Information to Users
INFORMATION TO USERS
This manuscript has been reproduced from the microGlm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer.
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.
Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book.
Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order.
UMI University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 3 0 0 North Z eeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600
Order Number 9605208
When literacies converge; The personal and political dimensions of reading narrative
Greer, Jane, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University, 1994
UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Aibor, MI 48106
-W IiENi^m^<2^£^S^QN¥ERQEJEIEJPERS0NAL AND POLITICAL
DIMENSIONS OF READING NARRATIVE
DISSERTAnON
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of the Ohio State University
By
Jane Greer, B.A., M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University
1994
Dissertation Committee: Approved by
James Phelan
Andrea Lunsford __ Adviser Suellynn Duffey Department of English ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would first like to thank the student who appears in this dissertation as “Booker.”
I view his willingness to share himself and his writing as a most generous gift. This dissertation, and indeed my entire program of graduate studies, would never
have been completed without the sustaining kindness and support of family and friends. My mom’s quietly extraordinary strength has been and always will be an inspiration to me.
The long-distance laughter I have shared with my two best friends in the world-Julie
Foster and Lynne Farrisee-has kept me sane over the past six years and especially during the completion of this project. And special thanks go to the graduate students who have been my office mates in Denney Hall. In particular, Mike “Pookie” Ritchie’s seemingly
limitless tolerance for silliness and Diane Chambers’ level-headed advice and balanced perspective have helped me more than I think they realize. At different points during my graduate studies, I have benefited from the personal and professional generosity of Professors Kay Halasek and Kitty Locker, and I very much
appreciate their help. Professors Andrea Lunsford and Suellynn Duffey have offered me invaluable suggestions as I worked through this project. Their insightful and patient readings of the various drafts of this dissertation have helped me improve not only this text but have, in a broader sense, pushed me to become a better reader, writer, thinker, and teacher. And finally, I would like to thank Professor Jim Phelan. Even an extensive, richly detailed, concrete, and particularized account of the ways in which he has served as my adviser for the past five years could only begin to capture the wisdom and patience he has demonstrated. His gentle encouragement and sound advice have helped me immensely, and for that I am deeply grateful.
u VTTA
October 1, 1964 ...... Bom - Chillicothe, Ohio
1986 ...... B.A., Hanover College, Hanover, Indiana
1990 ...... M.A., Department of English, Ohio State University
1988-Present ...... Graduate Teaching/Research Associate, Department of English, Ohio State University
Publications
“Beyond the Group Project: A Blueprint for a Collaborative Writing Course.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication. 6 (1992): 99-115. With Kelly Belanger.
Instructor’s Resources to accompany Business and Administrative Communication, 2nd ed. Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1992. With Kitty O. Locker, Kelly Belanger, Ruth Hendrickson, and Jayne Moneysmith.
Fields of Study
Major Field: English
Reader-Oriented Rhetorical & Narrative Theory Professor James Phelan
Literacy Studies Professor Andrea Lunsford Composition Studies Professor Suellynn Duffey Professor E. Kay Halasek Professor Kitty Locker
Twentieth Century Literature Professor Walter Davis
lU TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... ii
VTTA...... iii
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WHEN LITERACIES CONVERGE; AN INTRODUCTION 1
II. A BASIC WRITER, HENRY JAMES, AND THE LIMITS OF AUTHORIAL READING...... 27
Authorial Reading, A Basic Writer, and the Perpetuation of Academic Hierarchies ...... 31
Moving With/Against/Alongside the “Master”: Authorial Reading and The Wings o f the D o v e...... 56
III. DETAILED READINGS/READING DETAILS: LITERACY AND CLASS IN WHARTON'S THE AGE OF INNOCENCE AND LE SUEUR’S THE G IR L ...... 79
‘Tyrannical Trifles”; The Details of Life and Literacy in The Age of Innocence...... 82
“Everyone is Important”: Detailing Multiple Voices in The G ir l...... 101
IV. BEYOND OPPOSmONALTIY: GENDER AND READING IN GATHER’S LUCY GAYHEARTNND HEMINGWAY’S A FAREWELL TO ARM S ...... 122
“A Slip of a Girl in Boy’s Overalls”: Lucy Gayheart and the Construction of Gender ...... 132
Confronting the Body: The Construction of Gender, Sexual Difference, and A Farewell to A r m s ...... 155
IV V READING ACROSS RACE ...... 182
E-race-ing Anxiety?: Modem/Postmodem Literacies and Reading Beloved ...... 192
“I ‘spect White People Won’t Buy It”: Reading Way Past C ool ...... 218
AFTERWORD...... 239
APPENDDC: BOOKER WILLIAMS’ PORTFOLIO...... 245
WORKS CITED ...... 266 CHAPTER I
WHEN LITERACIES CONVERGE: AN INTRODUCTION
Stories are letters. Letters sent to anybody or everybody. But the best kind are meant to be read by a specific somebody. When you read that kind you know you are eavesdropping. You know a real person somewhere will read the same words you are reading and the story is that person’s business and you are a ghost listening in. Remember. I think it was Geral I first heard call a watermelon a letter from home. After all these years I understand a little better what she meant She was saying the melon is addressed to us. A story for us from down home. Down Home being everywhere we’ve never been, the rural South, the old days, slavery, Africa. That juicy, striped message red meat and seeds, which always looked like roaches to me, was blackness as cross and celebration, a history we could taste and chew. And it was meant for us. Addressed to us. We were meant to slit it open and take care of business. Consider all these stories as letters from home. I never liked watermelon as a kid. I think I remember you did. You weren’t afraid o f becoming instant nigger, of sitting barefoot and goggle-eyed and Day-Glo black and drippy-lipped on massa’s fence if you took one bit of the forbidden fruit. I was too scared to enjoy watermelon. Too self- conscious. I let people rob me of a simple pleasure. Watermelon’s still tainted for me. But I know better now. I can play with the idea even if I can’t get down and have a natural ball eating a real one. Anyway... these stories are letters. Long overdue letters from me to you. I wish they could tear down walls. I wish they could snatch you away from where you are. John Edgar Wideman Dedication toDamballah
I have all this time pleaded only in behalf of Clarissa; but you must know, (though I shall blush again) that if I was to die for it, I cannot help being fond of Lovelace. A sad dog! why would you make him so wicked, and yet so agreeable? He says, sometime or other he designs being a good man from which words I have great hopes; and in excuse for my liking him, I must say, I have made him so, up to my heart’s wish; a faultless husband have I made him, even without danger of a relapse. A foolish rake may die once; but a sensible rake must refonn, at least in the hands of a sensible author it ought to be so, and will, Ihope.... Perhaps you think all this proceeds from a giddy girl of sixteen; but I know I am past my romantic time of life, though young enough to wish two lovers happy in a married state. As I am myself in that class, it makes me still more anxious for the lovely pair. I have common understanding, and middling judgment, for one o f my sex, which I tell you for fear you should not fmd it out; but if you take me for a fool, I do not care a straw. What I have said is without the least vanity, not but modesty would have forbid; but that you only know me by the name of BELFOUR.
Letter from Lady Bradshaigh to Samuel Richardson October 10,1748
“Now this one Mom. Let’s read Curious George tonight” I snuggled under my rainbow bright sheets and tugged Grandma’s patchwork quilt around my shoulders. Reading at my home is a daily event. From infancy my parents read to me and surrounded me with books. My doting older sister, Lisa, sat for hours with her kindergarten “I See Sam” books and recited the simplistic phrases to any interested audience, namely me. By the age of 3 or 4 1 had finished the “I See Sam” series and wanted to read “real” books, like Lisa, with hard covers and new words. Reading became my hobby. Mom would take us to the library every two weeks. Lisa and I would race up the carpeted steps to the children’s section, each holding one handle of our LL. Bean canvas book bag. Content to wander through the aisle, browsing, until the bag slowly filled with new titles and old favorites. Billie Anne First-Year Writing Student
Although John Edgar Wideman, Lady Bradshaigh, and Billie Anne are widely separated by time, gender, race, and social class, their accounts of reading texts as diverse as a watermelon, an eighteenth-century novel, and “I See Sam” all reveal how profoundly both political and personal circumstances affect the convergence of literacies that occurs
when a reader picks up a text. Wideman’s reading of a watermelon oscillates between an articulation of the melon’s political symbolism as a letter from "Down Home... the rural
South, the old days, slavery, Africa” and an articulation of Wideman’s own vision of the
roach-like seeds which arose from a self-consciousness that separated Wideman from his
more daring brother. This personal self-consciousness that Wideman describes is a dimension of his awareness of the political nature of stereotypes about watermelons and African Americans, and the political consequences of such racial stereotypes are most profoundly given voice in this personal message from Wideman to his brother who was incarcerated for his role in a robbery and homicide. Even Wideman’s shifting pronouns— from “We were meant to slit it open” to “I never liked watermelon as a kid”-denote the interplay between the personal and the political in Wideman’s reading experience. Writing under the pseudonym, Belfour, Lady Bradshaigh’s reading of Clarissa highlights a similar
convergence of political and personal positionings. Lady Bradshaigh’s desire to see Lovelace redeemed and faithfully married to Clarissa reflects her investment in an
ideological script which argues that a reformed rake makes the best husband. But Lady Bradshaigh grounds her appeals for such a happy ending to Clarissa’s story in her own
situation as “past the romantic time of life, though young enough to wish two lovers happy
in a married state,” and she acknowledges that her own happy marriage makes her “still
more anxious for the lovely pair.” While Lady Bradshaigh recognizes that her reading of Clarissa is shaped by her own personal circumstances, the politics of gender roles in the
eighteenth century still necessitate that she forego her own signature and instead sign her reading as Belfour. Like Lady Bradshaigh’s response to Clarissa, Billie Arme’s descriptions of her early reading experiences reveal her deep love for books. However, Billie Anne’s
description of her L.L. Bean book bag suggests much about her family’s economic status.
That Billie Anne’s mother had the time and the means to drive her daughters to the library every two weeks and that having a “hobby” seems like a normal aspect of life for Billie
Anne suggests that her literacy practices are shaped by the conventions of middle-class life in America where parents typically encourage their children in the sorts of discursive practices that will coincide with the academic literacies fostered in American schools.
That readers like Wideman, Lady Bradshaigh, and Billie Anne are all involved in positioning themselves both politically and personally when they encounter narratives is inescapable because of the very nature of language itself. Sergej Karcevskij, a student of
Saussure and a founding member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, cogently argued in 1929 that “On the one hand, language must supply a means of communication for all the members of a linguistic community. But on the other hand, it must serve equally as a means of self-expression for each of the individuals in this community, and however
‘socialized’ the forms of our psychic life may be, the individual cannot be reduced to the social” (49). For Karcevskij, language is the site at which the subjective life of an individual engages with the politics of the larger community, and while “any act of knowing cannot, properly speaking, become utterly ‘individual’” (50), the social system of
the language is continually stretched and modified along homonymie and synonymic axes
through specific language use by individuals in concrete situations. Because an individual in a specific context can select from a variety of synonymous signifiers to describe a
particular signified, she has the ability to stretch the social system of language. Furthermore, signs can function homonymically and represent different signifieds
depending on the particulars of a situation, thus allowing individuals to draw upon the dynamic, flexible relationship between signs and the “realities” they represent In reading watermelon as both a cultural symbol of “instant nigger” as well as of his own self- consciousness, Wideman is, in Karcevskij’s terms, drawing on this asymmetrical dualism inherent in the structure of signs. The signifier watermelon comes to have functions other than its own, and Wideman’s self-consciousness and the racial politics of American society are expressed by means other than their own signs. This asymmetrical and unstable relationship between signifiers and signifieds allows the social system of the language to be shaped by the specific language use of an individual and “the exigencies of the concrete situation” (Karcevskij 54). All discursive acts thus involve a dialogic movement between individual expression and the norms of the community's shared linguistic system, between the personal and the political. When individuals like Wideman, Lady Bradshaigh, and
Billie Anne encounter texts and then respond by creating their own texts, they are negotiating the space between the personal meanings they wish to express and the ideological meanings imposed by the social system of language. The concrete personal circumstances in which individuals find themselves-a happily married woman reading
Richardson’s novel or a young child from a traditional and economically secure family reading “Curious George”-w ill inevitably shape the dialogues that occur between readers, texts, and writers. And these personal circumstances are at the same time positioned within a larger historical context-as a young woman living at the end of the twentieth century,
Billie Anne’s response to Clarissa would probably be quite different from Lady Bradshaigh’s response. But it is only as a function of such concrete situations that “the exact semantic value of a word can adequately be established” (Karcevskij 52), and, thus, the politics inherent in a social system of language and the individual’s personal meaning
are inextricably intertwined in any act of communication. Consequently, as the literacies of
writers and readers converge in textual encounters, there are continual negotiations and renegotiations, questions asked and questions answered by readers and writers, as well as
questions asked by each that are ignored by others. But what strategies should we use to describe the complicated convergencies of
literacies that occur in the textual encounters between writers and readers? How can an individual reader articulate the personal elements of his response to a text without
degenerating into solipsistic disclosures that preclude further conversation? What stance should a reader adopt as she positions himself within the politics of a shared social system
of language? How does one account for the incredibly complex interaction between the political and the personal that occurs when readers read? Would an approach to reading that
attempts to account for both the personal and the political dimensions of literacy be capable of accommodating the variety of talents that readers bring to the texts they encounter?
