more. Lakes of blue ink flowed between lines, blotting out entire phrases…[t]hey puzzled and conferred over every blot, then guessed, then invented. (Shields, 1993: 200-3)
Swann’s poetry is damaged clearly due to an accident when Cruzzi’s wife Hildë throws the remains of the dinner they have had into the paper bag in which Mary Swann brings her poetry. However, their attempts to save her original work of art goes beyond an innocent intervention of drying the soaked and greasy pieces of paper all of which are manuscripts of Mary Swann’s poetry. For they obviously change the words chosen by Mary Swann with those of theirs which are simply based on their own predictions of what the words could be. It will be another new book presented to the public by Cruzzi’s Peregrine Press which focuses on the mission that “whatever [they] decide to publish must have a new sound.” (Shields, 1993: 203). Besides, the fact that the title of Mary Swann’s book is determined by Cruzzi and his wife, one more time displays the deliberate meddling of Cruzzi with Swann’s innocence as he names the book to his own preference. Thus,
42 Frederic Cruzzi is also understood to rewrite Mary Swann’s work of art in order to serve his own ends. In fact, what he does can be considered as going one step further than Sarah Maloney or Morton Jimroy since he is the one and only person who truly receives an original piece of material as to Mary Swann’s poetry. However much, Cruzzi and Hildë claim that by reinventing the missing words they have done her a favour, in other words, they “wanted to offer help and protection, what she seemed never to have had.” (Shields, 1993: 223), still they become the authors of her texts as they “employ guesses, deduction, invention, textual analysis, personal preference, and emendations to fill the gaps in Swann’s verse.” (Eagleton, 2003: 322). Hence, the dimension of their authority over Swann’s verse becomes even more apparent as they change a word in one of Swann’s poems simply because “they liked it better.” (Shields, 1993: 223). Thus, this process of recreating the works of Mary Swann also explains why he accepts at once to come to the symposium when Sarah Maloney writes to him since “when trying to persuade Cruzzi to come to the symposium, she flatters him with the notion that he had midwifed the original text.” (Eagleton, 2003: 324). In fact, he did not only midwife the texts but partly gave birth to each of her lines and recreated her works of art together with his wife. Hence, Mary Swann, once again, becomes the representative of a female writer whose “status as author is radically uncertain”(Eagleton, 2003: 313) as her life and her works are consumed “by critics who fight over…her body and soul.” (Eagleton, 1993: 313). In fact, as an author -a female artist -her word is taken away from her not only by the scholars and publishers like Cruzzi but by her one and only Parker 51 pen which she is known to have composed her poetry:
A gift it was said, from her husband “in happier days.” And she used a kind of ink very popular in those days, called “washable blue.” When a drop of water touched a word written in washable blue, the result was a pale swimmy smudge…two or three such smudges and a written page became opaque and indecipherable…(Shields, 1993: 221-2)
However much it is the husband’s gift to her, the ink she uses is what makes the writing ephemeral. Her works of art easily become incomprehensible due to a
43 drop of water touching the paper, just like her attempts to write poetry and create works of art using her own words, because the moment she tries to express a feeling it is tainted and spoiled by her husband as he kills her brutally and it is also consumed by biographers like Morton Jimroy or they are rewritten and, hence exploited by publishers like Frederic Cruzzi. Thus, Mary Swann’s silent efforts to write poems are similar to building sand castles next to a stormy sea because her poetry “is on the verge of being legitimated and so transformed into symbolic power” (Eagleton, 2003: 315), in other words, her identity and her poetry is stolen away from her by scholars and critics in order to fit her into the literary canon where there are “few positions for working-class, rural, female writers” (Eagleton, 2003: 316), in order to maintain their authority within the scope of critics and scholars. As the section ends, it is understood that there are only ten days left until the symposium and the remaining four copies of Swann’s Songs are stolen from Cruzzi’s house. In fact, all through the five sections, every single document about Swann is observed to be lost: At the very beginning of the first section Sarah Maloney loses the notebook of Mary, which according to Maloney consists of “nothing more than the ups-and-downs accounting of a farmer’s wife” (Shields, 1993: 49). And later on Jimroy’s luggage is lost and found in which there are some documents and a photograph of Swann and finally the four copies of Mary Swann’s book are stolen from Cruzzi’s house. As a matter of fact the absence of the copies of Swann’s Songs cannot necessarily be considered a loss of documents pertaining to Mary Swann’s literary identity since her literary creations have already been demolished by Frederic Cruzzi as he, together with his wife, has altered the original manuscripts and even decided the title of the book of his own choice. Hence, the words of a female artist who has an attempt to create a work of art are observed to be literally lost just like Mary Swann’s identity is lost and forgotten as her life and identity are rewritten again and again by the scholarly people. Thus, “Swann’s body of work is dismembered, like her physical body.” (Sweeney, 1993: 24).
44 The last section focuses on The Swann Symposium which is to take place in The Harbourview Hotel, Toronto. Being the final part, it displays in detail how all of the characters leave their houses and reach the symposium. One of the most significant issues that catches attention is the way they are narrated. To be more specific, the narration of each character’s acts is presented as if they are characters from a movie screen:
The Swann Symposium is a film lasting approximately 120 minutes. The main characters, Sarah Maloney, Morton Jimroy, Rose Hindmarch, and Frederic Cruzzi, are fictional creations, as is the tragic Mary Swann, poéte naïve, of rural Ontario…(Shields, 1993: 231)
The ongoing emphasis on the fictionalization of each character, as they reconstruct not only Mary Swann’s identity but also themselves in their interaction with other people such as Rose’s conversation with Jimroy as to her friendship with Mary Swann or Cruzzi’s letters each of which reflects different selves of Frederic (some being made up identities), is reinforced even more clearly at this point in the novel. To be more specific, the acts and discourses of each character have, up to this point, shown the contrived nature of identity and now it reaches its climax with regard to the narration of the final part. The people who are gathering for The Swann Symposium are completely fictionalised, and so their reality which has already has been reflected to be on slippery grounds is more insistently shown by the “…more playfully self-reflexive…form of an imaginary screen play.” (Sweeney, 1993: 23). As each person arrives at the symposium, their speeches and the events that take place during the gathering show how Mary Swann is just a tool for the critics and scholars to reach their own goal of creating a “Swann industry.” (Shields, 1993: 299). In fact, during their stay at the Harbourview Hotel for the symposium, the scene where all of the people introduced in the first four sections of the novel come together in Sarah Maloney’s room and discuss whether the lost notebook of Swann has in fact been stolen, the motive behind all the effort spent until The Swann Symposium comes to the fore:
Rose: You know what I think? ...I think it’s an inside job…
45 Sarah: Someone here? Attending the symposium? ...But why would anyone — ? Jimroy: Someone who wants to corner the available material. Cut us out, all of us, as Swann scholars. Cruzzi:… I think it’s more likely to be— Rose:… Money! Cruzzi: yes, I would agree, money. Jimroy: I still don’t see how— Sarah: I don’t either. Whoever is cornering the market won’t have any market to sell to. I mean, there is no Swann industry if there are no Swann texts. (Shields, 1993: 298-9)
Although, they refer to themselves as Swann scholars, they are in fact not different from the thief they assume to have planned selling the book to the market since Sarah who believes that even if the thief is aiming to sell the notebook as a commodity to the market, he will not be successful due to the fact that Mary Swann’s texts have not yet been distributed to the shops, and thus Mary Swann’s works have not yet been turned into a commodity to be consumed by the industry. Her statement can also be considered as Ironic as well because all of these scholars, critics, including the non-scholar Rose Hindmarch are already creating a Swann industry regardless of the original texts which are rewritten and completely constructed by them. The book copies, Swann’s Songs, which they attach importance to and worry about its being stolen or lost are merely reconstructions of Mary Swann’s manuscripts. Thus, they are establishing the market on their own creation of Mary Swann without the original texts, without Mary Swann with her real life-story and works of art. Besides, they are disregarding the original texts, the fact which is witnessed when Sarah Maloney refers to the notebook of Swann being a “disappointment” (Shields, 1993: 50) or Frederic Cruzzi refers to the original manuscripts of Swann as “clutter of paper [or]…heap of scraps” (Shields, 1993: 192).