These are the questions which drive my dissertation. I will begin to address these questions by charting the development of previous conversations about reading, a development that,
for all its contributions to our understanding of the reader’s role in textual encounters, has nevertheless split the personal and the political. Furthermore, I will argue that this split
ultimately serves to reinscribe the power of traditional academic reading practices. The nearly simultaneous publication of Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin: The
Reader in Paradise Lost in 1967 and Norman Holland’s The Dynamics o f Literary Response in 1968 in many ways inaugurated the bifurcation of the political and the
personal in Anglo-American reader-oriented theory. Surprised by Sin is founded on the socially determined competence of a reader who is capable of becoming Milton’s ideal audience while the work of Holland is founded on very different principles about the
validity of an individual’s personal response to literature. Fish and Holland both attempt to account for the role of the reader in textual encounters, but because they deal exclusively with either the political (Fish) or the personal (Holland) rather than acknowledging the inevitable intersection of these two dimensions of reading, Fish and Holland both end up reinscribing the power of traditional and privileged ways of reading.
In his introduction to Is There a Text in this Class?, Fish admits that behind both Surprised by Sin and “Literature in the ReadeF’ is a privileging of community standards for
interpretive practice and “the assumption that subjectivity is an ever present danger and that any critical procedure must include a mechanism for holding it in check” (9). Fish actually
includes two connected mechanisms for holding subjectivity in check-the concept of an
ideal reader and the notion of linguistic (syntactic and semantic) and literary competence. Drawing on Chomskyan linguistics and the New Criticism, Fish defines literary
competence as the internalization of “the properties of literary discourses, including
everything from the most local devices (figures of speech, and so on) to whole genres” (48), and his ideal reader would, in addition to being literarily competent, consciously
attempt to make her “mind the repository of the (potential) responses a given text might call
out” and to “suppress . . . what is personal and idiosyncratic” (49). It is in “Interpreting
the Variorum” that Fish then goes on to position his ideal, literarily competent reader within an “interpretive community” which would presumably act not merely as an arbiter of
literary competence, but which would actually write the text. In “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” Fish demonstrates that when confronted with the list “Jacobs-
Rosenbaum, Levin, Thome, Hayes, Ohman (?)” a classroom community of students
studying linguistics and literary theory “writes” a very different text than does a classroom
community of students studying English religious poetry of the seventeenth century. While Fish’s conception of an “interpretive community” has served as a springboard for his most recent commentaries on the English profession and on the role of critical theory in literary studies, it has been widely critiqued for neglecting the positions and powers of individuals within communities. Robert Scholes notes that Fish “has never made clear what an interpretive community is, how its constituency might be determined, or what could be the source of its awesome power” (173). Scholes goes on to suggest that “the notion of interpretive communities suggests a process that is too monolithic to represent adequately the agonies of choice that confront actual interpreters, who often have at their disposal more codes than they can use” (178). James Phelan contests Fish’s interpretive communities on similar grounds. Phelan argues that “there is nothing
inevitable about the particular context we are in, especially when we read a literary text; we can to a great extent choose our contexts, and we can choose well or badly” iWorldsjrom Words 91). Walter A. Davis has pointed out the problems with Fish’s assumption that
moving from the individual to the interpretive community eliminates the problems of the
subjective, and Davis disputes Fish’s “social ontology,” arguing instead that “the social is a realm of contradictions and conflicts rather than of placid agreements; to be aware of one’s
social situation is to experience all it denies” (676). And Gerald Graff has noted that in investing interpretive communities with the power to actually write texts, Fish has issued a proclamation of interpretive infallibility which can allow individuals to deny responsibility
for the specificity and selectivity of their interpretations. Fish’s focus on the “competence”
of a reader as certified by an interpretive community and his claim that interpretive communities (not readers or authors) actually “write” texts denies an individual’s unique position in relation to a text and leads Fish to participate in the regulation and certification of privileged readings. Daniel O’Hara rightly faults Fish for, among other things, his conclusion that interpretive communities are “committed to the apparently impersonal practices of instrumental reason,” and O’Hara argues that "this idea of human rationality is actually (in large part) no more than an updated, professionalized, 1980s style version of the conventional understanding of ‘taste’ and ‘common sense’ that distinguishes a cultural elite from the untutored masses” (46).
Like Fish, Jonathan Culler’s early work posited an ideal reader who would be literarily competent In Structuralist Poetics (1975), Culler begins with a view of the text as “an utterance that has meaning only with respect to a system of conventions which the reader has assimilated” (116). For Culler, “the question is not what actual readers happen to do but what an ideal reader must know implicitly in order to read and interpret works in ways which we would consider acceptable, in accordance with the institution of literature” (123-24). In an attempt to defuse charges that his semiotic system is flawed because it
“assumes agreement among readers or posits as a norm a ‘competent’ reading which other 8
readers ought to accept” {The Pursuit o f Signs 50), Culler claims that he values divergence. But ultimately for Culler, divergence “must be defined in terms of convergence,” and
because in Culler’s version of reading one is “always implicitly appealing to norms” (51),
he is unwilling to sacrifice the notion of competence. Culler is quite specific about the
source of “norms” and he makes clear his allegiance to the interpretive community of the formal academy. In Structuralist Poetics, Culler argues for literary competence because
“the claim of schools and universities to offer literary training cannot be lightly dismissed” (109), and in The Pursuit of Signs, he cites “the whole institution of literary education” which is founded on “the assumption that one can learn to become a more competent reader and that therefore there is something (a series of techniques and procedures) to be learned”
(125). Culler’s reliance on educational institutions as a justification for his critical agenda is, though, highly problematic.
Since 1967 Richard Ohmaim has been calling attention to the ways in which educational institutions in America, including English Departments, are part of the social order and survive by perpetuating its hegemony. In 1976 (just a year after Culler published Structuralist Poetics) Ohmann collected and extended his previous critiques in English in
America. In this collection, Ohmann argues that “Society needs help from the schools to justify its present divisions including much inequality.. . . The ruling classes want a culture, including a literature and a criticism, that supports the social order and discourages rebellion, while it sanctions all kinds of nonthreatening nonconformity” (25). A similar argument is made by Jenny Cook-Gumperz in “Literacy and Schooling.” Cook-Gumperz analyzes twentieth-century schooling practices (standardized curriculums, objective texts, etc.) and concludes that “schooling. . , occup[ies] the preeminent place in society as the institution which ensures its continuation and provides talent for the replacement and expansion of the advanced industrial economy, by selecting and placing this talent in differentiated positions and occupations” (33). J. Elspeth Stuckey is more emphatic in her call for English teachers “to understand the extraordinary power of the educational process and of literacy standards not merely to exclude citizens from participating in the country’s economic and political life but to brand them and their children with indelible prejudice, the prejudice of language ( 122). Stuckey goes on to charge: “The truth is that literacy and
English instruction can hurt you, more clearly and forcefully and permanently than it can
help you, and that schools, like other social institutions, are designed to replicate, or at least
not disturb, social division and class privilege” (123). Culler’s reliance on our schools and universities as justification for the concept of literary competence only perpetuates the
dominance of particular kinds of literacy-the kinds valued by the white, male-dominated,
middle-class. By focusing only on the institutional power of communities as exemplified by their ability to regulate and define “competence” and by neglecting the individual’s potential to operate outside of or in opposition to any particular community and to make
choices about moving among various communities. Fish and Culler have developed
approaches to reading which only serve to certify the status quo. In contrast to critics like Fish and Culler whose critical perspectives are founded on
the norms and standards of the reading practices of the academic community, subjective critics like Norman Holland, Murray Schwartz, and David Bleich originally promised a
more egalitarian critical agenda-one rooted in the individual. Schwartz begins his article, “Where is Literature?”, with the observation that “all of criticism originates in our personal
experiences of individual works, and all criticism is a transformation of those experiences. This seems obvious, yet, implicitly or explicitly, it is the most frequently denied or avoided
aspect of the professional study of literature” (756). Schwartz goes on to bemoan the fact that “broadly speaking, students are required to adopt or submit to a critical methodology that claims objectivity for itself, objectivity aside from the students’ own experience of the works to be interpreted” (757). Although subjective critics sought to liberate students from
the potentially imprisoning precepts of New Criticism by encouraging students to draw upon their most immediate and visceral reactions to literature and to make connections between textual encounters and other life experiences, the subjective critics, like Fish and Culler, ultimately have also served conservative ends and reasserted privileged ways of reading. Feminist critiques of Freudian psychology and its phallocentric construction of human subconscious experiences make it easy to critique Norman Holland’s earliest 10
attempts in The Dynamics of Literary Response to provide a theoretical model for
understanding how readers move from unconscious response to conscious interpretation.
But by 1975 even Holland himself had come to recognize the limitations of his earliest work and began to move away from orthodox Freudianism and from his emphasis on the literary work’s own transformation into meaning of a latent fantasy. In Poems in Persons
(1973) and 5 Readers Reading (1975), Holland explores the ways in which readers’ own identity themes lead them to re-create texts in particular ways. Rather than turning to the conceptual models of subjectivism as a way to explore the ways in which such a criticism perpetuates the status quo however, I would like to turn to the pedagogical consequences of subjective criticism-a move 1 feel justified in making because both Holland and Bleich often cite the important pedagogical consequences of their theories. In a 1975 article, “The Delphic Seminar,” Holland and Schwartz explain how subjective criticism served as the basis of their literature-and-psychoanalysis seminar. Holland and Schwartz describe their seminar in contrast to “ordinary literature classes
[which] take an ostrich approach to subjectivity: if we just don’t notice it, maybe it will go away,” and they go on to articulate their own goals: “We, however, wanted a seminar, not to write criticism or write about criticism in the usual impersonal way, but to form (as our syllabus put it) ‘a self-study group to discover how the distinctive character of each of our minds affects the literary transactions we engage in and the critical statements we make’” (789-90). The class centered around the exchange among seminar members of informal written responses to short poems and stories, and Holland and Schwartz asked the seminar members “to talk about the work as a whole or parts of it... that particularly interest you. Whatever you write about, try to avoid the intellectual, analytical response of the ordinary English class. Try instead for three things: feelings, associations, persons” (790). During class meetings these response papers formed the basis of discussion, and Holland and
Schwartz note that “We sat in a circle-and meant it. We used first names and meant that, too” (790). Holland and Schwartz also acknowledge that ‘To avoid getting into any kinds of group therapy, we encouraged privacy and, if necessary, periphrasis, so that people felt easy with what they were saying about themselves” (790). However, for all their well- 11 intentioned structuring of this course, reading the gaps in Holland and Schwartz’s discussions of their students reveals that such a strategy of exploring individuals’ subjective responses to literature functions just as conservatively as the socially determined competence models of Fish and Culler.
The first student that Holland and Schwartz discuss is Kim McSherry, a 23-year old high school English teacher who was pursuing a Master of Arts in the Humanities.
Holland and Schwartz present several of McSherry’s responses to works like Robert Duncan’s “My Mother Would Be a Falconress,” Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer,” and Donald Barthelme’s, “The Balloon,” and they conclude that running throughout McSherry’s response papers are the themes of “control and dominance by parents, role, culture, or government and the interaction of male and female” (795). What Holland and Schwartz seem to fail to see, though, is that they and the other seminar members may have participated in controlling and dominating McSherry, and that much of this domination may have run along gender lines. Of the other seminar members described in the article, three are professors (not including Schwartz and Holland), two are Ph.D candidates, and one is a poet-all ranking higher in the academic hierarchy than a 23-year old high school teacher working on a Masters degree. (Three other seminar participants are designated as “graduate students,” but McSheny is the only participant explicitly labeled as a candidate for a Masters degree-the position of least status in graduate school hierarchies.)
Besides McSherry, only three of the other seminar members mentioned in the article are women, and of the five works of literature mentioned in the article, none were written by women. Among the responses McSherry received to her work was an analysis from a fellow seminar member (a man who was an assistant professor of English) that encapsulates the problems of dominance and gender inequities. The responder wrote to
McSherry that “Being swept away in the rush of excitement, as in your response to Keats, is orgasmic and Anally comforting and peaceful to you, so long as you will it to happen”
(795-796). In such a situation, it is perhaps not surprising that McSherry’s responses would indicate a concern for control and dominance as well as anxiety about the interactions of men and women, but because Holland and Schwartz’s program for 12
subjective criticism validates only an individual’s “characteristic adaptive and defensive strategies” in response to literature, there is no room for them to consider the ways in
which academic and gender hierarchies were shaping McSherry’s responses. And in such
a subjective paradigm, the lone voice of an individual has little power to mount a sustained
and effective critique of the forces that dominate him or her. ‘ Although one of McSherry’s
responses was a feminist reading of Duncan’s “Falconress,” highlighting the way in which
“motherhood” is a complex societal construction, because such a response is, according to Holland and Schwartz, merely part of McSherry’s psychological “adaptive and defensive
strategies” her response cannot be seen as a critical commentary on the classroom in which
she found herself or her larger culture. Subjective criticism, as practiced in the classroom by Holland and Schwartz, precludes the possibility of working against the hierarchies which served as the context for McSherry’s readings. Holland and Schwartz imposed an external model-the identity theme approach-on the reading experiences of McSherry and ignored not only the political context of her reading but also the political consequences of their imposed model.
David Bleich takes a slightly different route in developing his model of subjective criticism. Bleich’s epistemological model of subjectivity is exemplified by the interpersonal language-learning contexts of early childhood. Bleich argues that in early storytelling experiences with parents a child engages in a “subjective dialectic” between his/her own language system and the language system of the “author” of the story. While Shirley Brice Heath’s work in Ways with Words probleraatizes any universal conception of parent-child relationships and their influences on the child’s acquisition of literacy skills, I would like, as I did with Holland and Schwartz, to turn instead to Bleich’s characterizations of his own pedagogical practices to explore the ways in which his subjective model of reading continues to perpetuate the dominance of privileged groups and their literacy practices by isolating individuals.
’ James Berlin makes a similar point about “expressive rhetoric’" in the composition classroom in his 1988 article in College English, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” 13
The fifth chapter of Subjective Criticism is entitled “The Pedagogical Development of Knowledge,” and in this chapter Bleich writes extensively of his interactions with a
student, Mr, P, who was enrolled in a seminar on literary response. For his first essay, Mr. P was faced with writing about one of the six topics suggested at the end of Bleich’s book
Readings and Feelings, and he chose to write about topic F which asked him to consider his “earliest feeling of love” and to answer, among other questions, “What is the
connection between how you loved as a child and how you love now?” ^ In his essay Mr. P describes how at the age of five he discovered that he loved his father very much, and the
essay follows the development of Mr. P’s deeply felt but distant relationship with his father. Bleich finds particularly interesting “Mr. P’s emphasis that the important feeling [of love for
the father] described at the beginning and at the end of the essay cannot be told” (141).
Bleich then analyzes another of Mr. P’s response papers in which the younger man
focused on J. Alfred Prufrock’s lament that “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” Based on Mr. P’s texts and on Mr. P ’s behavior in the classroom and in student-teacher conferences, Bleich surmises that although Mr. P ’s “emotional inhibition and the inhibition of his language system are identical... he is able to reduce his frustration through articulation of his knowledge of ‘the poem’” (144).
Although Bleich’s reading of Mr. P and Mr. P’s texts is rich and illuminating, his grounding of the subjective dialectic in interpersonal relationships obscures the ways in which Mr. P’s texts might he reactions to the sort of discourse that he is asked to produce in Bleich’s class. As a student who has moved through the university with enough success to be within a few months of graduation, Mr. P may have carefully honed academic literacy skills, and he may be quite resistant to Bleich’s request to write about areas of his personal life that he would prefer not to make public. Bleich’s focus on the interpersonal negotiations of language systems leads him to the conclusion that Mr. P has certain unresolved issues involving his father as evidenced by the feelings that are unutterable in
* All of the “lines of inquiry” Bleich proposes in his “Pragmatic Suggestions and Elaborations” at the end of Readings and Feelings have the potential to make students feel as though intimate and personal disclosures are not just allowed in the subjective classroom, but are required. Bleich’s suggestions include having students share recent dreams, tell of an argument with a parent, or describe a moment of great embarrassment or shame (97-98). 14
the first essay and the desire to explore Prufrock’s declaration, but these moments in Mr.
P ’s texts may be equally indicative of a clash of literacies. While subjective critics may
hope to liberate their students from potentially oppressive modes of academic discourse which privilege objectivity, logic, and argumentation, asking students who have succeeded
through the use of such strategies to forego them is no less problematic or less political than asking African American students, students from rural areas, or students from working
class families to forego the discursive norms of their home communities. ^ Bleich’s focus
on the subjective dialectic without regard to this larger social context leaves Mr. P powerless except to do what he sees the characters in Henry James’s The Aspem Papers doing:
This [the compromise of values] is not an unusual theme in literature or in everyday life. The story brings to mind times that I have compromised my values to gain personal ends. However, just as important as the actions taken by the characters and the motives behind those actions is the ending to the story. Each one compromised values they knew to be correct and good and each one lost. I think this is pretty true of life. (145)
Just as Kim McSherry was left with no ways in which to express potential concerns about the ways in which issues of dominance and gender relations were affecting her in the class lead by Holland and Schwartz, Mr. P is locked in Bleich’s model of interpersonal negotiation with no way to express what might have been discomfort with Bleich’s requirement that he sacrifice his preferred literacy strategies and assume those of the teacher. Mr. P may be compromising his values and capitulating to the power of his teacher. While subjective critics set out in their early work to make space for individuals to talk about their personal experiences of literature, by ignoring the ways in which individuals read and are read in political contexts, they ultimately serve conservative functions.
' In a 1989 article in the Journal o f Advanced Composition, Bleich fully articulates his position on academic discourse: “Academic discourse works in a tradition of deliberately excluding experience, of aiming to purify thought of both experience and feeling so that some ideal of pure truth, linked to the intellectual formulations of one or a few men, may some how miraculously come to preside over everyone’s common experience of living” (19). My ethnographic research in classrooms where the value of the schooled literacies of honors students was challenged by the presence of basic writers and their more diverse literacies has, however, led me to appreciate the difficulties of asking students for whom academic discourse is essentially their “native language” to forego the norms of schooled literacy. 15
Isolated individuals responding to literature only according to their own psychological adaptive and defensive strategies or as part of specific interpersonal relationships have little
power to work against literacies with which they are uncomfortable or which place them on
the margins.
The separation of the personal and political by Fish, Culler, Holland, and Bleich is
easy to trace throughout the 1970s, but as reader-oriented theory moved into its second decade, conversations about the consequences of the personal and the political in textual encounters become diffused among critics with a variety of theoretical allegiances. In Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study o f American Fiction, Stephen Mailloux
attempts to extend the usefulness of Culler’s model of a competent reader by specifying the
interpretive conventions which such a reader would have to internalize. Mailloux constructs a typology of traditional conventions, regulative conventions, and constitutive conventions, and thus he offers a more concrete and specific discussion of the “norms” of
reading than surfaces in any of Culler’s work. While Terry Beers points out in Diacritics
both the value of MaÜloux’s attempt to specify and describe interpretive conventions and
the limits of Mailloux’s typology, which seems insufficient for describing some aspects of literature which many critics find important (87), for me, Mailloux is not sufficiently interrogative of the issue of who is making up the conventions and how those conventions serve the interests of particular groups. Like Fish and Culler, Mailloux’s vision is still restricted by his commitment to traditional academic practices, and this bias is revealed when he faults Bleich and Holland for advocating a critical project that “runs counter to the dominant activities of American literary study” (38). Peter Rabinowitz’s Before Reading:
Narrative Conventions and the Politics o f Interpretation is not entirely dissimilar from Mailloux’s work. Rabmowitz attempts to account for the conventions that shape readers textual experiences before a book is even begun. Although Rabinowitz goes beyond Mailloux in examining how rules of “notice,” “signification,” “configuration,” and
“coherence” can be used to exclude works like Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and Margaret Ayer Barnes’s Eeka His Wife from the literary canon, Rabinowitz’s questioning of why marginalized works like popular fiction and books by women writers have not been 16
considered literatui'e leaves in place “literature” as the yardstick by which texts should be evaluated. While Mailloux and Rabinowitz both posit a universal reader, Ellen Spolsky argues that situations where readers fail to generate meaning should be more closely interrogated
than reading situations about which there is a great deal of consensus. She declares her interest in “the uses of adversity” rather than in competency models. For Spolsky, the
feminist critics who provide instructive models for overcoming the difficulties that women may experience when reading a male-dominated literary canon are productively using
adversity, while deconstructionists like Paul de Man and Frank Lentricchia use adversity slightly differently to reveal the “the nature of language to skew, slant, distort, confound,
or frustrate the emergence and understanding of meaning” (25). For such critics, the misreading of “a well-trained reader is not a random, marginal occurrence but a phenomena
that reveals something important about language” (27). Even though Spolsky is interested
in what happens when it is impossible to read “competently,” like Culler, Spolsky’s interest
in divergences is predicated on the ideal of convergence and thus the standards of convergence retain their authority.
While Mailloux, Rabinowitz, and Spolsky vary in their openness about their commitment to academically privileged ways of readings, none of them seem interested in accounting for what is unique and individual about reading. But when we look at the most recent work of personal or subjective critics, the situation is quite different Subjective critics have begun attempting to integrate their theories about the individual nature of literary response with the social context in which that response takes shape. In his most recent book. The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations, Bleich makes powerful and attractive statements that generalize about the connection between what he calls the social and the personal. For Bleich, the cultivation of literacy “is to refine and enhance our mutual implication in one another’s lives and to discover and exercise our mutual responsibilities” (67). But when Bleich turns to discuss specific students these attractive generalizations evaporate, and his analysis of Ms. V in The Double Perspective is 17
no less troublesome than his reading of Mr. P in Subjective Criticism.* Bleich offers to his readers Ms. V’s essay on her feelings about her grandmother’s dire warning not to swallow
bubble gum, and Bleich goes on to applaud the way in which her essay is discussed in class. Ms. V’s classmates draw out of her details about her parents’ divorce, her grandmother’s stepping in to play the role of mother for the young Ms. V, and the
grandmother’s recent death. For Bleich this allows the essay to be seen as “the enactment
of an affective dialectic in Ms. V’s mind, and perhaps, the resolution of that dialectic, or even, a ‘dialogue’ between herself and her grandmother” (194). While I would not dispute the value of peer response in the classroom and I am a strong advocate of collaborative
pedagogies, Bleich’s apparent lack of concern for whether Ms. V was comfortable with
these kinds of disclosures during only the second week of the course is troublesome to me.