In fact, another proof as to how they present Mary Swann to the literary market by idealising her becomes clear during Jimroy’s presentation in The Swann Symposium. Here, he associates Mary Swann with famous authors like Emily Dickenson and refers to her as an “international voice.” (Shields, 1993: 257) and as the novel proceeds, a forty year-old scholar called Syd Buswell makes
46 a true statement about Swann’s circumstances, Jimroy’s reaction is noteworthy with regard to his idealization of the poet Mary Swann which becomes apparent:
…I am simply saying what we all know. That the Nadaeu Public library cannot have provided serious nourishment to the mind of a poet like—…you point to the parallels between Swann and Emily Dickenson and you suggest— …All I want to say, and then I promise to pipe down, is that the resources of the Nadaeu Public library cannot seriously be considered as an influence. (Shields, 1993: 259-261)
However much Syd Buswell’s accusations seem to be directed to the public library of Nadaeu, Buswell, in fact, it also points to the constructed nature of Mary Swann’s biography in Morton’s associations. Indeed, Jimroy cannot find a justification for his claim that Swann is influenced by artists like Dickenson. In fact, the only way he can support his statement as to Swann being an international voice at this point is observed to be his interview with Swann’s daughter Frances who told him that her mother “was familiar with that genre of verse commonly known as mother goose.” (Shields, 1993: 261). However, as Jimroy tries to support Mary Swann with this factual information as to her reading habits, he seems to have lost his authority over his previous statement that Mary Swann is an international voice. And this statement which, according to Jimroy already has freed her “from the bolted confines of regionalism” (Shields, 1993: 257) loses its validity by his own very words that Mary Swann was reading children’s story books. Hence, people react to his weak explanation and Willard Lang, as the organiser of the symposium finds remedy in having a short break serving them coffee. Thus, the degree of Jimroy’s idealization of the poet becomes more apparent since factual information as to the poet falls short to present her as a significant female author to the public as it only leads people like Syd Buswell into “an appalled laugh” (Shields, 1993: 261). His efforts of idealizing Swann, also shows how much Morton Jimroy is a part of the existing system as well since as a scholarly male authority this is perhaps one of the few ways of keeping his successful title as an experienced biographer. From a wider perspective, the idealization of Swann’s work and identity does not only serve Morton Jimroy’s ends but also it is necessary for the success of the conference which “depend[s] on
47 establishing at least an adequate fit, for there is no point in having a literary conference on a figure who is judged to have no literary dispositions.” (Eagleton, 2003: 316). Thus, her idealization and the reconstruction of her identity by critics, scholars and biographers become essential in order to keep the existing literary industry going regardless of concerns like the necessity for art not to be tainted and used for commercial ends. On the other hand, each male like Syd Buswell or Morton Jimroy are looking for a ‘serious’ figure to have great influence on Mary Swann as an artist, they do not however, all through the novel focus on her inborn ability as a unique reason for her success. Thus, Swann’s whole existence turns out to be nothing but a dream, a figment of the imagination of those who are after her once pure soul which they wanted to make use of to bring “elucidation and grace” (Shields, 1993: 49) to their lives in order to survive within their prestigious and utilitarian lives. In fact, this incident can be considered as a microcosm of what ends the novel since Swann’s true self is observed never to have existed at all. On the contrary, it is reshaped and ended, from the beginning to the end, mostly in the hands of different male figures such as her husband Angus Swann and scholars and critics like Frederic Cruzzi and Jimroy as well as females who act in conformity with the requirements of the system established and maintained by the needs of those males:
A meeting is in session, but there is no one at the lectern and no one, seemingly in charge. People are seated in a sort of circle, speaking out, offering up remembered lines of poetry, laboriously reassembling one of Mary Swann’s poems. Sarah is writing, a clipboard on her knee… Buswell: We all agree, then, on the first lines. Merry Eyes: Yes, that’s it. Did you get that down?...Man with outside afro: Second line?... It is a run-on line, I’m almost sure. “It sometimes happens when lookingfor/Lost objects, a book, a picture or”. Crinkled Forehead: That’s it, I’m positive. Sarah: Close, anyway. What comes next?... (Shields, 1993: 310-1)
As a matter of fact, as the original manuscripts have been thrown into thrash with fish slime and destroyed by Cruzzi’s wife and, though accidentally, have been wasted away or as the original notebook of Swann which is given to Sarah by Rose Hindmarch gets lost, her whole identity is stolen away from Swann. Then
48 her poetry is brought together in the form of a book, Swann’s Songs, which, to a great extent, consists of the rhymes and phrases of Hildë whose own poetry disappointed her husband Cruzzi before since they “had no edges, no hardness…no quality” (Shields, 1993: 204). This is how Swann’s Songs emerges. This is how Mary Swann becomes the symbol of a lost identity, lost soul, lost female authority as a woman and a poet. On the other hand, all these people’s search for the original, their unending quest to get the original copies of Swann’s work or their attempts to comment on her work as if it is a unique piece of work of art clearly brings forth the post-modern concept of the futility of the belief in originality. The scene becomes a parody of the post-modern disbelief in the original since as also Roland Barthes states:
A text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (Barthes, 1968: 1468)
Finally, we see how Sarah and some other people form a circle and start bringing together bits and pieces of the lines they remember from Mary Swann’s poems. This reconstruction can only be considered as the rewriting of what has already been changed by scholars after the death of Mary Swann. All of the people who are working on Swann’s poetry as they form a circle seem to be united. There is a sense of togetherness as they help each other to remember lines and phrases of some poetry. They are together in this act of rewriting Swann while she is losing her whole identity. And they are not aware of the fact that as scholars, they are getting away from the concept of the value of art, even as at one point Cruzzi refers to Sarah, Jimroy and Rose “comrades” (Shields, 1993: 302) when they are looking for the stolen book of Mary as if they are taking part in a political act. Hence, as they “reinvent, retrace, re-imagine, remake” (Hansson, 2003: 356) Mary Swann’s works of art, they silence her, one more time, for eternity after her husband. In other words, Mary Swann is both metaphorically and physically killed by the patriarchal and capitalist society which constructs another identity
49 for her to their own taste and requirements. Thus, as the novel ends, it leaves us with the death of the author who, as an already dead self, loses all hope of being resurrected by her works of art since they are lying in the waste basket of Cruzzi, the scholarly male, with fishbone and slime waiting for their final destination which is eternal dissolution.
50 Chapter III:
LADY ORACLE: The Self-written Death of Joan Foster Delacourt
Mary Swann, from the beginning to the end of the novel Mary Swann by Carol Shields, appears as a dead self who is both physically killed by the husband and metaphorically by the society that constantly attempts to limit and reduce her, as her works of art and life story are reconstructed in the hands of the people who are serving the system, and taking away Swann’s identity from her for the benefit of the market place needs. The woman’s identity stolen away from the female is taken a step further in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle as the protagonist Joan Foster, a female Costume Gothic writer plans her own death and leaving her hometown Toronto, escapes to Terremoto:
I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it… I wanted my death, by contrast to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe…[n]o trumpets, no megaphones, no spangles…[t]he trick was to disappear without a trace, leaving behind me the shadow of a corpse, a shadow everyone would mistake for solid reality. (Atwood, 1998: 3)
At first sight, Joan gives the impression of a woman who is unable to control the events in her life and has escaped to Terremoto, a small Italian town, where she can relax and get rid of her past which seems to have annoyed her to the degree to plan her own death. She does not want to catch the attention of anyone, and therefore prefers a silent disappearance leaving behind her only a shadow. Even from the opening lines of the novel it is possible to see how Joan reconstructs a reality for her own self and for the others. She creates an image of death, leaving behind only a shadow, a reflection which will become a constructed reality for the people who know who she is. They will think that Joan Foster is not alive anymore and perhaps mourn her death, the police will search for her dead body which in solid reality never exists whereas they will only be experiencing the story she has made up as she writes her own death reshaping reality.
51 In her first days of Terremoto, Joan Foster is also observed to be an unhappy woman since she keeps remembering her husband Arthur whom she has left behind not informing him about her pretence death and escape to Terremoto, a place where she and her husband have lived for a short time before. As a “dead entity”, she plans to go to Rome and buy herself a hair-dye and change her hair- colour which is normally red and she wants to buy herself a typewriter as she is a Costume Gothic writer. Her pretence death also brings about an ironical new self since she also uses the name Louisa K. Delacourt which belongs to her dead aunt. Thus, even from the very beginning of the novel, Joan Foster seems to be assimilated by the existing system which is reflected in her deliberate destruction of the self and however much she seems to have found refuge in another reality she herself creates, her planned death indicates a metaphorical and contrived one, and hence, suggests how the female victimizes herself when she cannot cope with the constructed gender roles assigned on her as a female. In other words, even though she somehow is seen to deny to put on the roles assigned to her as a female and, as Linda Tucker suggests in her book Textual Escap(e)ades, escape from “containment in stereotypical role expectations” (Tucker, 1994: 37), still she clearly cannot escape but be a part of it beginning from childhood to her adulthood which is more clearly displayed as she starts thinking about her childhood years in Toronto:
My mother named me after Joan Crawford…Did she name me after Joan Crawford because she wanted me to be like the screen characters she played—beautiful, ambitious, ruthless, destructive to men— or because she wanted me to be successful? Did she give me someone else’s name because she wanted me never to have a name of my own? Come to think of it, Joan Crawford didn’t have a name of it either. Her real name was Lucille LeSueur…[w]hen I was eight or nine and my mother would look at me and say musingly, “To think that I named you after Joan Crawford,” my stomach would contract and plummet and I would be overcome with shame; I knew I was being reproached,…Joan Crawford was thin. I was not, and this is one of the things my mother never quite forgave me. (Atwood, 1998: 38-9)
Joan’s mother, Frances Foster, catches attention with her attitude towards Joan even with the way she names her daughter. She is seen to be a female figure
52 who has already become one of the members of the existing system since she constructs an identity for her child even before she was born. She gives Joan not simply the name of an actress who is successful and beautiful but she names Joan after a movie screen character whose real name is Lucille LeSueur, the ruthless and male destructing personality of whom is only limited to the scenario of the films or series she performs in. Thus, Joan carries the name of a fictional character. Besides, with regard to her sarcastic language, Frances draws a completely opposing image of a mother who is supposed to love and support her child as a female, as a part of her flesh and bone. As she humiliates Joan due to her appearance and her plump figure, she in a way not only reproaches Foster for her looks but for her failure of not becoming the person that she tries to make of Joan which is more fitting to the requirements and norms of the male-oriented system, that is apparently a thinner and a more charming little girl who will grow up to be an attention-grabbing lady ready to be desired by men and be hopefully turned into the beautiful wife. Hence, Frances does not seem to accept her for who she is but trying to impose on her the female figure she wants to see her in. In other words, the mother is in a way trying to reshape her identity beginning from her very birth to her childhood years. What is more, she even refuses to take pictures of her own daughter when she reaches six years of age due to the fact that Joan “fail[s] to lose what is referred to as baby fat… [and] [Frances] no longer want[s] her growth to be recorded.” (Atwood, 1998: 39). The mother reproaches her for what she cannot be and makes her feel ashamed of it. She wants to recreate her according to the standards she is also taught by the society since the mother also is brought up by a “very strict, very religious family” (Atwood, 1998: 64). Also, Joan later learns that even though her mother runs away from home when she is sixteen, still she cannot help but conform to the rules of society by getting married to a man whom she does not love very much and who “goes off to war, leaving her pregnant” (Atwood, 1998: 65) and not returning until Joan reaches five years of age. Thus, however much she is a female who is expected to accept her daughter for who she really is, Frances becomes one of the first people who tries, perhaps even harder than Joan’s father, to reshape her according not
53 only to her requirements but also society’s standards of a female’s beauty. Even in the times when the father, a male figure, is considered “simply an absence” (Atwood, 1998: 65), a female pushes her daughter to reconstruct her identity assimilating her to the requirements of society.