Is it possible that Ms. V felt that in Bleich’s classroom such disclosures where required or that she felt coerced by the questions of her classmates? And how did Ms. V’s disclosures
affect other students in the class who might be less than comfortable with the blurring of
boundaries between public and private? While Bleich wants to account for the social aspect
of literacy events, he seems (at least in this case) to be oblivious to the fact that social
relations are inevitably entangled in and mediated by political relations.^
Michael Steig makes similar moves in his book Stories of Reading: Subjectivity
and Literary Understanding. For Steig, when it comes to reading “the only truth can be a
* In a review of The Double Perspective, Clayton Koelb makes a similar point about the gap between the theoretical positions Bleich purports to hold and his practice. But while I am most concerned about the ways in which Bleich’s students are positioned in his classroom, Koelb is concerned that Bleich’s pedagogical ends continue to be the promotion of self-knowledge rather than social consciousness. ® “Ethnography and the Study of Literacy: Prospects for Socially Generous Research,” published in the 1993 collection, Into the Field: Sites in Composition Studies, does suggest a growing recognition (or at least a more explicit articulation) on Bleich’s part of the relation between the social/political and the personal. In this article, Bleich describes how a student, Ms. S, prefaced her final course project with an analysis of her position as the only woman in a class of twenty m en-a class that took the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women as its primary text Bleich recognizes Ms. S’s analysis as “the beginning of an authentic piece of ethnography” which “was in part a critique of the class, of the teacher, and of the university” (190). Such a move by Ms. S disrupts traditional constructions of authority in the classroom and beings the work of forging new models of academic identity. As Bleich concludes, the sort of ethnographic move made by Ms. S “actually preserves the more important individual options whüe still enlarging research toward political and social consciousness” (191). 18
social, intersubjective one: when readings by critics, by me, or by my students make sense and give new insights to another readei^’ (38). But like Bleich, Steig seems to overlook the fact that social and intersubjective relations are also political relationships, and that in classroom settings these relationships can be particularly sensitive. Steig blithely relates
that a student, Wanda, revealed during a class discussion of Bleak House that her negative
response to Esther Summerson was predicated on her own self-loathing-she told the class
she considered herself “an extremely dependent and malleable, as well as quite insecure,
person” (73). Another student, who is unnamed, is goaded by the laughter of his classmates into revealing that his defense of Murdstone’s treatment of David Copperfield was prompted by his own “close relationship with a divorced woman that had broken up because of her young son’s hostility towards his mother’s lover” (142). While the disclosures that these students offer may prompt further discussion and cause other readers to revise and deepen their understandings of texts, integrating the personal and the social without acknowledging the political seems at best naive and at worst dangerous. The classroom, as well as any other room where people gather, is a political space as well as a social space, and classroom relationships, both among peers and between students and teachers, are constructed within hierarchies based on gender, socioeconomic class, race, and academic ranking.
Autobiographical criticism appears as the most recent attempt to bring together the personal and the political during acts of reading. In anthologies like The Intimate Critique, writer/readers like Ellen Brown, Dolan Hubbard, and Julia Balén avoid some the problems that Bleich and Steig face when they try to integrate the personal and the social. Instead of reading how other people read texts, autobiographical critics read their own readings and are at liberty to integrate the personal and political in ways they deem comfortable and appropriate to their particular situations. The number of autobiographical “stories of reading” is growing and they are an invaluable counterweight to the “literary darwinism” that Olivia Frey has documented in professional journals in English studies, but the assumptions and strategies which serve as the foundations of these autobiographical stories of reading have yet to be examined. Advocates of autobiographical criticism seem to 19
assume that any reader who comes to a text with sufficient conviction and interest will be
able to produce a powerful personal account of his/her experience. This too easy
assumption limits the pedagogical value of autobiographical criticism, and perhaps, threatens to return us to the sort of critical practices espoused by Romantics like
Wordsworth and Keats who defined poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings” to which the reader must bring a “negative capability.” ® A reader who is able to offer an “intimate critique” of a text in 1993 is certainly far removed from a reader who was “surprised by sin” in 1967. And while my narrative of the
first two decades of Anglo-American reader-oriented theory is driven by the tensions
between the personal and political in conversations about reading, in documenting the
positions of Fish, Holland, Mailloux, and Steig, I have neglected the provocative and
diverse work of theorists like Rosenblatt, Iser, and others, all of whom attempt in different ways to develop models which stake out a middle ground in which texts and readers share
power and responsibility for the reading experience. However, these theorists still fail to do justice to the full complexity of readerly subjectivity and political positionality. I would argue that any theory of reading which recognizes the inevitable impingement of the
personal and political on textual encounters will have great difficulty in deriving abstract or
universal principles which govern the reading experience. Instead, I would like to explore
the possibility of resituating reading within larger discussions about literacy and to investigate the potential powers of particularizing the personal and political dimensions of
our textual encounters. Resituating reading within the field of literacy scholarship can provide a new angle of vision for reader-oriented theorists who have most often concerned themselves with literary texts and with academic readers. Rather than concerning themselves with how ideal, hyperliterate readers respond to the texts of people like James Joyce, Jane Austen, or
® Chapter Five of Nancy K. Miller’s Getting Personal is entitled ‘Teaching Autobiography”—an ambiguous title leaving open the possibility that Miller will discuss her classroom approaches to works like Anzaldua’s “Speaking in Tongues,” Jane Eyre, and The House on Mango Street as well as her strategies in teaching students how to compose their own autobiographies. Unfortunately, the only gesture Miller makes toward this second project is to imply that reading autobiographies makes it possible for students to write their own autobiographies. 20
John Milton, literacy scholars may find themselves absorbed in the story-telling strategies of African American children in the Carolina Piedmont, the academic writing of first-year
college students, or the interweaving of orality and literacy among the Vai people in Liberia.
By working in such diverse cultural contexts, literacy scholars have moved beyond simple
distinctions between literate and illiterate, and even the more complicated dichotomies between orality and literacy advanced by classicists like Eric Havelock and Walter Ong have
been undermined. The field work of researchers like Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole in
Liberia and Shirley Brice Heath in the Carolina Piedmont has demonstrated that literacy is a
culturally organized system of skills and values learned in specific settings, and educators like Paulo Freire and David Bartholomae have demonstrated the pedagogical imperative of recognizing literacy as a dialogic term which can be used to investigate the ways in which
the discursive practices of individuals and communities are embedded in political contexts.
The impossibility of accounting for literacy through any objective means (such as the size
of press runs of eighteenth-century periodicals or the number of contemporary high school
students who can pass a ninth grade proficiency test before the end of their senior year) has been recognized, and programs for merely inculcating functional and/or academic literacy skills have been questioned. Instead, literacy scholars are working to find ways to describe the multiplicitous and complicated activities which are literacy-activities which are often tacit or inexplicit, activities which are inextricably intertwined and can even be contradicto!)', activities which have profound personal and political dimensions.
Positioning reading within these larger conversations about literacy creates an opportunity for the various kinds of reader-oriented theorists currently practicing in literary circles to move beyond the conservative functions they have fulfilled as long as the personal and political were separated or were inadequately connected. Like literacy scholars, reader- oriented literary theorists could begin to interrogate the the ways in which subjective experience and political imperatives (including traditional academic practices) converge during concrete and specific acts of reading. However, this is an area in which simplifications will not do. Instead of abstract rules or the conceptual elegance of models, what is needed are the complexifying 21
particularities of the personal and political dimensions of reading. It is in the particularities
of reading that significant revelations about readers, texts, and writers will surface. As
Elting Morison has argued in his spirited defense of the role of art in a mechanistic society,
the power of the particular
preserves the sense of the immediate and specific, the steadying concreteness of actuality that gets muffled up and insulated in the generality that is an abstraction. ITiis direct feeling for what actually happens in the individual situation is a condition that has to be taken into account in any organizing form for contemporary experience. It presents the claim for variation within the order of technological structure, and introduces constructive surprise within the solemn regularities of machine performance. (182)
The power of the particular has long been the stock-in-trade of ethnographic inquiry, and ethnographers have come to recognize that their “thick descriptions” function not as strictly
referential discourse that portrays the reality of a distant culture. ^ Similarly, the value of a
particular account of reading would not be its ability to present a realistic or mimetic vision of textual experience. Instead, a particular account of reading can claim only to be a partial
truth, but in the details of such an account one is more likely to see how personal and
political economies of truth are operating. As Bakhtin has shown, dialogical processes
abound in any complexly constructed discursive space, and by offering an account of reading rich in its own particulars our interested personal and political positions are made
available for discussion. Such descriptions of textual encounters will highlight the contested and emergent nature of reading. Rather than following the lines laid out by Fish and Culler which lead to a communal labeling of readers as either competent or incompetent, particular accounts of reading experiences will create a point of entry into critical conversations for readers whose literacies may diverge from traditional academic reading practices. And instead of ignoring the political contexts of reading, as Bleich and
Holland sometimes seem do in their classrooms, in accounting for the particulars of our
^ Clifford Geertz’s Works and Lives and Writing Culture, a volume edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, provide multiple perspectives on ethnographic writing, its “truth” claims, and the political implications of inscribing distant cultures in the discourse of the academy. While 1 find ethnographic methodologies promising for exploring the personal and political dimensions of reading, 1 am not unaware of the ways in which ethnography has been used in colonialist enterprises. In Chapter V, 1 will more fully engage the political implications of ethnographic writing. 22
reading experiences the ideologies inherently freighted in social systems of language can be exposed. Various relationships between readers, writers, and texts will surface, and the multiple factors which affect how power is shared by those engaging in discursive acts can be articulated and explored.
In this regard, Kenneth Burke provides a useful warning about reactions to complexity. In charting the intellectual history of the nineteenth century and the rapid advances in science and industiy, Burke observes that “new material. .. became bewilderingly complex, and men began to seek a fresh basis of simplification.” As a result, thinkers “went nudist” {Permanence and Change 218). For Burke, “Nudism represents an attempt to return to essentials, to get at the irreducible minimum of human certainty” (219).
In their responses to the vastly complicated issues of literacy and education in the United
States, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, and William Bennett can all perhaps be considered
“nudists,” and they will take little comfort in my call for a particularizing of the personal and political dimensions of reading. Such particulars will only lead to more complicated questions-a movement toward complexity that Burke would embrace. At the end of Permanence and Change, Burke posits the privileged nature of a poetic or dramatic metaphor for avoiding the dangers of simplification. For Burke, such a metaphor “offers an invaluable perspective from which to judge the world of contingencies” (341), and it has the potential to describe the richness of the interactions of human beings through language. Ten years later in A Grammar o f Motives, Burke fully develops his dramatistic pentad
(scene, agent, act, agency, and purpose) as a generative principle for describing the messy realities of human interaction. Unlike Burke, though, I wish not to begin with the points of a pentad, but instead, like an ethnographer, with the personal and political dimensions of my own reading experience as I move through a text. Before I begin, I would like to offer an initial account of the stance I will take as I travel through textual worlds. To borrow a phrase from Geertz, I need to explain how I intend to be “both a pilgrim and a cartographer” (10). In Teletheory, Gregory Ulmer has advice for those of us who would be both cartographers and pilgrims. Ulmer’s larger project is to apply grammatology to television, and he 23 suggests that a new genre, “mystery,” can serve as a “translation (or transduction) process researching the equivalences among the discourses of science, popular culture, everyday life, and private experience” (vii). Embedded in Ulmer’s explanation of the constituent parts of a “mystory” are suggestions about the stance one might adopt in narrating an accoimt of the personal and political dimensions of his or her literacy/videocy experiences/
Ulmer suggests that in telling a story of your reading, it is critical to position yourself as a narrator who has already been a narratee and is, therefore, positioned within previous traditions. In chapter IV when I narrate my reading of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, for example, I must acknowledge that I have already been the narratee of stories that participate in the creation of narrow definitions of masculinity and that position femininity as a deficient alterity to male norms. I have, however, also been the narratee of stories which question and challenge such narrow definitions and hierarchical relationships. In narrating my story of A Farewell to Arms, I am also narrating these other stories once again.