In fact, in her following acts, Frances’s imposition of who she wants Joan to become becomes more apparent as she enrols her to a dancing school:
Miss Flegg , who was almost slender and disapproving as my mother, taught tap dancing and ballet…[m]y mother took this step partly because it was fashionable to enrol seven-year-old girls—and partly because she thought it would make me less chubby…Miss Flegg…she let herself go on the annual spring recital. The recital was mostly to impress the parents, but it was also to impress the little girls themselves so they would ask to be allowed to take lessons the next year. (Atwood, 1998: 39)
The attempts of the mother to enrol Joan in order to reshape her identity according to the preferences of society is more clear in Frances’s act of registering her daughter to the ballet classes since she wants her to be thinner and perhaps carry the mission of a ‘proper’ female identity who is slender in appearance and hence, in need of protection as opposed to her chubby image. In other words she wants to fit Joan into an identity familiarising her with an activity that only “girls could do.” (Atwood, 1998: 40). Besides, she does not just want to reconstruct her to become physically more acceptable within the mostly subconsciously insinuated norms of society, but she wants her to join a dancing school which apparently serves the capitalist system which is creating selves, little girls, who are seemingly involved in artistic facilities whereas they are obviously used in the recitals of Miss Flegg. For Miss Flegg uses them as baits to catch bigger fish from the sea since she organizes these recitals not only for making parents feel proud of their daughters, but also to earn more money by creating an impressive scene before the little girls’ eyes so that they may want to join her school the coming year. Thus, what Miss Flegg does is not very different from what Joan’s mother does to her. Miss Flegg uses Joan to earn more money and to keep her fame and status going in the existing system and Frances tries to reshape Joan into another
54 identity so that she can present her as a perfect production of her own rather than seeing her as an outcast or an object of shame that she even hides from her husband’s friends since “she [is] tired of having a teenage daughter who look[s] like a beluga whale.” (Atwood, 1998: 70).
From a wider perspective, Miss Flegg as a person who is supposed to be an artist and deal with art and creativity also turns out to be one other female who tries to reconstruct Joan’s identity in alliance with her mother Frances, since after Joan’s mother’s warning that she looks too fat in the costume that is designed for them to wear on stage, they do not let Joan wear her favourite butterfly costume on the recital day and instead, change it to a mothball costume which also requires Joan to wear a sign over her neck that says mothball:
The worst thing was that I still didn’t understand quite why this was being done to me, this humiliation disguised as a privilege…“This isn’t me,” I kept saying to myself, “they’re making me do it”… It’s true I had received more individual attention than others, but I wasn’t sure it was a kind I liked. Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? (Atwood, 1998: 46-7)
Joan’s inner reaction during her dance as a mothball rather than a butterfly becomes a clear manifestation of how her identity is stolen away from her by her mother, who deliberately points out her daughter’s unfitness and informs the teacher about it, and by her dance teacher Miss Flegg, who does whatever is required in order to gain respect in the eyes of the audience she is expecting to profit from the next semester by gaining new students. In other words, both females try to reshape her both physically by changing her costume and spiritually since Joan constructs another identity on stage dancing and acting out her part as if she is really enjoying her costume and the mothball role that is assigned to her. To be more specific, she hides her jealousy for the other girls in their butterfly costumes, she conceals her anger towards her mother and to her dance teacher behind her dance as she swings like a mothball on stage “concealed in the teddy- bear suit, which flop[s] about [her] and makes [her] sweat.” (Atwood, 1998: 46). Her dance becomes the unspoken language of Joan, her suppressed self that is
55 taken away from her and reconstructed in the form of a giant mothball. Thus, Joan becomes the victim of the system as her identity is torn into pieces by the two women’s acts.
As a matter of fact, as also stated by Linda Tucker, Joan experiences “the demotion from a transformational flying creature to a product intended for its destruction, [which] [is] cruel and traumatic for Joan.” (Tucker, 1994: 38). Hence, she not only experiences a disappointing experience as a little girl who likes to have the wings of a butterfly but also as a female she is reduced to an object and limited by the rules of the patriarchal system that does not allow a fat girl like her to be exposed to the eyes of society with a costume that is identified with “prescribed standards of beauty, which create attractive objects for male desires.” (Tucker, 1994: 39). And however much she seems to react to her mother “refusing to speak to her” (Atwood, 1998: 45) and shedding secret tears of pain, she herself cannot escape but become a part of the contrived gender roles as she thinks herself as unworthy since the first idea that comes up to her mind is that, perhaps, no one would like to marry a mothball when there are such delicate forms like the butterflies. Hence, however much she is tired of her mother’s restrictions such as not letting her dance as a plump butterfly or however much she states that this is not her true self, she cannot help but be a part of it as she “already link[s] the image of the butterfly to gendering processes” (Tucker, 1994: 39). As opposed to her inner fight through which she wants to expose her real self to the audience, she subconsciously accepts the notion that to have the status as a wife you have to have a butterfly’s delicacy and, even before that, marriage should be the ultimate goal of a young woman.
As the novel progresses, they move to a new house and her mother this time enrols her in Brownies. At first Joan really enjoys being a part of this group of people after her “dancing school fiasco.” (Atwood, 1998: 49). However, it is worth noting that the choice of the mother is to send her not to Brownies which is closer to their house but to the one where rich families’ children attend. Thus, the restrictive nature of the mother who, mostly, ignores Joan’s wishes comes to the
56 fore once again. As a mother, she decides what is good or bad for Joan disregarding her own identity and trying to shape it according to her own choices just like the impositions of the male-oriented society which determines how a male or a female is supposed to act or exist. Thus, she is a woman “who is containment and entrapment incarnate.” (Tucker, 1994: 37).
In fact, with regard to her education in Brownies, the mother does not turn out to be the only one who tries to reconstruct her identity in that even the songs they are taught to chant by heart during their education is nothing but an imposition of the roles the females are expected to adapt themselves to in order to survive as an appropriate female figure within the existing system. For instance, as Joan happily sings her part of the song out loud: “Here you see the laughing Gnomes, Helping mothers at our homes”, (Atwood, 1998: 51), the chanting proves how the female is assigned domesticity since the image of a young girl is strictly attached to images related to housework, to indoors. And it is possible to see how Joan is affected by these teachings as a little female figure when after that day she “tries to surprise her [mother]…as suggested in the Brownie handbook…bring[ing] her breakfast on a tray,…carry[ing] out the garbage can.” (Atwood, 1998: 51). Thus, Joan’s identity, her freedom of choice as to who she wants to become is almost taken away from her to such a degree that now she willingly reconstructs her existence, on a symbolical level, almost in the form of Victorian Era ladies who were considered as the angel in the house. However, the institution’s subconscious imposition of the housewife role on her is taken to another level for Joan with regard to her mother’s views about Joan in the house:
This wasn’t strictly true: I didn’t help my mother. I wasn’t allowed to… the only way I could have helped her to her satisfaction would have been to change into someone else…my mother didn’t approve of my free-form style of making beds,…she didn’t like scraping charcoal off the bottoms of pots when I tried to cook (“a cooked desert” was one Brownie test requirement)…(Atwood, 1998: 51)
The mother apparently does not approve of almost anything about Joan. She has to become another person, she has to give up on who she is in order to be
57 appreciated by her mother. Hence, her mother, as a female figure who herself has been trapped within the system by getting married to a man with whom she is not in love and giving birth to a child whom she did not really want, still tries to redefine Joan. The idea that Frances Delacourt is in fact as victimized as Joan is crucial since her life is all about being accepted by society as a married female figure. She tries to shape every single thing in her life conforming to the rules of society and thus, just like the new house “she ha[s] just finished getting into shape” (Atwood, 1998: 66), she wants to reshape Joan and turn her into an identity that is acceptable within the male-oriented system. Hence, even though Joan does not seem to do everything perfectly, the mother does not approve of her efforts either. Nevertheless, in both cases, whether she tries to become what Brownies define her to be or her mother’s requirements, still her identity is taken away from her and she is reconstructed according to the needs of society.
When she either helps her mother with the housework or tries to act in the way her mother wants her to be, she becomes another identity who cannot actualize her true self. Thus, she is trapped within different selves required by society represented, in this case, by her mother’s and the Brownies’ preferences of how a young female should be. Yet, as the daughter of a woman who “herself [is] the victim of entrapment [as] her marriage is a result of an unwanted pregnancy” (Atwood, 1998: 37), Joan seems to have found a way to resist to yield to this pressure on her that forces her to be somebody else. She uses her own body as a reaction against her mother by overeating and getting fatter each day as she reaches thirteen years of age:
By this time I was eating steadily, doggedly, stubbornly, anything I could get. The war between myself and my mother was on in earnest; the disputed territory was my body…I reacted to the diet booklets she left on my pillow, to the bribes of dresses she would give me if I would reduce to fit them…I rose like a dough, my body advanced inch by inch towards her across the dining room table, in this at least I was undefeated. (Atwood, 1998: 66)
As Joan fills her body like a trashcan eating every single thing that she can get, it is obvious that the degree of her greed goes beyond her hunger or her capacity to
58 eat. She fills in her stomach as if she is to take revenge from her mother who wants to control her life and identity. The mother, although another female figure, becomes some kind of an enemy that Joan has to defeat in order to survive. As a matter of fact, Joan does not openly fight with her mother, she is not seen as a daughter shouting or swearing at her mother, instead, she is, as Madeleine Davies states, “locked in a vicious silent war with her mother where Joan’s weapon of choice is fat, Joan’s aggressively bloated body is a subversive text.” (Davies, 2006: 65). Hence, at first sight, Joan’s physical existence, her enlarging body seems to have become a tool of communication, the female’s language that she uses to oppose the existing patriarchal system. However, as Joan turns her body into somewhat a rebellious language to oppose the identity that her mother and society are trying to impose on her, she, in fact, cannot help but become a part of it by her very own act since the deliberate action of eating in order to defeat her mother, the passive aggressive reaction that speaks to the mother with her silently screaming body, once again, is merely Joan’s conscious act of reconstructing an identity for herself that she can use against her mother. In other words, she, through this deliberate act of changing her physical appearance, is in fact performing another form of (self)destruction. Thus, as she gets fatter, she destroys her own identity and rebuilds another one that she believes will beat her mother’s power on her. Therefore, although she believes that this reactionary attitude will let her escape from becoming somebody else- somebody like her mother who tries to reshape her into what she believes is right- Joan annihilates her own self by creating another identity for herself and hence, what she does to herself seems not different at all from what her mother, Miss Flegg and Brown Owl (the leader of Brownies) do to her as they try to reshape her according to the preferences and needs of their own selves.
As a matter of fact, getting fat does not seem to be the only way through which Joan fights against the system. As she becomes a high school student, she has her allowance from her mother in order to buy herself different types of dresses:
59 At this time my mother gave me a clothing allowance, as an incentive to reduce. She thought I should buy clothes that would make me less conspicuous, the dark dresses with tiny polka-dots and vertical stripes… [i]nstead I sought out for clothes of a peculiar and offensive hideousness…[o]nce, when I arrived home in a lime-green car coat with toggles down the front…[m]y mother started to cry…[she]had never cried where I could see her and I was dismayed, but elated too at this evidence of my power, my only power. I had defeated her: I wouldn’t ever let her make me over in her own image…[I] stomped past her, up to my room feeling quite satisfied with myself. (Atwood, 1998: 83-4)
In order to escape from the identity, the person her mother is trying to create out of her, Joan builds up an image for herself. She chooses her dressing style that obviously her mother will detest and feel upset about. However, by acting contrary to her mother’s wishes, she recreates herself in a form that exposes only a reactionary self against the mother. The answer to the question as to who Joan is still remains a mystery even to her own self. She deliberately reconstructs an identity to defeat her mother and to subconsciously destroy her own self. In other words, as Madeline Davies also states: “Joan’s fashion show…rewrites femininity in fleshy terms: here her inflated body speaks volumes and it does so without saying a word.” (Davies, 2006: 65). Nevertheless, Joan’s fleshy language cannot speak purely of a female’s language. It still turns into what she escapes from since the way she acts and looks are far away from being her own self, it is just an act of redefining herself with what her mother will object to. It is a reaction against the male-oriented system saying no to being shaped according to another person’s choices yet it cannot prevent her to take refuge in an identity she reconstructs for her own by demolishing her own identity. It is also true, however, that when her mother wants Joan to reduce, it is not only to reduce Joan physically, but it is also a reduction of Joan’s power to be herself because except for her body, her mother seems to have complete control over her life and personality. Her mother does not let her have a pet inside the house, or she decides whether Joan is to go to a girls’ school or whether she is to sit in the living room with them when they have guests inside the house. Still, both the mother and Joan seem to have been a part of the existing system already building up walls around themselves or against each other
60 since Frances builds a self for her own as she tries to keep a marriage she does not seem to fit into very much and takes it out on Joan and alcohol, while Joan reconstructs a self for her own in order to let her mother down and prove she is not what her mother wants her to see. Thus, as females they become both the victims and victimizers of the patriarchal system and, clearly, Joan does not let herself “be diminished,…by a navy-blue polka-dot sack” (Atwood, 1998: 84), but she diminishes as she exposes herself in a constructed form against her mother.
On the other hand, Joan’s high school years with regard to her relationship with her friends are significant in terms of throwing a light on how much she really can be her own self away from her mother’s impositions and her attempts of reconstructing her identity since Joan “play[s] kindly aunt and wise-woman to a number of the pancake-madeup, cashmere-sweatered, pointy breasted girls in the class. It [is] for this reason that the yearbook say[s] such cozy things about [her].” (Atwood, 1998: 89). Thus, in order to be socially accepted by her friends, she reshapes her identity pretending to be another person. She reconstructs a self completely different from the passive-aggressive Joan at home. She presents a contrived self to her friends who understands their problems with their boyfriends and when they call her to inform Joan about the state of their private affairs, she acts “as though she [is] thrilled and delighted and could hardly wait to find out.” (Atwood, 1998: 90). Thus, she becomes a fictionalized self by her own will just in order to be accepted, respected and to be able to graduate from the Braeside high school without having any trouble. She, in a way, turns herself into a selfless self, putting on different roles at home with her mother and at school with her friends. Besides, as she is not invited to any of the parties during her high school years, and, in her own words, “regarded as being above [fleshy] desires” (Atwood, 1998: 91), how much she gives up on her own self and hides behind a constructed one becomes more apparent with her definition of the self:
I knew what they thought about each other and what they said behind each other’s backs. But they guessed nothing about me; I was a sponge, I drank it all in but gave nothing out, despite the temptation to tell everything, all my hatred and jealousy, to reveal myself as the
61 duplicitous monster I knew myself to be. I could just barely stand it. (Atwood, 1998: 91)
Joan’s awareness of hiding her true self behind a benevolent elderly figure in her relationship with her friends strengthen the notion as to her multiplicity of selves. She becomes the symbol of the silent female who is entrapped within the patriarchal order that steals away her alternative to be her true self and leads her to recreate identities in order to present herself appropriately in the society she lives in. In other words, her reactionary self constructed by Joan against her mother so as to liberate herself from the restraints of an imposed self is resurrected in Joan’s attempts to get along with her ‘friends’ through her high school years. She becomes a sponge reshaping her identity to be approved by her environment and graduating without having any troubles with them like the other fat girls at school one of whom is continuously bullied by boys calling her “fatty” (Atwood, 1998: 90). Thus, no matter how hard she tries, and no matter how much she is aware of the fact that she acts hypocritical in her pretence loving and caring manners, she cannot help but introduce an artificial self, a fictionalized one in order to survive within the existing system as a female.
Throughout her childhood, the only person with whom Joan feels herself free from all the rules and regulations of the people who surround her and try to reshape her identity is Aunt Lou. Aunt Lou appears as a middle-aged plump female who lives alone in her old apartment after having been dumped by a gambling husband who has suddenly left her alone. She likes spending time with Joan. As opposed to her own mother who gets angry when Joan cries and who considers “tears [as] an evidence of stupidity” (Atwood, 1998: 75), Aunt Lou appears as a woman who is even closer to Joan than her own mother, as someone who understands and listens to her ideas carefully in an understanding manner. Joan loves to spend time with her aunt, especially the times when she takes Joan to movies:
Aunt Lou…loved them, especially the ones that made you cry; she didn’t think a movie was much good unless it made you cry…I wept also, and these binges of approved snivelling were among the happiest
62 moments of my childhood…[w]e would settle down in the furry, soothing darkness…as the inflated heroines floating before us on the screen were put through the wringer. (Atwood, 1998: 77-8)
Joan’s relationship with Aunt Louisa Delacourt seems to be much more different since Aunt Lou does not seem to restrict Joan as her mother does. As Joan cries next to Aunt Lou watching a film, she draws the image of a little girl who is not afraid to express her real emotions, her true self. In other words, as also stated by Nathalie Cooke, Joan seems to have found “a surrogate mother who…embodies everything that her mother is not” (Cooke, 2004: 81) since Joan is free to eat however much she likes to next to her, she can ask her some questions as to her marriage life or her job without being afraid as opposed to her mother for whom everything should be “static and dustless and final.” (Atwood, 1998: 66).
Yet, however much she seems to have escaped from her mother’s restraints and she is happy to have found someone who can truly approve of her display of true emotions, Aunt Lou does not seem to offer a world much different from the other figures around her since the films they watch with Aunt Lou is all about a constructed world and characters that present Joan with female figures who “cope with an alcoholic husband [or] [a] [red-haired] ballet dancer torn between her career and her husband.” (Atwood, 1998: 78). Thus, the aunt, perhaps subconsciously, just opens the way for her to be confronted with fictionalized characters that Joan can associate herself with in the future and apparently, after watching the same movie with Aunt Lou for the forth time, Joan seems to have found a character she can identify herself with as she states openly that she wants to have the life she sees on the movie screen: “to be married to a handsome orchestra conductor.” (Atwood, 1998: 78). Thus, even though Joan has the desire to run away from the imposed selves on her by her teachers and her mother, her escape ends in her wish to become one of the fictionalized characters, to marry a handsome man and be a wife appropriate to the very system she is in as she is exposed to nothing but “conventional romantic images and narratives” (Tucker, 1994: 40) which are also shaped and introduced to the audience as products keeping the continuation of the market with regard to their plots.