Narrating as one who has already been the narratee of previous stories gives me a starting place for beginning to particularize my accounts of the political dimensions of reading, and Ulmer’s additional suggestion that the narrator of a story of reading should adopt a “middle voice” acknowledges that although an individual is not autonomous as a reader and has already been a narratee, she or he is not merely a product of the stories that have already been told. Drawing on Derrida, Ulmer defines a “middle voice” as neither active or passive, but instead as a voice which recognizes that the speaking subject is affecting him/herself in the act of enunciation. According to Ulmer, by using a middle voice, “the teller designates him or herself as someone narrated by the social body and in which one has a place of one’s ow n-a proper name” (89). Through the middle voice one can play upon the asymmetrical dualism of signs posited by Karcevskij and stretch language along homonymie and synonymic lines, acknowledging the power of one’s individual expression while at the same time positioning that expression within the social
“ Readers familiar with Ulmer’s work will recognize that I have not merely adopted the five constituent features of a mystory as outlined in Teletheory; instead, I have extracted from Ulmer’s powerful program for mystories the strategies by which one might both come to know and to articulate history, herstory, mystery. My story, and the envoi. 24
system of language. In chapter HI, as I narrate in a middle voice my movement through The Age o f Innocence I am continually refining my understanding of the ways in which
academic reading strategies shift me into an alliance with the wealthy elite of old New York
whose social practices are founded on a veneer of restraint and understatement While Ulmer gives me tools for articulating the particular political dimensions of my reading experiences, the issue of the personal remains vexed. In my account of subjective
theories of reading, I criticized scholars such as Holland, Bleich, and Steig for the ways in which they positioned the personal experiences of their students. While I will not be dwelling on anyone’s personal experiences but my own and I will, like autobiographical
critics, have the luxury of choosing to reveal only what seems comfortable and appropriate to me, questions remain about how accounts of the personal can be used to generate conversation rather than serve as solipsistic defense strategies. In The Struggle fo r
Pedagogies, Jennifer Gore cites Foucault’s study of the construction of the self, and she focuses on /typo/nne/nato-techniques employed by the Greeks in the constitution of
themselves. Hypomnemata were, according to Gore, “notebooks in which there was not
an account of oneself (as in the later Christian mode of confession with purifying value), but a constitution of oneself’ (129-130). In such an account, the goal is to collect and
reassemble the already-said and the public manifestations of our multiple selves, rather than
to divulge and interrogate the most hidden elements of an individual’s psyche. According to Foucault, the purpose of the hypomnemata was “to make of the recollection of the fragmentary logos transmitted by teaching, listening, or reading a means to establish as adequate and as perfect a relationship of oneself to oneself as possible” (247). In constructing an account of myself as a reader of the portfolio of a basic writing student, I acknowledge that I am a teacher of basic writers, that I have read widely in the field, and that I am committed to a democratic vision of the university which does more than merely educate an elite class of leaders. But I must also acknowledge that I, myself, have never been a basic writing student, that I moved through my undergraduate education with an ease that is unfamiliar to most basic writing students. Such hypomnemata could never fully capture the multiplicity and complexity of any reader’s subjectivity, but hypomnemata 25
serves as a citation to a part of that subjectivity, a chosen part that has a temporary piioriiy.
Because such a strategy for representing the particularities of the personal dimensions of
my reading experiences emphasizes the power I have to make choices about which aspects of my subjectivity I cite as well as how I present those citations, it helps me avoid feeling
compelled to make painful personal disclosures. Additionally, citing aspects of my subjectivity through hypomnemata ensures my readers that my representations of self are
available for public comment and response while also establishing a boundary that
preserves from interrogation aspects of my subjectivity I wish to remain private. Furthermore, as Gore argues, “the process of collecting and re-assembling leaves open the possibility for rupture, for interrupting our current regimes and practices, perhaps
even more so than the constant attempts to innovate beyond what we ‘know,’ That is, in always looking forward, it is easy to accept what is behind as given” (130). Thus, in my
reading of Jess Mowry’s Way Past Cool, my acknowledgment of my status as a middle class, white, academic reader and my uncritical acceptance of social and cultural narratives
about minority urban youth leads me to see how these positions need to be disrupted in order for me to engage with the ethical and aesthetic demands of Mowry’s novel.
Speaking in a middle-voice as a narrator who has already been a narratee and
adopting hypomnemata as a strategy for constructing and articulating my personal experience provides me with a starting place for particularizing the political and personal
dimensions of my textual encounters. Such an opening stance seems most promising to me, but as I move through novels by James, Wharton, Le Sueur, Gather, Hemingway,
Morrison, and Mowiy and student texts, this starting position will inevitably be problematized, and I welcome the questions that the convergencies of literacies between writers and readers will inevitably raise. In fact, the organization of the following chapters necessitates that such questions will arise. I have adopted the strategy in each chapter of pairing texts which seem to come from radically different social and political contexts, thus situating myself between powerful systems of meaning. Such a strategy of pairing texts creates what Arnold Krupat calls a “frontier” where the tacit, assumptions, values, and 26 beliefs which shape different literacies are thrown into relief as they come into contact with each other. And in recounting the particular details of ray reading experiences a dialogic rather than a dichotomized view of different literacies becomes possible. Self-other relationships are constructed in particular ways under unique, local circumstances, and the practice of describing the particularities of our textual encounters makes impossible easy dichotomies between the reading invitations extended by academically privileged texts and academically marginalized texts, by writers from the upper echelons of wealthy society and writers from working class neighborhoods, or by male writers and female writers. In organizing the chapters that follow along lines of academic status, socioeconomic class, gender, and race, I hope to blur typical boundary lines rather than highlight them. “When
Literacies Converge” does not seek to answer all the vexing questions which concern literacy scholars and literary critics, nor does it attempt to establish monolithic prescriptions or descriptions about how readers should or actually do read. Instead, it is intended as a way to “enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where, tumbled as we are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way” (Writing Culture 147). CHAPTER II
A BASIC WRITER, HENRY JAMES, AND THE LIMITS OF AUTHORIAL READING
In Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics o f Interpretation, Peter
Rabinowitz offers a fully developed definition of an “authorial audience,” and he cogently argues for the value of such a model of reading. Rabinowitz founds his definition of the authorial audience on the premise that an author “cannot begin to fill up a blank page without making assumptions about the readers’ beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions,” and as a result, authors “design their books rhetorically for some more or less specific hypothetical audience” (21). Rabinowitz goes on to explain that “the notion of the authorial audience is clearly tied to authorial intention, but it gets around some of the problems that have traditionally hampered the discussion of intention by treating it as a matter of social convention rather than of individual psychology,” and he argues that such a
“perspective allows us to treat the reader’s attempt to read the author as intended not as a search for the author’s private psyche, but rather as the joining of a particular social/interpretive community” (22). In Rabinowitz’s terms, successful authorial reading occurs when the author and her readers share (at least temporarily) membership in the same community.
Having defined such an authorial audience, Rabinowitz goes on to argue that authorial reading has a special status for two reasons: “First,... most people actually do read-or attempt to read-this way [for the author’s meaning] most of the time Second, the perhaps more important for critical theory, reading as authorial audience provides the
27 28
foundation for many other types of reading” (30). While Rabinowitz does not argue that attempting to read as member of the authorial audience is “either the final reading or the
most important,” he does assert that any reading is incomplete “without an understanding
of the authorial audience as its base” (32). To find support for Rabinowitz’s argument
about the special status of authorial reading, one need only consider the number of
influential critical studies which have been founded on such a model-Wayne Booth’s The
Company We Keep and James Phelan’s Reading People, Reading Plots, among others. However much such work may illuminate specific texts and make available for discussion
the inner-workings of narrative in general, too strong a commitment to authorial reading may close off other possible ways of understanding relationships between authors and
readers and may, at times, oversimplify the very messy, dialogic process of reading. A closer look at Rabinowitz’s two specific claims about why attempting to read as a member
of the authorial audience is a privileged act suggests to me that perhaps alternatives to authorial reading may be necessary in particular situations.
Rabinowitz’s first claim for the special status of authorial reading arises from the necessary recognition that when real readers pick up any text they are searching for a
connection with the writer(s) of the text. While no one would deny that readers read in order to achieve some sort of communication with an author, models based on authorial or
implied readers are founded on the notion that the writer is an auihor-ity and that readers acquiesce to the writer’s power. However, such models of an ideal reader’s experience of a text can oversimplify the very complicated relationships that usually exist between specific
writers and readers. ' Although readers often do assume a subservient role as they move
’ Maiy Louise Pratt has argued that reader-oriented criticism which presumes a “rational cooperation toward shared objectives” on the part of readers and writers is so great an oversimplification that it borders on distortion, and she suggests that reader- oriented critics must find ways “to talk about reader/text/author relations that are coercive, subversive, conflictive, submissive, as well as cooperative, and about relations that are some or all of these simultaneously or at different points in a text” (“Ideology and Speech- Act Theory” 70). And in “Audience Addressed/Audience Implied: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” Ede and Lunsford suggest that student writers are continually structuring and restructuring their relationships with both real and imagined readers, and that the concept of audience is “an overdetermined or unusually rich concept, one which may perhaps be best specified through the analysis of precise, concrete, situations” (168). 29
through a text trying to decipher and then accept “the author’s invitation to read in a particular socially constituted way” (Rabinowitz 22), the relationship between the author
and the reader can actually be quite different As opposed to the published writers, whom we typically assume are capable of issuing clear, if not immediately discernible, invitations to their readers, struggling writers may perceive themselves not to be extending invitations to their readers at all, but rather they may see themselves as trying to meet the demands of
their readers. Instead of creating worlds from words which beckon the reader to enter,
some writers are in the position of trying to write themselves into the worlds their readers
already inhabit Such is the case with the first writer whose work will give me an occasion to account for the particulars of my own literacies as I read.
Booker Williams was a first-year writing student whose ACT score and
performance on a placement exam landed him in a basic writing class. ^ In reading Booker’s portfolio, it becomes apparent to me that reading to become a member of
Booker’s authorial audience is an insufficient way to approach his text. Because Booker is
in the position of trying to develop the literacy skills that will certify his membership in the academic community, his portfolio necessitates a more complicated construction of the
writer-reader relationship. Rather than extending an invitation to his readers to become a
member of his authorial audience and read in a particular socially constituted way, Booker is himself trying to become a member of his readers’ community. While I may initially try
to read as a member of Booker’s authorial audience, it quickly becomes obvious that Booker is still in the process of learning how to construct rhetorically both himself and his readers, and merely following Booker’s cues and trying to read as a member of his authorial audience actually impairs my understanding of his text. Because Booker is in the position of trying to enter the community of his readers rather than vice versa, Rabinowitz’s claim that readers actually do read for authorial meaning seems not to recognize the complexity of Booker’s situation or the situation of his readers. More generally, my reading of Booker’s portfolio suggests that models of ideal reading such as those advanced by Rabinowitz fail to anticipate that reading as member of the authorial audience of a
' “Booker” is a pseudonym chosen by the student because of his respect and admiration for Booker T. Washington. 30
struggling writer could actually be an impediment to understanding. Positioning myself as a narratee of social and cultural narratives, adopting a middle voice, and constructing a self
through hypomnemata as way to account for the particulars of my encounter with Booker’s portfolio will not only allow me to mediate between Booker’s literacies and my literacies but win also provide a more satisfying reading than one based on a model of authorial
reading.
In the second half of this chapter, I will investigate Rabinowitz’s second claim that
any reading without authorial reading as its base is incomplete. While Rabinowitz maintains that he differs from Booth (who argues that there is a moral imperative first to
read as a member of the authorial audience), the image of authorial reading as a “base” or
foundation does imply primacy. And in his own acts of practical criticism, Rabinowitz does begin with an explanation of how members of an authorial audience would read.
Before exploring how “a masculine bias” in typical academic reading strategies precludes the inclusion of Margaret Ayre Barnes’s Edna His Wife in the academic canon, Rabinowitz
first asserts what is presumably an “authorial” reading of the text: “Behind the straightforward story is a strong demystification of democratic capitalist ideology, specifically of the myth of upward mobility—the belief that social advancement is both desirable and possible through shrewdness and hard work. Barnes undermines this myth.
.. by showing that it comes at high personal cost and the structure of society forces women
to pay more than their share” (214). Only after Rabinowitz has deduced that reading as a
member of Barnes’s authorial audience means recognizing her critique of capitalist ideology does he perform a different kind of reading and assess how Barnes’s novel does not
conform to traditional rules of notice, signification, configuration. Such a methodology of first characterizing the overt message to the authorial audience and then exposing any covert ideology beneath that message has become the standard critical apparatus for a variety of critics interested in the politics of narrative-Judith Fetterley, Rachel Blau DuPIessis, Keith
Cohen, David Richter, Claudia Brodsky, and others. Rarely, though, is reading such a neat, step-by-step process. My own experience with Henry James’s The Wings o f the Dove can serve as a case in point. As I move through the novel, my relationship to James’s 31
narrative is at times cooperative, at other times contentious, and always complicated. While
Rabinowitz’s discussion of Edna His Wife suggests that he initially (and accurately) discerns the ways in which Barnes’s novel debunks the myth of upward mobility, such certainty eludes me as I work through my contradictoiy impulses when reading The Wings of the Dove. Do I submit to James, “The Master” for whom Milly Theale has a “supremely touching value” (6)? Or do I align myself with Kate Croy whose great energy and vitality is invested in trying not only to satisfy her own romantic desires but also to secure the financial well-being of her father and sister? By offering an account of the details of my reading experience I hope to offer an alternative method for talking about the experiential dynamics of reading, one that does not necessitate authorial reading as a separate first step and that allows me to acknowledge the multiplicitous nature of my response as I move through a text.
AUTHORIAL READING, A BASIC WRITER, AND THE PERPETUATION OF ACADEMIC HIERARCHIES
Because language serves as a means of communication among members of a community as well as a mode of self-expression for individual members of the community, let me begin with a brief description of the communal context in which Booker created his portfolio. Booker was a participant in an experimental first-year writing course in which students from the honors program and students from the basic writing program were intermingled in a single class (1 lOW/Hl 10). ^ As an ethnographic participant-observer in this unique educational setting, I watched, listened, and learned as Booker and his classmates sometimes struggled and sometimes triumphed as they worked to fulfill the university’s first-year writing course requirement. By placing honors students and “at risk” students in the same classroom, the teachers. Professors Kay Halasek and Suellynn
Duffey, hoped not only to help all the students improve their writing, reading, and thinking
® Funding for this course was provided by Ohio State University’s Center for Teaching for Excellence. 32
skills but also to challenge explicitly the political dynamics of institutional placement practices and to help the students complicate any assumptions they might have acquired from the educational caste system that pervades American elementary, secondary, and post secondary educational institutions. Kay and Suellynn chose to organize the course around the theme of literacy, and throughout the ten weeks of the quarter, the students were asked to engage in a collaborative exploration of issues of literacy in their own lives. The students read works by Malcolm X, Mike Rose, Maxine Hong Kingston, Maya Angelou, Pete Rondinone, Richard Rodriguez, Deborah Tannen, and Paulo Freire. In class discussions the students shared their own high school experiences and personal backgrounds, commented on and frequently critiqued the published writers they read, and pooled their ideas and insights as they worked to develop their own defmitions and understandings of literacy. Using the Macintosh computers that lined the perimeter of their classroom and
Aspects software, the students engaged in on-line, anonymous computer conversations as a way to begin the process of generating topics and ideas for their formal writing assignments. In small groups, the students responded to each other’s drafts and occasionally generated informal collaborative texts which were used in larger class discussions. At the end of the quarter, each student turned in a portfolio which had to include his or her own literacy history and a final project which drew upon all the work done in the quarter. The students were then also free to choose which other assignments they wished to include in their portfolio, e.g., an early assignment to interview a classmate, informal writings, and/or interviews with people outside the class about their literacy.
Because he was the only African American in the class of 32 students and because he was strikingly handsome at 6’2” with his hair shaped into a fade, Booker quickly became a prominent member of the HI lO/llOW class, even though his voice was seldom heard in class discussions. " For many of his classmates, encounters and conversations with Booker provided learning opportunities. A young woman from a wealthy, resort island community on Lake Erie who interviewed Booker for her first essay discovered that
* When I asked Booker what he would like readers of this dissertation to know about him, his response was ‘Tell them I’m black,” and with a chuckle, he added, “And tell ‘em I’m handsome too.” 33
even though Booker was from an economically depressed urban area, she still shared with him the common experience of attending a parochial high school. She also learned that
they both got sweaty palms and a dry mouth whenever they had to speak in public. In an
anonymous on-line computer conversation, Booker connected with another classmate who
had felt that he was the only member of the class whose family background did not fit “Leave It to Beaver" and “Father Knows Best” stereotypes. And when the class was
assigned Malcolm X’s “Learning to Read,” Booker contextualized the reading by sharing
his knowledge about Malcolm X’s entire autobiography with the other members of his
small group-although he refused to speak about Malcolm X during the larger class discussion and allowed the other group members to share the new insights they had gained
from his expertise. For me, Booker made the most insightful comment during the final class discussion. After listening to many of his classmates reveal their inability to reconcile
their sometimes conflicting ideas about literacy and academic tracking, Booker suggested “I believe we got more than what we think we learned.” For many of his classmates,
Booker’s comment helped them begin to see that what they had gained in their first-year
writing class was not something that could be revealed on any kind of objective test or that could even be articulated in a few simple sentences. A young woman followed up Booker’s comment with the realization that “What Booker said is right. We learned to make connections like in a literature course I didn’t learn to ‘write’ better, but I do develop my ideas better now.” Another young man continued to build on Booker’s observation: “Like Booker said, maybe your writing has improved and you don’t know it. After our class, I feel like I could help people-like I could do for others what you [Kay and
Suellynn] did for us by giving us comments on our papers.” Booker’s insight prompted his classmates to begin to realize that they needed new ways to articulate what they had accomplished in their first-year writing course, and I was intrigued by his quiet wisdom.
Booker and the Limits of Authorial Reading Let me now turn to Booker’s portfolio as a site for investigating not only the limitations of reading as a member of his authorial audience but also for exploring the 34
potential of positioning myself as a narratee of social and cultural narratives, adopting a middle voice, and constructing a self through hypoimemata as a way to mediate between
my literacies and Booker’s literacies. ' I first will assume the stance of a reader who is trying to enter Booker’s authorial audience as a way to highlight the problems of such a
model of reading. Booker introduces his portfolio with a cover page that sets up his work as a movie,
“B’s Excellent Adventure,” and he divides his portfolio into four “acts.” In this cover page
(written at the end of the quarter after all the other components of the portfolio had been completed and assembled), Booker begins to establish some ground rules about how he would like his readers to move through his work, i.e., he begins to send signals to his authorial audience about the sorts of “beliefs, knowledge, and familiarity with conventions” they will need in order to understand him (Rabinowitz 21). The first of these ground rules seems to be that Booker wants his authorial audience to read for pleasure and to enjoy his work. With his friendly “hello and welcome,” Booker strives to put his authorial audience at ease, and he goes on to connect his portfolio, “B’s Excellent Adventure,” to a 1989 comedy movie. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which chronicles the escapades of two ditsy young men who are on the verge of flunking their history class when they are given the opportunity to travel through time and meet historical figures ranging from Joan of Arc to Abraham Lincoln. The movie metaphor and the emphasis on enjoyment continue throughout the cover page, and Booker concludes his final paragraph by setting the scene for a pleasurable viewing/reading experience right down to supplying his authorial audience with a soda and popcorn. His final prefatory comment is to “Sit back, relax, and enjoy.” Booker’s concern for his reader’s enjoyment is consonant with his behavior in the classroom where he used the criteria of pleasure as a way to evaluate the texts he read throughout the quarter. When Booker was placed in a group with two of his classmates from the honors section and asked to rank some interview essays written by former students in English 1 lOW/Hl 10, Booker sat back while his fellow group members argued about which essay was the most effectively organized and which essay offered the most in-
Booker’s complete portfolio is available in the Appendix. 35
depth portrait of its subject. After listening quietly for several minutes, Booker finally
interrupted and asked, “But which one did you enjoy the most?” In his cover page Booker
seems to be asking his authorial audience to share with him this conception of effective writing as that which creates a pleasurable experience for the reader. This signal, however,
is not the only one Booker sends to his authorial audience in his cover page. While the opening and closing of Booker’s cover page grant license to the members
of his authorial audience to attach great importance to their own pleasure, Booker uses the middle paragraphs of his cover page to complicate the moves he is asking his authorial
audience to make as they progress through his portfolio. In these paragraphs Booker
seems to be asking the members of his authorial audience to be tolerant in their reading of
his work and to be generous in their evaluation of it Booker uses his third sentence to
create a modest and appealing ethos by offering a self-deprecating warning that “Because
the movie only been in the making for three months, some of the actor’s aren’t at there best” Without whining or undue complaining, Booker asks his authorial audience to
recognize the context in which his “movie” was created, and he laments the fact that the creation of his movie/portfolio was constrained by the academic calendar and OSU’s ten-
week quarter system. By characterizing the process of historical investigation and reflection that is the foundation of his literacy history as a “defying suicide stunt” and the
inventor of the stunt as “Mr. Foolish,” Booker asks his authorial audience to recognize the
valiant nature of his writing efforts and to read with goodwill. Even the three surface feature enors in Booker’s third sentence which do not impede the meaning of text (the auxiliary verb “has” is missing between “movie” and
“only,” the possessive form “actor’s” is used rather than the plural form “actors,” and “there” incorrectly substitutes for “their”) could be read as a signal from Booker to the members of his authorial audience that they should not be overly concerned with the surface features of his writing. Instead, they should enjoy the experience he is offering them. However, these surface feature errors can become the first site of disruption for the authorial audience. While it is plausible that Booker is issuing an intentional directive to his authorial audience that the surface features of his text are not be taken too seriously, such a 36
directive would cause the authorial audience to assume that Booker is aware of surface
feature conventions and of the ways he is disrupting them. But at other places in the
portfolio Booker’s grammatical errors do not seem to be part of a controlled and consistent system of signals to the authorial audience. Commas are occasionally misplaced and verb
tenses switch in a seemingly arbitrary fashion from present to past at places in Booker’s text where there are no apparent directives about the relationship between surface features
and the thematic or mimetic dimensions of his text. Thus, a reader trying to become part of Booker’s authorial audience has no consistent way to understand the function of surface
features in his work.
The disruptions continue to multiply as Booker’s authorial audience moves on into the first, second, third, and fourth acts of his portfolio. The progression of the portfolio
makes apparent that Booker’s interest in the pleasure of his authorial audience and his directives to read generously arise out of his very real concern for his grade. Booker
devotes much of his literacy history to explaining how he entered high school with a renewed dedication to achieve good grades and how he finally managed to achieve grades
of “B+ or higher” in his senior English class. In subsequent acts of his movie/portfolio Booker will often emphasize that his hard work and dedication should lead to a successful
college career. Booker’s literacy history also reveals his interest in the external rewards of
education that good grades on a transcript make possible-rewards such as getting his picture in the newspaper as the salutatorian of his high school class and receiving an alumni scholarship from his high school as well as a full tuition scholarship from OSU. However,
as it becomes obvious that Booker is largely concerned about how to get a good grade, problems begin to emerge for anyone trying to move through the portfolio as member of
Booker’s authorial audience. In his quest to obtain a positive evaluation from his readers, Booker continually changes the rules by which his authorial audience should read. In his cover page, Booker seems to indicate that the reader’s pleasure is the main criteria for judging effective writing, but in his literacy history Booker seems to rely on the power of painful revelations to get a good grade. In the second act of his portfolio, Booker will suggest that his authorial audience evaluate him positively because he specifically answers a 37
list of interview questions generated by his classmates as they prepared to analyze the literacy of other people, and in his final project Booker will rely on the voices of published
authorities to get the good grade that he makes clear in his writing is so important to him. Even though all of Booker’s “Acts” are gathered into a single movie/portfolio and all of
them were under continual revision until the end of quarter, I would not dispute Booker’s
right to ask his authorial audience to be flexible and to adjust to his continually changing criteria. However, Booker fails to make such mental gymnastics meaningful for the
authorial audience he constructs. There is no self-reflexive commentary about the ways in
which the terms of evaluation change in each act, nor does Booker direct his authorial
audience to adopt such a critical or reflective attitude toward these changes. Assuming the stance of a member of Booker’s authorial audience and tracing Booker’s mixed messages about the criteria by which his writing should be evaluated through the progression of his
portfolio can demonstrate the inadequacy of such a reading strategy. When members of the authorial audience turn to Act I of Booker’s portfolio, much
of what they encounter there resonates with Booker’s cover page characterization of his literacy history as a ^"defying suicide stunt,” but instead of using the faintly mocking
metaphor of movie stunts, Booker’s literacy history is quite serious. In his literacy history, Booker writes of stuttering as a child, and he admits he was “significantly behind most of the other kids in reading, and writing.” Booker goes onto reveal that he had to repeat first grade and that he felt like he “failed in first grade through eighth grade in school.” Rather than relying on the sense of humor and creativity that he used to create a pleasurable reading experience for his authorial audience in his cover page, Booker seems to depend on the force of his confessions of failure as a way to obtain a favorable evaluation from his authorial audience. In an interview with me months after his experiences in H 110/1 lOW had ended, Booker explained that he chose to make such painful revelations in his literacy history only because he thought he would get a better grade. Just before entering the university as a first-year student in the Autumn of ‘92, Booker had been enrolled in a summer “Preface” program at OSU for minority students interested in Engineering careers.