63 As the novel proceeds, one other thing that catches attention as to Aunt Lou is her profession. She tells Joan that she is the head of public relations. However, with regard to how Joan learns what her aunt does and the details the aunt tells Joan about her job is worth considering since it throws a light on how Louisa Delacourt belongs to the patriarchal order that reduces the female into objects and reconstructs them as a tool to satisfy the commercial needs:
“Here,” said my mother, “I suppose it’s time you read this,”…a pink booklet…[y]ou are growing up, the cover said…[t]here are also some things about it which can be puzzling. One of them is menstruation. At the bottom of the page was a picture of Aunt Lou, smiling maternally but professionally…[u]nderneath the letter was her signature: “Sincerely yours, Louisa K. Delacourt. I asked about [the] [book] next time I saw her…[t]hat was written by the advertising… “Well” she said,… I answer the letters…requests for advice…[g]irls wanting to know where their vagina is and things like that…[h]alf the time I don’t know what to say… “They pay well and it’s a friendly office. I’ve got nothing to complain about.” (Atwood, 1998: 81-2)
Aunt Lou, as a woman who seems to set an example for Joan and who seems to live an independent life and manages to be her own self up to this point, turns out to be just another fictionalized self, a constructed identity who is reshaped according to the needs of the market since she is reduced to a photograph at the back of a book that instructs young girls as to the stages of adolescence. Her existence is used on the cover of a book which she has not even written. Thus, perhaps with the benevolent look on her face, with her maternal smile she is nothing but a fictionalized self whose femininity is taken away from her and replaced with that of a figure to attract the attention of the other female and increase the sales of the book as she sincerely becomes a reconstructed tool for the continuation of the commercial cycle. On the other hand, as Aunt Lou writes advice to young girls as to their sexual problems or their questions pertaining to their physicality, she pretends to be a professional as she provides them with the necessary information by having help from her secretary and sometimes not having an idea as to what to say. Thus, she reconstructs an identity for herself as she replies the letters of the people who are in need of the help of a professional; a doctor. However, it is also significant to note that Aunt Lou is doing all this work
64 for the sake of earning money, becoming the part of the capitalist, male-oriented system and benefiting from it. Hence, Joan as a young girl who escapes from becoming her mother, once again, is exposed to an already constructed femininity as she reads the book written by the advertising company and perhaps building her femininity on a book which is reshaped by the existing patriarchal system.
From a wider perspective, her mother’s only way of communication with her about becoming a woman is through this commercial compact book of information. Hence, the women’s communication with regard to mother and daughter relationship is taken to a degree where the book “You are Growing Up…articulates female functions that Joan’s mother fail[s] to articulate.” (Tucker, 1994: 39). The childhood memories of Joan with her aunt displays how much Aunt Lou becomes a symbol of escape and freedom for her since Joan identifies herself with her aunt to the point where she deliberately messes up her room thinking that “disorder mean[s] you could do what you like.” (Atwood, 1998: 79). Hence, trying to escape from becoming a person her mother approves of she tries to have an identity similar to that of Aunt Lou. However, no matter how much Aunt Lou seems to understand Joan, never judging her for her eating habits or clothes and even answering her questions as to her private life, such as her previous marriage with a gambler at the age of nineteen, still Aunt Lou also reshapes Joan according to the society’s standards as well, as in the case of her taking Joan to Canadian National Exhibition in the summers:
Aunt Lou and I loved it… the shouting barkers and the pipe bands and the wads of pink cotton candy…but there were two tents Aunt Lou wouldn’t let me visit. One had women in harem costumes and enormous jutting breasts painted on it…the other was the Freak Show, and this tent had the fire-eater and the sword-sallower in it…and the fattest woman in the world. (Atwood, 1998: 86)
However much Aunt Lou seems to have built for herself a life that is of her own and states to Joan that this is who she is and “If other people can’t handle it, that’s their problem” (Atwood, 1998: 84), still refusing to let Joan into those two tents she restraints her from seeing what is not ‘normal’, acceptable for society. She
65 keeps Joan away from the display of what is considered to be weird and unusual. Thus, she takes her away from the visions she can identify herself with as a fat girl who is known to have recreated this self especially as a reaction to her mother.
In fact, “Aunt Lou’s censorship of certain circus acts” (Tucker, 1994: 40) continues with her heritage she leaves to Joan after her death since Joan can only get this money on condition that she loses one hundred pounds. Hence, while on the one hand it is an advantage for Joan to escape from her mother’s pressure and build an independent life of her own, Aunt Lou, also, restricts her by pushing her to lose weight in order to have the amount of money she has left to her. Thus, Aunt Lou, somewhat, becomes similar to Joan’s mother wishing her to destroy the vision which now -however much constructed- Joan defines herself with. On a symbolical level, she wants Joan to demolish the identity Joan has constructed against her mother and become what Aunt Lou and, from a wider perspective, what the system will approve of her to be. As Lindsey Tucker comments, “[w]hile she has been allowed (she thinks) an escape from an older self… [she] struggle[s] to transform herself into the butterfly— the image that conforms to the cultural myth about women’s shape.” (Tucker, 1994: 40). Therefore, once again, Joan has to become one other self in order to live a life of her own and away from her mother.
As she loses weight at nineteen years of age, the contrived nature of both her former self and her present one becomes more clear:
I’d never developed the usual female fears: fear of intruders, fear of bus stops and slowing cars…so when I shrank to normal size I had none of these fears, and I had to develop them artificially. I had to keep reminding myself: Don’t go there alone. Don’t go out at night. Eyes front. Don’t look, even if it interests you…(Atwood, 1998: 138)
Joan, hiding her fatty self, learns to become stronger in the male-oriented system. She does not feel the fear and pressure on her to be teased by men since they are after the butterfly image that she could never have become. However, with her
66 changing looks, she feels the need to reshape her personality in accordance with her thinner self. Thus, once again, she re-builds an identity to put on herself as a necessity for the survival of the new Joan. In fact, her attempts of creating a new and more timid identity as a female, sets an example as to how the male-oriented system forces the female to carry the burden of the roles that are assigned on them, learning to hide their feelings, pretending not to be interested even if they are and restricting their own selves.
Thus, Joan’s act of reshaping her identity becomes a clear manifestation of the constructed nature of gender roles which, on a symbolical level, bury the true reflection of their identities beneath their bodies. Hence, just like all the suppressed female identities hidden behind their shapely figures, Joan, in order to escape from the selves imposed on her both by her mother and by her environment, also victimizes her own self by constructing different selves, by finding refuge in multiple identities she does not belong to; therefore, the system she very much resents and escapes becomes her shelter and victimizer at the same time.
The moment she leaves her mother’s house in Toronto, she opens a bank account, using her aunt’s name, with the money she has earned from the jobs she has worked during her high school years, and she uses the same identity, Louisa Delacourt, as she checks into a new hotel room in Royal York Hotel as well. Clearly, her escape results in nothing but another self she forms for herself as she, somewhat, runs away from her mother’s constraints. Especially, the way she introduces herself on the phone to the landowner in order to hire a room on Isabella Street catches attention since, apart from using her aunt’s name, Joan presents herself as a “twenty-five year old office girl” (Atwood, 1998: 135) and, as Kim L. Worthington also states, she definitely proves to have “many different selves; she exists in a variety of subject positions, each defined by their situation in a variety of determining communities, relationships.” (Worthington, 1996: 299).
67 Receiving her aunt’s heritage, Joan moves to England and as she is involved in a relationship with a forty-one year old man named Tadeo Paul whom she calls The Polish Count, this really becomes the “formal beginning of her second self” (Atwood, 1998: 135) since from the very start of their affair, she builds up another self for her own and The Polish Count thinks that she is a young woman who has come to England to “study art at the art school.” (Atwood, 1998: 145). However, even though Joan learns about the fact that he has come to England escaping from the war in Poland leaving behind a mother and a daughter, she hides her past completely from him to the degree that The Polish Count finds out that she is a virgin only after she invites her to live with him and at that very night that he gets into bed with her. In fact, it is clear that even though Joan refers to him as The Polish Count, he is not a real one and it is just the fact that he “is aristocratic in background, a Polish exile who has escaped the Russians” (Tucker, 1994: 41) which leads Joan to call him as the count. Thus, she reshapes his identity since, perhaps, from the first time she sets foot on England she has expected a country where there are “castles and princesses.” (Atwood, 1998: 141) and in a way she reconstructs not only her own self and Paul’s but also the reality she is experiencing at the time as well.
As Joan and The Polish Count start living together, Paul also turns out to be quite different from what Joan has expected since he is understood to be a writer as well. In fact, Joan learns that he is the writer of the nurse novels using the female pseudonym Mavis Quilp and the reason why he writes these books catches attention:
On first arriving in England, he had still fancied himself a writer. He had written a three-volume epic…[h]e knew nothing of publishers…[t]hey rejected his novel…but they were impressed by the…quantity of his work. “You can turn it out, all right, mate, the man had told him. “Here’s a story line for you, write it up and keep it simple, a hundred quid. Fair enough?...[w]ith his new job at the bank he earned exactly enough to support himself,…the nurse novel money was extra, and he sent it to his mother and daughter in Poland. (Atwood, 1998: 152-3)
68 As a matter of fact, the first idealistic image of Paul as a writer seems not to have helped him to exist within the environment he is trying to survive. The fact that he has the ability to write a three-volume epic is almost left out since as opposed to his talent and knowledge as a writer, he has to create stories parallel to the needs of the market and hence, serve the capitalist system in order to keep his independent status as a male living alone in England and as a son and father who has to take care of his family in Poland. Therefore, he can only achieve success as long as he builds up his stories confirming with the wishes of his publisher combining the previously provided lines for him with his own epic to construct his new novels. Certainly, what he creates, combining his own epic with the ready-made words and lines of the publishers turns his attempts to create works of art only into products to serve the capitalist cycle. Thus, while on the one hand it shows how the male-oriented system victimizes not only the female but the male as well by forcing him to a somewhat mass-production of clichés, on the other hand Paul’s writing his nurse novels using a fake female identity sets proof as to how he is serving the system in order to earn money and keep his strong status within society. In other words, as he reconstructs his identity and presents himself to the market as Mavis Quilp, he becomes both the victim and the victimizer just like Joan Foster who keeps reconstructing her identity in order to survive as an independent female away from the restrictions of her past and yet getting stuck in fictionalized selves every time things get complicated (because after all, escaping from an identity in Toronto, leaving behind the aunt-like fat girl acting according to her mother and teacher’s preferences, she turns out to be “Paul’s mistress” (Atwood, 1998: 151).