Part of the program involved a six-week writing class, and in that class Booker faced an 38
assignment to write a history of his literacy experiences similar to the H 110/1 lOW assignment Booker explained to me that he had not included any of stmggles with
stuttering, his repetition of first grade, or even mentioned his “broken” home in his essay
for his Preface class, and he told me “I included that stuff this time because I saw other kids who wrote about stuff like that in the Preface class got a higher grade than I did.” Booker’s decision to reveal information that he would prefer not to make public underscores his determination to get a good grade, and it forces readers trying to move through Booker’s portfolio by becoming members of the authorial audience to radically revise their understanding of the criteria by which Booker is asking that his work be judged. Rather than tiying to obtain a favorable judgment from his readers by insisting that they enjoy his work, Booker is hoping that his painful disclosures will be the key to a good grade. In fact, Booker’s concern for his reader’s enjoyment is all but lost in his literacy history. Although the overall structure of Booker’s literacy history conforms to the potentially pleasing generic structure of a bildungsroman, there seem to be few other attempts on Booker’s part to create “enjoyment” for his readers. He doesn’t describe the “fun” of the trailer where he went to work on his “reading, spelling, and communication skills,” and he creates no characters besides himself with whom readers can identify. The only characters whose voices we hear in the essay are the clerk at PharMor and the bus driver; Mrs. Wagner and Booker’s brother, Fred, who play significant roles in Booker’s life are silent For readers trying to become members of Booker’s authorial audience, the fact that Booker switches from trying to provide his readers with an “enjoyable” reading experience to trying to gain his readers’ sympathy by revealing painful personal information suggests that Booker is himself unsure about his rhetorical goals. He seems to be struggling with the very challenging problem of constructing both his identity as a writer and constructing if not a consistent identity of his ideal readers, then at least an understanding of why that identity is continually in flux. In Act n of his movie/portfolio, both the elements of pleasure and pain disappear from Booker’s writing, and Booker once again radically revises the rules of the game for 39
his authorial audience. For the second act of his portfolio Booker composed an essay about the literacy of one of his fellow dorm dwellers. Rather than judging Booker’s work
based on the pleasure it offers to readers or based on the intensity of the self-revelations, Booker now asks his authorial audience to judge him positively for paying close attention
to the parameters of an assignment In his interview of James, many of Booker’s descriptions of and comments about James seem directly tied to the list of questions which
Booker and his classmates generated in a class discussion intended to help them prepare for their interview. Booker includes in his essay that Steven King’s The Stand is one of
James’s favorite books because one of the young men in the 1 lOW/Hl 10 class suggested interviewers could ask their interview subjects, “What kinds of reading and writing do you do outside of class?” When Booker reports that James “enjoys reading, writing, and speaking,” it is a direct response to the question offered by an articulate young woman who had been assigned to the basic writing class: “What attitudes do you have about speaking, reading, and writing?” And when Booker writes that James’s role models are “his parents, and a high school biology teacher,” it is apparent that Booker has asked James a question posed by the young woman from Lake Erie: “Is there a particular teacher that stands out as good or bad in your experiences?” In reading Booker’s essay it seems as though he is responding very directly to the questions that were generated in the class discussion, and
Booker’s decision to create an essay based on an almost rote list of his interview subject’s responses to such questions conflicts with the earlier norms of reading that he established for his authorial audience. No where in this essay does Booker offer his readers opportunities to take pleasure in getting to know who James is, nor does Booker include gut-wrenching disclosures about James or about himself. Booker’s reliance on the list of questions generated in class discussion seems to arise out of his desire to get a good grade-
-he wants to make sure he has covered all the material that he thinks he is supposed to cover in his essay. However, this reliance on a list of questions conflicts with the earlier ways in which Booker has constructed his relationships with his authorial audience. Booker no longer seems interested in making his portfolio an enjoyable experience for his authorial audience, nor is he attempting to use painful confessions as a way to obtain the 40 favorable judgment of his audience. There is no consistent invitation extended from
Booker to his readers, and he continually changes the rules of the game on the authorial audience, leading to a very unsatisfactory experience in reading his portfolio. In Act IV of his portfolio, Booker once again changes the rules on his by now befuddled authorial audience. Although Booker announces at the beginning of his final project that he will deviate from typical academic codes and not compose “all of the ideas and different point of views [on childhood literacy] into one summary” but will instead divide his final project into four different sections, at the end of his introduction Booker retreats a bit from a his innovative stance by relying on Webster’s dictionary to provide him with a definition of literacy. This reliance on the voices of “authority” is the fourth and final norm Booker establishes as he tries to create a community where his authorial audience can join him and judge him positively. In his final project, Booker does an extensive summary of the theories of Piaget, he quotes from Mike Rose’sLive on the
Boundary, and he uses Charles Horton Cooley’s concept of the the “Looking Glass-Self’ to validate his own claim that “how we think others perceive us is how we perceive ourselves.” Although Booker does devote much of his final project to a discussion and exploration of his own experiences in HI 10/1 lOW, and he does use his own voice to add humor to his re-creation of a conversation with a representative from the university mentoring program, in the final paragraph of the project Booker subjugates his own voice to the authority of Webster’s Dictionary as the “Standard of civilized English Language.” Just as Booker offered inconsistent and seemingly uncontrolled invitations in each of the previous acts of his portfolio, here again he seems to be not fully in control of his text. If I read strictly according to Booker’s instructions I have a very unsatisfying reading experience. Booker has asked the members of his authorial audience to first read for pleasure, then to value his painful self-disclosures, then to admire him for constructing an essay which completely answers a list of questions and finally to evaluate him favorably 41 for being able to cite a variety of academically credible authorities.* Even though all of
Booker’s “acts” are gathered into a single movie/portfolio and all of them were under continual revision until the end of quarter, I would not dispute Booker’s right to ask his authorial audience to be flexible and to adjust to his continually changing criteria.
However, Booker fails to make such mental gymnastics meaningful for the authorial audience he constructs. There is no self-reflexive commentary about the ways in which the terms of evaluation change in each act, nor does Booker direct his authorial audience to adopt a critical or reflective attitude toward these changes. In short, reading only in Booker’s authorial audience leaves me with an unsatisfying experience because he extends inconsistent and at times seemingly contradictory directives to his readers. Trying to read as a member of Booker’s authorial audience forces me to conclude he is not fully in control of his discourse and that his portfolio is flawed. However, my goal here is not to point out problems with Booker’s text, but rather to demonstrate how attempting to read as a member of the authorial audience may be an inadequate response to some texts. Models of reading based on an authorial audience are founded on the notion that the writer is not just an author, but an author-ity and that readers acquiesce to the writer’s power. However, in order to create such an axis of power within the writer-reader relationship, the reader-space must be evacuated of all gender, race, and social class affiliations and all preexisting personal and political positions must be transcended. By denying (or at least deferring) the particular positions of readers, a model of authorial reading not only ensures but inevitably mandates the dominance of the writer, thus relegating basic writers, who have difficulty constructing such a relationship
' Some objectors to my analysis might claim that the problem lies not with the concept of an authorid audience, but rather with the particulars of my analysis of Booker’s portfolio. They would point out that 1 haven’t accounted for X, Y, or Z elements of Booker’s text Such criticisms are easy to answer-I agree with them. I have not fully characterized how Booker’s authorial audience would move through his text, but no description on an authorial audience’s experience ever does. As Rabinowitz acknowledges in his argument for the value of tiying to engage a text as a member of its authorial audience, “it does not logical follow that it [authorial reading] is actually possible. Indeed, I would argue that in a sense it is not” (32). Although my description of how an authorial audience would move through Booker’s portfolio is necessarily incomplete, I do not think it can be characterized as inaccurate or wrong. 42
with their readers, to the margins of the university. In other words, because Rabinowitz constructs the normative relationship between writers and readers as one in which power is invested in the writer, his model of the authorial audience participates in the creation and
perpetuation of a hierarchical system of academic identities. Demonstrating how an
authorial model of reading leads to an unsatisfying experience with the text of a basic writer unmasks the way such a model ensures the hegemony of texts with privileged academic
identities (i.e., canonical literature) and maintains the academic status of writers who
produce such texts. But what if we switch the relation between text and theory and try to come at
Booker’s text another way, a way does not make assumptions about the distribution of
power between writers and readers and that gives more context to the reader’s position? If reading as a member of the authorial audience is unsatisfying and reinscribes academic identities, how might articulating the particulars of my reading experience allow me to
engage with Booker’s literacies in ways precluded by authorial reading?
Reading Booker Once Again When I first turn to Booker’s portfolio, his voice is only one voice among many that echo loudly in my ears. 1 also hear Mina Shaughnessy and David Bartholomae, whose
research and scholarship on basic writers have helped to shape my understanding of the
position in which students find themselves when they seek admittance to the discourse communities of the university. I recall snippets of the animated discussions that arise during the staff meetings of OSU’s Writing Workshop when concerned and committed
teachers share ideas about how to structure courses, design assignments, and respond to the challenging texts their students present to them. 1 hear the amazed voices of Booker’s classmates as they discovered to their astonishment that the texts of students labeled as basic writers and those labeled as honors students are sometimes surprisingly similar. This catalogue of voices functions as a hypormemata and allows me to acknowledge my public selves (basic writing teacher and researcher in the field of composition), but in acknowledging these voices, I also come to recognize that there are silences about which I 43
can only speculate. Unlike Booker, I have never been surrounded by the sounds of eleven
brothers and sisters growing up in the sort of home he describes as “broken.” I have never
heard the voice of an elementary school teacher telling me I would be held back a year as
Booker was. Nor have I ever sat like Booker on the pew of a church listening to the
rhythms of a sermon delivered by an African American Baptist minister. All of these
sounds and silences are with me as I move through Booker’s portfolio, regardless of
whether the members of Booker’s authorial audience hear them as they move through his portfolio.
Although Booker welcomes me into his text with his friendly hello, I do not make it past Booker’s first sentence without becoming aware that while we have both been the
narratees of some of the same cultural/social narratives, we have also been the narratees of some very different narratives. Booker’s connection between his written portfolio and the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure causes me to recognize that Booker and I both seem to be narratees of the story of technological advancement in which the boundaries between print and film are blurred and where we can use our literacy strategies to read and to create discourse, regardless of whether it is contained within the covers of a book or projected on to the silver screen. However much, though, Booker and I might share literacy skills which allow us to “read” both print and film texts, I think we’d find ourselves standing in line at the movie theater for different tickets and checking out different video cassettes. Although I might have been enticed into seeing Bill and Ted’s
Excellent Adventure had I been in high school rather than in graduate school in 1989, it is not the sort of movie I typically find interesting. Instead, I typically see movies that I can deal with using the strategies that have become second nature to me when I read literary texts: how do typical narrative strategies and expectations short-circuit in The Crying
Game or how does The Piano intersect with other female suicide narratives? Booker’s favorite movies are Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. ’ Although movies are not the only
' This is not to say that popular movies geared to young adult audiences cannot repay serious scholarly investigation. Cultural studies scholar Will Rockett uses the popular Friday the Thirteenth and Freddie Krueger movies to investigate literacy in his article “Jason Dreams of Freddy: Genre, Supertext, and the Production of Meaning Through Pop-Cultural Literacy?” 44 medium through which social and cultural values are narrated, the differences between Booker and me are certainly telling. Booker’s preferences in movies suggest that the social/cultural narratives of which he has been a narratee have made him comfortable with stories of violence, aggression, and escape. My preference in movies highlights the ways in which even in seeking entertainment I manage to avoid having to sacrifice ray academic literacy strategies. I am, perhaps, too easily dominated by social/cultural narratives about the values of the life of the mind. Our very different taste in movies is not the only manifestation of how my own personal and political positionings are thrown into relief by Booker’s text. In an attempt to concretize his general cautionary statement that his movie has only been in the making for three months, Booker writes: “B forgets one of his lines in the final scene. It’s after he says ‘Therefore literacy in a way is imaginary,’ that he sticks in his own words. Be prepared for these things it happens a lot in this movie.” While Booker’s authorial audience would defer to Booker’s authority and accept his suggestion that his own words should be devalued, my reaction is that Booker’s own words are precisely what I do want to hear.