One of the most important acts of hers during her relationship with The Polish Count is that she also starts writing novels that she names as Costume Gothics since the money she has received after Aunt Lou’s death begins to get less. Thus, she shapes her books not as an artist but parallel to the requirements of the publishers so as to earn a living. Besides, just like The Count, she uses a pseudonym while she creates her stories and as she uses her aunt’s name again,
69 Louisa K. Delacourt, she cannot help but become, professionally, a part of the male-oriented system as well since she reshapes her identity as she is presented to the readers with the name Louisa K. Delacourt. What is more, when the publishers ask for a picture from her in order to use at the cover of her novels she sends them her aunt’s picture with her own former self standing next to the aunt. Yet, as well as Joan’s continuous act of reshaping her own identity, the publisher’s acts also catch attention since even though they ask for the picture “to be used for publicity…this picture [is] never used [because] [t]he women who wrote [her] kind of book were supposed to look trim and healthy, with tastefully grayed hair.” (Atwood, 1998: 156). Hence, even the picture of the author of a work of art is edited according to the needs of the market place. And how the works of art and their writers are reconstructed by the publishers once again becomes visible when they ask Joan to omit some of the words from her novel and they pay her “hundred pounds”(Atwood, 1998: 156) in return for what is, clearly, not Joan’s but their own rewriting of an author’s work. On the other hand, Joan’s attempts to become an author turns out to be nothing more than attempts to rewrite as well since the first time she decides writing a Costume Gothic, her process of writing is worth noting:
I asked Paul to get me some samples of historical romances from Columbine Books, his publisher, and I sat to work. I joined the local library and took out a book on costume design through the ages. I made lists of words…I spent whole afternoons in the costume room of the Victoria and Albert museum…I thought if I could only get the clothes right, everything else would fall into line. And it did… (Atwood, 1998: 155)
Joan writes her books basing the plots on daily life, making lists of words, examining clothes which she thinks are suitable for her theme. She, in a way, reshapes what she sees in her daily routine and rewrites the stories of the previously constructed historical romances. She does not create any original work of art, on the contrary what she does is to present society with a rewritten form of her past life as she gives one of the characters “the features of Miss Flegg” (Atwood,1998: 155), her dancing school teacher. And considering the fact that
70 she does all this research and reconstructs what is already written so as to earn money, Joan’s escape from the constraints of the mother, of the institutions like the dancing school becomes only a parody of a woman looking for the true self or of someone who does not want to become what the system wants her to be. And however much Joan does not want to be a part of the system escaping to other lives, recreating selves as a friend through her educational life, as a lover, still she serves the system by all means as a writer producing rewritten clichés edited by the publishers, by becoming a married count’s mistress and by even becoming a silenced female figure who cannot ask her lover –The Polish Count- about the reasons why he keeps a revolver at home. And, once again, she realises that she has become an entrapped mistress since The Polish Count, similar to Joan’s mother, forces Joan to live her life within the limits he sets for her such as letting her “go nowhere except with him…[and][being] always home before he [is]” (Atwood, 1998: 159).
Thus, Joan, resisting to becoming what Paul wants her to be, takes refuge in an escape from him leaving a note saying “I have been making you unhappy and we cannot go on like this. It was not to be.” (Atwood, 1998: 169). Yet, once again, she leaves a note which is written not as a reflection of Joan’s true thoughts and feelings, but a note leaving The Polish Count with nothing but a deception since what she writes to Paul is a display of what Joan wants him to see her as a, yet, ex-lover because what she really wants to write to Paul is, in her words, “not dramatic enough.” (Atwood, 1998: 169). Thus, one more time Joan’s goodbye note becomes proof of her fictionalized self as a lover.
In fact, Joan’s relationship with Arthur which begins during her affair with Paul and gets official after she leaves The Polish Count and starts living with Arthur, is not very different from the previous one since she builds her relationship on lies as she presents herself to Arthur by reshaping her past and thus reconstructing a new identity. To begin with, she does not tell him that her first sexual experience has been with The Polish Count, instead she tells him another made up story about “being seduced under a pine tree at the age of
71 sixteen, by a summer camp sailing instructor” (Atwood, 1998: 147), although she has never been to a summer camp in her life. Thus, she does not only create an imaginary self for her own but she reconstructs her past making some additions, leaving out the parts she does not think Arthur will be fond of. Nevertheless, while she is, somewhat, rewriting her own life story, she is, on a symbolical level, building up a wall around her just to be approved by another male. Arthur, whom she sees as the man she has fallen in love with can only see her through her fictionalized self. Joan almost denies her whole existence when she tells Arthur that the female standing next to her Aunt Lou in one of the pictures is her other aunt Deirdre although it is Joan’s childhood self. What is more, she comments on the imaginary aunt’s character calling her a bitch. Thus, she destroys her own identity both physically and in terms of personality both now as well as retrospectively.
In fact, one of the most significant issues about Joan’s identity construction is the way she conceals her writer self from Arthur even after she moves in with him to his Earlscourt flat which Arthur shares with a New Zealander and an Indian:
I could find neither time nor space to work on Escape from Love…I kept the manuscript in a locked suitcase…[o]ne day I returned to find that the Indian had hocked out my typewriter. He’d repay me later…I didn’t have enough money left to get it out of the pawnshop myself, and I’d counted on at least two hundred pounds for the finished work…Arthur didn’t know about this problem… [i]n the fictitious past I’d constructed for his benefit I’d included a few items of truth, and I’d told him I had once been a waitress…and we laughed together over my politically misguided past. (Atwood, 1998: 171)
The most important thing that catches attention about Joan’s life is that, however much she rejects being shaped by the system or the authoritative figures like her mother, her teachers or Paul, and takes refuge in creating multiple selves of her own escaping them, still she feels the need to be appreciated as well. Although she earns her living as a Costume Gothic writer, she conceals this from Arthur as she knows that Arthur fights for political causes and will think of such
72 writing as useless since he wants her to deal with things in which she can “exercise her intelligence constructively” (Atwood, 1998: 210). Whereas Joan, seemingly objecting to become a part of the existing norms within society, earns her living by writing gothic romances and she turns her book writing into commerce by shaping her plot according to the needs of the publishers and editors who pay her at least two hundred pounds for the finished work. She serves the system as she also tears apart her whole identity with her own hands laughing with Arthur while talking to him over her politically misguided past and she cannot even tell Arthur her real profession. It is a secret which turns her into no more than an imaginary screen character while she is continuously in search of “the impossible goal of essential, fixed personal identity.” (Worthington, 1996: 298). On the other hand, when she states that the half-true stories she makes up about herself are for Arthur’s own good, she definitely conflicts with her own notion of freeing herself from the constraints of the system since whatever she does turns out to be acts done for appreciation and approval. She recreates herself in order to become someone that Arthur wants her to be as, after they get married, she “cook[s] dinners of vegetables in boilable plastic packages [and]…after the meal [she] would scrape the plates into the rooming house toilet”(Atwood, 1998: 208). Hence, she turns into a housewife taking care of her house, trying to put things into shape just like her mother whom she does not want to turn into does and thus, she reconstructs a wife self for the sake of Arthur although she is a bad cook and has never cooked in her previous life at all apart from some prevented attempts at her mother’s house. In other words, whether it be keeping her writer self from Arthur or constructing a life using her aunt’s name as a Costume Gothic writer, she is entrapped within the vicious circle that either one way or another prevents her from living a life free from the people or the institutions that try to reshape her according their contentment.
As the novel proceeds, Joan’s identity as a writer is taken to another level since she decides to use another method in creating her stories which is called the Automatic writing which puts her into some kind of a trance and makes her write
73 words out of her subconscious. In fact, the time she learns about this technique dates back to her previous years when in one of her childhood visits to church with Aunt Lou, Joan is informed by Leda Sprott, one of the church members, to have the gift to communicate with the dead and hence Joan decides to apply it to writing in order to write something different:
Arthur thought I was writing an essay on the sociology pottery for the university extension course I claimed to be taking… [t]hen I sat myself in front of the mirror and concentrate…[I] stared at the mirror, the mirror candle…[w]hen I would emerge from the trance…there would usually be a word, sometimes several words, occasionally even a sentence, on the notepad in front of me…I would stare at these words, trying to make sense of them; I would look them up in Roget’s Thesaurus… (Atwood, 1998: 221)
It is clear that Joan leads another life that she hides from Arthur creating an identity before his eyes as a scholar studying on papers and essays. However, behind closed doors, she finds another self, another identity that frees her from the restrictions of her daily routine. In other words, her attempts to free herself from the system, the ongoing restrictions which try to fit her into structures in order to define who she is continue. Automatic Writing belongs only to her, something about the female self of Joan that she herself cannot assign any definite meaning and that is perhaps because up to this point in her life, she has always run away from the constraints of being shaped according to other people’s desires, whereas however much she has founded other lives and other selves for her own, she has not taken a step further than becoming what Arthur or Paul has wanted her to be. Yet, this different technique seems to have given her another self, a special identity as a writer that no body else will own. The subconsciously written words turn her into some kind of an idealized image of the romantic female artist, god- like and superior as opposed to her Costume Gothic writer self which can only be considered as mass-production and which makes her nothing but a part of the male-oriented cycle since, after all, it is only a way of providing herself with financial support out of its sales and not freeing herself from the market-place needs.
74 As a matter of fact, within a post-modern and poststructuralist environment (context) where the impossibility of creating an original work of art is indisputable and where ‘true’ identities of characters and even the first-hand form of works of art are doomed to continuous rewriting and reconstruction, Automatic Writing becomes the symbol of a nostalgic search for the unique / the original. In other words, Joan becomes the kind of a Romantic artist who is considered as a mysterious, god-like figure, as an isolated and alienated identity who is superior to and away from the routine and corruption of daily life. As Maurice Beeb states with regard to the Ivory Tower tradition, “the artist is free, a detached spirit which looks down on the man from a distance…like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork…” (Beeb, 1964: 6-12). And what Joan creates as an artist by using the Automatic Writing becomes a parody of the romantic notion of art which is superior to ordinary man and cannot be defined by common experience. However, Joan’s attempt to create a work of art which is not tainted by the system falls short since she turns back to what the system offers her even in order to be able to define it, to make use of it to earn money. Thus, her work is to be redefined to serve the needs of the market as opposed to the first impression she creates as an artist trying the Automatic Writing. To be more specific, she herself cannot define these words; she tries to define them by using Roget’s Thesaurus which belongs to the very structured system she continuously feels the need to escape from. And the moment she decides to get her work published not with her pseudonym but as Joan Foster, as a female who can provide her readers with something of her own, something she believes to be out of her original, unique self, things are carried to another level. When she sends her work to a publishing company called Morton and Sturgess, the first signals of how her idealized writer self will be victimized and reshaped by the existing capitalist system becomes more apparent since in their meeting together with Joan, the two partners and the editor of the publishing company John Morton, Doug Sturgess and Colin Harper talk about Joan’s work of art as if it is some kind of a trade commodity:
75 “Yes,” said Colin. “We might take out the more, well…” “A bit could come out, here and there,” said Sturgess. “I mean there is some of it I don’t understand too much…” “I sort of like that,” Colin said. “It’s you know, Jungian…” …“It’s evident that this is a book that has something for everyone. My dear,” he said, turning to me, “we would be most happy to publish your book. (Atwood, 1998: 224-5)
Joan’s manuscript she wishes to be published is, somewhat, torn apart by the three men and, in a way, rewritten by them. As they cancel the parts which they think will not make any sense for the audience and keeping the ones to their own taste, they reshape it according to the market place needs. What is more, they define their approval of their favourite parts with that of the male psychologist Carl Jung. They redefine her work associating it with another scholarly male. Even when it comes to the title of the book, it is Doug Sturgess who points to one of the sections written by Joan and takes out the phrase Lady Oracle out of it and suggests that it is going to be a great title as he makes his final statement saying: “that’s it, I have a nose for them. The women’s movement, the occult, all of that…” (Atwood, 1998: 225). He talks about Lady Oracle as if it is a new type of food which will be packaged by their company and served to public so as to be consumed. They rewrite her work by making the necessary additions and omissions and turning it into a product. Thus, also, as Kim L. Worthington states, Lady Oracle, the newly rewritten book of Joan Foster becomes a clear display of “the repressed desire in conflict with social prescriptions.” (Worthington, 1996: 286).
As Lady Oracle is published, her attempt to share something belonging to her and original is destroyed as it is consumed within the marketing system by publishers. Joan is turned into more of a product and icon of the publishing companies when she is introduced to the media with her pictures taken for the cover of the book which she stands with a jacket written “modern love and the sexual battle”(Atwood, 1998: 233) on it. In fact, as Joan thinks the jacket blurb does not have any connection with the content of the book and Sturgess reassures her that as a publishing company they know what they are doing, it is obvious that Joan does not only appear on the back of the book as its author but as a
76 presentable icon to increase the sales. Thus, her identity is reconstructed for the market and she cannot escape but take part in it. Besides, Sturgess and Morton even publish some fake reviews by famous authorities in order to present Joan’s book and in fact, Joan, standing on the back of the book with fake reviews of appreciation, is “reduced to a seductive picture on the collection’s cover suggest[ing] that this unconscious, passive mode of writing is not in itself sufficient to affect political change.” (Atwood, 1998: 284). In other words, her words of self-exposition are turned into a product of consumption digested within the system rewritten according to its needs to keep the continuation of the existing political and economical equilibrium.
Moreover, as the promotion of her book continues and she appears on TV shows, for the first time she explains how she has written her book using the Automatic Writing. However, when she attempts to express the truth as to her own self, her exposition of her identity as an artist is thought to be done intentionally since when Joan apologises for revealing such a thing on a TV show, Sturgess does not even notice it as a revelation of truth; he believes that she has done it intentionally and that it has been “sensational” (Atwood, 1998: 237). Thus, Sturgess’s thoughts about Joan also depend on how he wants her to be. In his eyes, Joan is a newly produced good which he has appropriately reshaped and introduced to public. Hence, once again, Joan is reconstructed in relation with the public requirements since her inborn ability is perceived as a tactic to catch the attention of the public.
Besides, her confession of Automatic Writing leads her to being assigned the role of a fortune teller as people call Joan and “want to know how to get in touch with the other side…[want] [Joan] to foretell their future.” (Atwood, 1998: 249). Some people also write letters to her wishing her to help them for getting their work published. Therefore, Joan becomes a heterogeneous self open to be shaped according to people’s needs and preferences. Her writer identity is torn between the publishing company and the public requirements together with her identity she subconsciously gives up on as she is in an ongoing effort to “do
77 something [Arthur] would admire.” (Atwood, 1998: 24). Thus, however much she escapes from any kind of imposed selves upon her, her identity, her existence takes shape in other people’s hands as she is always redefined by them.
As she meets Royal Porcupine in a party thrown for her by the publishing company, her life takes a different turn:
He too had red hair, and he had an elegant moustache and beard, the moustache waxed and curled upward at the ends, the beard pointed. He was wearing a long black cloak and spats, and carrying a gold-headed cane, a pair of white gloves, and a top hat embroidered with porcupine quills. (Atwood, 1998: 238)
Royal Porcupine, apart from having the same hair-colour with Joan, reminds one of a fictional movie character with his waxed and pointed beard carrying porcupine quills on top of his head. He seems as if he has come out of an ancient period of time as well like a lord or a baron with his long cloak and cane. In fact, even his name is not the one given to him by his parents. He has it legally changed in court since he thinks this name defines him better as he is a Royalist and he believes that his name should reflect that. As to the porcupine, he believes it to be a better “national symbol” (Atwood, 1998: 239). Hence, “he has more deliberately constructed himself. Having the proper costumes…and has successfully escaped his own name…an entered into an earlier time period” (Tucker, 1994: 41). However, as a male who defines himself as an artist who exhibits dead animals freezing them in their original form and exposing them to public in glass containers, Royal Porcupine comes to the fore as a man who has recreated his own identity as a man and as an artist. His own self is nothing but a construction of his own. He is, somewhat, a man who, just like Joan planning her own death, destroys his own entity in order to be able to survive within the existing system. However much he seems to be trying to stay out of it with his ‘extraordinary’ understanding of art, still what he does is not far from recycling dead animals and presenting them to people trying to make money out of it. In other words, however much he is another vessel for Joan to redefine herself free from the restrictions of Arthur, the publishing company and society, still this time
78 she is somewhat entrapped in the world provided by the Royal Porcupine for her since the world they create for themselves is nothing but a fictionalized scene from a movie screen:
When I finally went on Sturgess’ trans-Canada tour, the Royal Porcupine came along…[s]ometimes we dressed up in middle-aged tourist outfits… and registered under assumed names. In Toronto I started going parties, not exactly, with him but five minutes before or after. We’d get other people to introduce us to each other. (Atwood, 1998: 257)
As they take on different roles, create different contexts as if it is the first time they meet with each other or they check in hotels with imaginary names pretending to be tourists, they take refuge in fictionalized selves and, in a way, annihilate their own existence. They start living in a reality they themselves construct and rewrite themselves over and over again, hence, on a symbolical level, their escape from the system ends in a euphoria they create for their own, causing their self-destruction.
Nevertheless, as they come back from the trans-Canada tour, their fictionalized lifestyle as secret lovers continues since every time Joan comes to Royal Porcupine, escaping from Arthur’s, on a symbolical level, vicious circle, she is confronted with different fantasies as they waltz in Royal Porcupine’s warehouse wearing “formal gowns of the fifties” (Atwood, 1998: 255), shoes and dresses they buy in junk shops. Thus, this secret affair seems to have provided both Joan and the Royal Porcupine with the freedom away from the constraints of the social order. However, as time passes, Royal Porcupine, with whom Joan feels so free and away from both Arthur’s restricting life and the public which is constraining her, turns out not to be very different from Arthur since the Royal Porcupine wants to get married with her and wants her to be with him for the rest of his life as he also leaves his Royal self aside becoming somewhat his Chuck Brewer self, he turns back to his previous looks cutting his hair, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, shaving his beard. And as he asks Joan to leave Arthur and move in with him, she decides to break up with him since she does not want him “to
79 become gray” (Atwood, 1998: 269), in other words, ordinary. In fact, her own statement pertaining to why she cannot live with Chuck is noteworthy:
I knew I couldn’t live with him. For him, reality and fantasy were the same thing, which meant that for him there was no reality. But for me it would mean there was no fantasy, and therefore no escape. (Atwood, 1998: 270)
What Joan wants, from the beginning of her childhood years up to her present life, is to liberate herself from all the restraints both in her private life and her social life. She stays away from her mother’s impositions by getting fatter and becoming what the mother does not want her to be, she escapes from becoming a girl who is made fun of at high school by presenting herself as an aunt-like, wise self, and hence, hiding her fat aggressive image behind her own construction of a mature school girl. As she feels she has become nothing but a mistress of Paul she escapes to Arthur’s arms with her scholarly image liberating herself by living a double life behind her closed bedroom door as she secretly writes her Costume Gothics under the name of another fictionalized self Louisa K. Delacourt. And when her contrived writer self is also made public when Lady Oracle comes out, she finds refuge in an affair with the Royal Porcupine who provides Joan with a completely fictionalized self and life. Thus, when the Royal Porcupine turns back to his ‘normal’ state and somewhat becomes Arthur Foster like, she perhaps feels trapped just like she always has whenever the system has gotten hold of her and has tried to reshape her into another successful best-seller writer or a wife who is supposed to take care of her man like a baby sitter, cooking and consoling him in times of need. And for this reason, she denies staying with Chuck Brewer and turns back to Arthur since, clearly, “[w]hile the Royal Porcupine is her most liberating lover, he, too, ends by entrapping and immobilizing her.” (Tucker, 1994: 42).
When Joan turns back to Arthur, who is not even aware of having been cheated, she also turns back to writing her Costume Gothics under the pseudonym Louisa K. Delacourt, which she has given a break during her affair with the Royal Porcupine. In fact, although mostly her gothic romance is written by Joan to earn
80 money and even though each of them are based on clichés like weak female characters chased by the male or the virtuous young girls rewarded by a successful marriage with noble men, still it is possible to see that her appropriately constructed novels become another way to rewrite herself since at times in her books “the gap between reality and fantasy all but disappears” (Tucker, 1994: 43) such as the moment Joan subconsciously makes one of her female characters pronounce Arthur’s name instead of the protagonist Redmond. And thus, Joan fictionalizes herself as Felicia (the novel protagonist) calls out Arthur’s name. In other words, as she returns to Arthur, the slippage of fantasy and reality becomes even more apparent and her awareness as to her dissolution of identity catches attention. She realizes that her life is “a snarl, a rat’s nest of dangling threads. [She] couldn’t possibly have a happy ending, but [she] wanted a neat one. Something terminal… [She] would have to die.” (Atwood, 1998: 293). Thus, realizing that no matter how much she runs away from the social order, reshaping her past, her identity, recreating fictionalized characters for herself, still not letting others to turn her into a hallow self, she destroys her own existence in an ongoing construction of multiple selves.
Thus, her final solution turns out to plan her own death, which in fact consists of a fake suicide as she literally escapes to Terremoto. As Joan runs away to Italy, however, her fake death is again not to provide her with the solution since the news of her death are on the newspaper with regard to her being the famous author of Lady Oracle. Thus, still even her pretence death is serving the patriarchal system as “the sales of Lady Oracle were booming.” (Atwood, 1998: 313).
In the meantime, Joan becomes delirious, thinking that Fraser Buchanan, an ex-reporter, who has previously threatened Joan of revealing her true past, will come and find her there and somehow she has to escape again. She hears footsteps at her Terremoto house and as she hides behind the door, she hits a man whom she thinks as Fraser Buchanan on the head with a Cinzano bottle. As it turns out, the man is only an ordinary reporter who has just come there to talk to
81 Joan Foster. Together with the landowner Mr. Vitroni, they take the man to the hospital and Joan tells him the whole story. Yet, as the novel ends, however much Joan seems to have told the whole truth to him, she still manages to: “stimulate the scene as much as possible…like a stage director” (Atwood, 1998: 218), since she changes some of the names and some other details about it. Thus, although the fact that she is alive is announced by the lawyer of one of her friends, and she is to turn back to Toronto with her story revealed, still she knows that it will all be considered as another act of publicity by society. And, as Tucker suggests, one more time, “she will continue to be a boundary violator, having many selves…slither[ing] out of the tight places of patriarchal discourse” (Tucker, 1994: 50), while at the same time killing her identity taken away from her by her own hands in her ongoing waltz with the male-oriented capitalist system.
82 CONCLUSION
Mary Swann by Carol Shields presents an unforgettable journey to its readers during which they will witness how the conventional understanding of the clear-cut binary oppositions is shattered. In other words, the post-modern novel provides us with a new perspective as to gender roles by a display of its artificiality which is effectively emphasized all through the novel and hence throwing a light upon “the situation of women and the analysis of male domination.” (Flax, 1987: 40).
In Mary Swann, the protagonist Mary Swann comes to the fore as a dead woman who is killed by her husband Angus Swann brutally. She is known to have lived all her life in a small place in Nadaeu, Ontario in poverty. However, within her limited life, she turns out to have written poetry and used the small library to borrow books of Edna Ferber and sometimes read these books to one of her neighbours. All through the novel the reader is presented with the ambitious attempts of the characters related to the work of Mary Swann and to the publishing world/market as well as the academy to, somehow, obtain, and to, if there is no other way left, reproduce Swann’s artistic creations.
The novel with its clear display of how Mary Swann is fictionalized in the hands of the scholars, editors, publishers and even neighbours, puts an emphasis on the contrived nature of gender roles and the oppressive requirements of the capitalist market system that victimize not only the female but the male as well. As Mary Swann’s work is reconstructed piece by piece by Morton Jimroy who adds up presumptuous information as to Swann’s reading habits or as he looks for one cathartic event in her life so as to idealize her in his biography, he not only becomes another male victimizer of Mary Swann but also his entrapment within the system becomes clear since he is equally forced to act according to the requirements of society in order to keep his reputation going as a successful biographer and hence, to survive. Frederic Cruzzi in his attempts to publish the work of Mary Swann, which he himself has rewritten, is also imprisoned within
83 the capitalist cycle since what he does is nothing more than recreating Swann’s poetry to make a profit in order to earn money as the system forces him to become what he is in order to keep existing. On the other hand, the female character Rose Hindmarch builds up another identity for herself to be respected by the authorities such as Morton Jimroy. She reconstructs herself to be approved by the male- oriented order of society just like Sarah Maloney who rejects the idea that Mary Swann may have used a rhyming dictionary while constructing her poems and throws it away in an attempt to recreate the Mary Swann in her own head and be able to present her in accordance with the requirements of the publishing world, opening the way to herself to keep her status as a successful scholar.
In fact, all through their attempts which are clearly set before the eyes of the reader throughout the novel, the constructed nature of gender roles which leads to the death of the self comes to the fore. To be more specific, Mary Swann presents the reader not only with the physical death of the female poet but also her metaphorical death as well. As she rejects conforming to the existing system, as she tries to push the limits of the socially imposed roles on her by trying to write poetry that she hides under the kitchen linoleum or in a paper bag, her life is ended by her husband Angus. On the other hand, when it is apparent that she has attempted to be more than a housewife and decided to oppose the system by creating works of art, the system silences her one more time by killing her poetry in the hands of the publishers and scholars who claim to work hard to make her physically silenced voice heard. As they reshape her works of art, changing phrases, guessing, replacing the missing lines with what they think will suit her poetry the best; they rewrite her life and identity. They take her words from her reshaping it according to commercial needs, reducing her to a product, a commercial commodity.
Lady Oracle, also as one of the outstanding novels of Margaret Atwood, takes the issue one step further with regard to “how gender roles are constituted and experienced” (Flax, 1987: 40) since the novel’s protagonist Joan Foster, in her attempts to survive refusing any kind of assigned roles on her, metaphorically
84 kills her own self by living a life of multiple selves that she herself constructs or is somehow forced to construct for her own. Beginning from her childhood years, whether it be her reaction against her mother who wants her to be as neat and thin as herself or her first lover Paul who wants to make her a mistress that lives with him forever without ever leaving the house when he is not at home, Joan takes refuge in a continuous escape from the restrictions. She does this by reconstructing imaginary identities for her both present and past selves. Thus, she victimizes her own self as she each time reshapes her identity thinking that she is escaping from and opposing the patriarchal order. In other words, she is so assimilated in the system that although she recognizes that she is turning into nothing but a fictionalized self, she is so desperate and cannot even find a way out of this vicious circle.
Even her attempts to write become another dead end since the first time she starts writing her Costume Gothics she again uses her aunt’s name Louisa K. Delacourt in order to earn a living, and thus, she becomes a part of the system using the works of art for commercial concerns, in fact producing them deliberately with the help of history books which turns her books into nothing more than a rewriting. From this perspective what Joan Foster does cannot be considered much different from what Frederic Cruzzi does to Mary Swann’s poetry; rewriting Swann’s Songs in order to earn money. However, what is even more striking in Joan Foster’s attempt is that she is becoming a part of the system by her own will without ever realizing it in the first place, whereas Mary Swann is turned into a product by other people after her death. Joan silences her own existence living in selves she has constructed for her own and when she comes to the realization that her life is “that between Houdini and ropes and locked trunk” (Atwood, 1998: 334), in other words, a trap and an illusion she has built for her own self in her ongoing escape, she, on a symbolical level, kills her own self by planning her fake suicide. Thus, here the system has gone one step further to manage to make its individual members destruct their own selves. And even when she reveals the truth about the fact that she is alive by telling the whole story to a
85 reporter, it is again to be considered a trick of publicity by the society since she has become an already constructed self by the publication of her novel Lady Oracle which she has written using the Automatic Writing. And her attempts to publish something original, maybe something that is revealing her true artistic ability is rewritten in the hands of the publishing company Sturgess and Morton and just like Mary Swann’s work is destroyed in the paper bag lying with fish slime, Joan Foster is annihilated both by the capitalist cycle and by her very own hands revising her manuscript in the way Sturgess wants it to be.
Besides, however much the economical conditions of the two protagonists are different since Joan Foster is known to have grown up in a richer family compared to Mary Swann’s wretched house in which there is not even a washing machine or a telephone, still, it does not change the fact that the moment they have an attempt to express themselves or create something original, it is destroyed either by literally killing them as in the case of Mary Swann or by forcing them to self-destruction by imposing on them the pre-determined roles of femininity as in Joan Foster’s case and leading them to an escape towards a dead end.
From this point of view, the ongoing system does not only harm the individuals but also art itself as it is reconstructed on the imposed male and female identities in relation with the preferences of scholars, critics, publishers like Morton Jimroy in Mary Swann or Morton and Sturgess in Lady Oracle.
The silenced female figures in both novels bring forth the issue as to the constructed nature of gender roles which is embodied in the two novels’ clear emphasis on the fiction within the already fictional stories of Mary Swann and Joan Foster. To be more specific, the artificial identity construction through discourse is manifestly shown. Joan, for instance, defines herself as “a sorry assemblage of lies and alibis, each complete within itself but rendering the others worthless.” (Atwood, 1998: 211). Hence, her own words become a solid alibi of identity construction; the vicious circle which entraps both Joan Foster and Mary
86 Swann and sentences them to eternal silence in the dominant mechanisms of the patriarchal and capitalist society.
Yet, it is also noteworthy that, despite the tragic situations of the two protagonists who, however much they try to write their own selves, are dramatically reconstructed within and by the dominant system, there still is an emphasis on the power of writing. In other words, the continuous focus on the possibility of re-writing, reconstructing selves/works of art, brings forth the idea that the struggles of the patriarchal order to reach a final definition, to say the last word is futile since there is always the possibility to reconstruct another version of whatever they try impose on society.
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