Many of the students who are tracked into OSU’s basic writing courses have been placed there precisely because the placement essays which they have written reveal a lack of the students’ own words and a reliance on empty, authoritative forms such as the five- paragraph theme. Such students have come to recognize that there are privileged conventions, rituals, and gestures that make up academic discourse, but with only a tentative and partial understanding of these norms, such students’ texts are sometimes uneven and puzzling patchworks. Thus, it is not surprising that Booker sees the fact that he
“sticks in his own words” as a weakness in his text and that he seems more concerned about remembering the scripted lines of academic discourse than about expressing himself in his own unique voice. David Bartholomae aptly describes the situation in which students like Booker find themselves: “Students... are not so much trapped in a private language as they are shut out from one of the privileged languages of public life, a language they are aware of but cannot control” (276). One of the explicit goals of English HOW is to help students learn how to negotiate the distance between their own words and the privileged 45
discourses of the university that are unfamiliar to them. While Booker’s ostensible goal in
pointing out that his own words are a weakness in liis text was to enlist the sympathies of
his readers, his cautionary statement reveals much more to me. It reinforces my understanding of one of the few commonalities that exists among students who are tracked into basic writing classes: such individuals are typically not undisciplined students or lazy writers, but rather they are writers who are unsure of the conventions of academic discourse. By reading not as a member of the authorial audience that Booker is trying to construct, but instead by drawing upon understandings that I have developed as a teacher of basic writers, Booker’s comment that the places where he sticks in his own words are a flaw in his text becomes much more multivalent than he intends. It reveals his position as a writer struggling toward membership in the academic community, and my reading of his lines reveals one of the many ways in which our literacies differ. Instead of merely following Booker’s directions to his ideal readers to approach his text in a certain way, 1 can read Booker’s comment as his attempt to write himself into the academic community by adopting its codes and conventions. Booker’s concern in his cover page that the places where he “sticks in his own words’’ weaken the overall impact of his text reminds me that
Booker is trying to become an academic writer and that there is a gulf between our literacies. When 1 turn to his literacy history, the particulars of my experience in reading
Booker’s literacy history continue to reveal the ways in which 1 am reading beyond the invitations he extends to his authorial audience.
From the moment 1 encounter the tentative beginning of Booker’s literacy history, “1 guess I’ll start off telling you of my first years in school,” to his recounting of his difficulties with stuttering and his struggle to graduate on time, 1 can hear Booker’s discourse as double-voiced in ways that he hasn’t prepared his authorial audience to understand. 1 perceive that underlying (and perhaps competing with) Booker’s desire to receive a good grade is his growing critique of the educational institutions that shaped his academic career. Throughout his literacy history Booker frequently presents the negative assessments of his educational performance that were conferred upon him, but he typically dissents from these judgments several sentences later. Booker begins his literacy history 46
with the claim that “[i]n first grade I was significantly behind most of the other kids in reading,” but six sentences later Booker retracts the earlier statement. He writes: “I said I
was behind most of the other students in reading, but I didn’t think so.” In his next paragraph when Booker mentions that he repeated first grade, he follows up his statement
that “I probably gained a little by staying in the first grade for an extra year” with the
rebuttal, “but it was nothing I couldn’t have gotten if I wasn’t held back.” And when
Booker describes his performance in reading classes, he embeds a critique: “Since I didn’t
do to well in reading classes, though I wasn’t to bad of a reader, I concentrated most of my time and ability on math” (emphasis added). Not only does Booker controvert the judgments of educational authorities
throughout his literary history, he even subtly critiques the overall organization of primary education in which students are typically evaluated by only one teacher. When Booker
moves on to recount his experiences in high school, he talks about the advantage of
focusing on individual classes where he could establish relationships with a variety of
teachers whose perceptions of him would be based only on his mastery of their particular
subject, not on his weaknesses in other areas. Booker’s handling of the character of Mrs.
Wagner, his English teacher, also seems to function as a subtle critique. When Booker describes his early frustrating experiences in high school English classes, his teacher is
only a nameless entity who gave him C’s because his in-class assignments were not long enough. Only when Booker reaches the end of the paragraph about his high school
English experiences and describes his success in his senior English class where he received a “B+ or higher” on all his major assignments, does his English teacher becomes “Mrs.
Wagner.” Because Booker ultimately wants his authorial audience to value his success as the salutatorian of his high school class and as a scholarship student at OSU and because
Booker reveals throughout his portfolio that he believes his own hard work will allow him to succeed academically, it would seem unlikely that Booker intends his authorial audience to recognize these implicit critiques of the educational system. Furthermore his decision to end his essay with a conventional moral tag and his reliance on the authority of the words of the Bible suggests that Booker has acquiesced to his perceptions of the norms of 47 academic discourse and to the institutions which help establish and perpetuate such norms. While Booker does not direct his authorial audience to recognize this critique, for me, as a particularly situated reader, Booker’s portfolio becomes a much more interesting and coherent text if I do recognize the implicit critique that is present in his essay. Before I move on, though, to the other “acts” of Booker’s portfolio, I must acknowledge that I am not exempt from Booker’s reprobation of the ways in which educational institutions have imposed themselves upon him. In enunciating my reading of Booker’s portfolio, I complicate my own assumptions about students, teachers, writing, and the authority
(institutional and otherwise) of academic discourse. Like the authorial audience Booker is trying to construct, I too notice that he is disclosing some very painful information in his literacy history. However instead of merely functioning to gain my sympathy, Booker’s disclosures make me complicate my assumptions about the possible relationships between students’ own voices and academic discourse. While composing a literacy history could serve as a cathartic way to (re)wiite one’s own version of past educational experiences, the assignment does not seem to function that way for Booker. Because Booker discloses but deemphasizes painful personal information, I begin to see that asking students to write about personal topics may be problematic. Booker’s revelation that he repeated first grade is buried at the end of his first paragraph, and by following up his statement that “I was held back that year” with “although I don’t know why,” Booker avoids having to interrogate further the painful reasons why. Only when Booker moves on to discuss how he made a positive change in his attitude in ninth grade does he unequivocally state: “I felt like I failed in first grade through eighth grade in school. I struggled just to get a 2.0, and many times I didn’t make it.” Booker uses a similar strategy to present other significant information that might be especially painful. It isn’t until halfway through the essay (paragraph five out of eight paragraphs) that Booker mentions that he was “from a ‘broken’ home and a poor one too.” And this information is embedded in a paragraph which focuses on Booker’s transition to high school, which he “entered with a new attitude and a new focus” and where his striving “to do well in each individual class. . . helped. . . [him] alot.” The ambivalence in 48
Booker’s presentation of these painful experiences foregrounds for me the complicated questions that arise when students are asked to reveal themselves, their families, their
friends in a writing classroom. ® Although Suellynn and Kay presented the assignment as
an open-ended opportunity to explore the variety of literacies that make up one’s life and
though they even changed the title of the assignment from a literacy autobiography to a literacy history in order to minimize the potentially confessional nature of the assignment,
Booker still seems to assume that he is being asked to explore his past failures and
frustrations. While Booker attempts to use this painful information to gain sympathy from his authorial audience, it makes me subject to his critique. My attitude that students should
not sacrifice their own voices to academic writing easily leads to assignments like literacy
histories and makes me wonder if I am really very different from the educational system which made Booker repeat tirst-grade and separated him from his classmates in a trailer where he could work on improving his communication skills. Because Booker seems at
times uncomfortable with the revelations that he believes the assignment requires, his
literacy history makes me begin to question my too-easy assumption that students will find it easiest and most rewarding to write from their own experiences and that validating personal writing in the university classroom is a liberatory gesture. In her study of
successful African American college-level writers, Valerie M. Balester documents the ways
in which her research subjects rejected a number of African American rhetorical traditions
as they “performed an intricate balancing act situating their own personas not only to the multiple audiences but also to each of their various roles, and attempted “to control ethos, to appear in good-standing of the academic discourse community ” (5). 1 would, of
course, concur with Balester’s conclusion that we need to expand and enrich our academic
discourse which “has traded flexibility for stability and has thus become more rigid than it need be” and that we need to make space for discourses such as personal writing and
‘ Min-zhan Lu and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles have both made powerful cases for the inclusion of “experimental” or “alternative” kinds of discourse, such as personal writing, in the academy, and Mary Louise Buley-Meissner argues that it is possible to work against the separation of the personal and the academic by constmcting a new “rhetoric of the self.” However, there are still dissenting voices. In the February 17,1993 issue of The Chronicle o f Higher Education, Swartzlander, Pace, and Stamler discuss the very real dangers of asking students to write about personal issues. 49
African American rhetorical strategies (159). However, my awareness of the ways in
which Booker acquiesced to what he perceived to be the academic community’s demand for
painful personal disclosures (just as the students in Balester’s study sacrificed African American rhetorical strategies to meet the perceived demands of the academy) causes me to
recognize that the strength of students’ commitment to establishing their membership in the academic community may work at cross-purposes to achieving an expanded and more
flexible conception of academic discourse. Booker and the students in Balester’s study
remind me of my status as, in Janice Neuleib’s words a “Friendly Stranger” who is nonetheless “Other” to her students. When I sit at a table in a classroom with a group of writing students, I am a representative of an academic world which may be quite alien to
the students, but in seeking to expand and extend the discursive norms of the academy, I am in some ways only making things more difficult for my students who have trouble
figuring out the ever shifting rules of the game.
By acknowledging the ways in which I have already been the narratee of various
social and cultural narratives, by using a middle voice, and by assembling the public aspects of my subjectivity as I attempt to account for my movement through the early acts
of Booker’s portfolio, my own literacies have become more visible to me as they stand out
in relief against Booker’s text. Additionally, the particulars of my reading experiences allow Booker to emerge as a far more sophisticated and interesting writer than the implied
author he rhetorically constructs in his text. Rather than presenting himself as someone to
be graded (and highly, he hopes), Booker becomes a writer whose unique position challenges the hegemony of the university and its languages.
When I move into the second act of Booker’s portfolio, I continue to read in ways which Booker has not prescribed for his authorial audience. Booker’s interview essay is probably the most uneven piece of his writing. As I described before, he seems very concerned about gaining a positive judgment from his readers by answering specific questions that he and his classmates generated as part of their preparation for interviewing people about their literacy. However, just as ray particular literacies lead me to hear in
Booker’s literacy history a critique of the educational experiences that shaped his academic 50
career prior to entering college, when I read the second act of Booker’s portfolio I become
aware of the ways in which Booker’s interview essay draws on stereotypes of what it
means to be a first-year university student at the same time that it resists the power of that
stereotype. When I first read Booker’s opening statement that “James lived in Florida his
first ten years of school. Then he moved to Seattle, where he finished the eleventh and twelfth grades,” I can imagine how many thousands of times the question “Where ya
from?” is heard in the halls of university dorms during the month of September. As I continue to wind my way through the progression of Booker’s interview essay, I can continue to trace out other threads of what it means to be a stereotypical undergraduate student in Booker’s characterization of James. In reporting that James’s favorite book is
Steven King’s “The Stand,” Booker writes that King’s novel “exemplified the message of mankind destroying mankind. . . [which] interested James because that’s the way it is in
the real world.” Like many undergraduates, James seems to want to suggest to Booker that
he is wise to the artificiality of college life and he seeks to differentiate between college and
what he deems the “real” world, an attitude that fits with a mode of discourse that Michael
Moffatt labels “Undergraduate Cynical” in Coming o f Age in New Jersey. This mildly defiant cynicism also surfaces in Booker’s explanation that James “pretty much does what he pleases, and don’t worry how others perceive him.” Whether such a notion of
individual autonomy actually reflects James’s private sense of identity or is a less authentic
social posturing, it too seems typical of the individualism Moffatt noted among the
undergraduates at Rutgers University. For most teachers and administrators working in higher education, James’s faintly derisive and self-centered attitudes could become part of a
fairly accurate, although incomplete, portrait of the typical undergraduate student. However, in what seems to be an impulse (either on James’s part or on Booker’s part) that complicates this image, Booker’s essay also gives voice to the common first-year student anxiety about balancing both a satisfying social life and a successful academic career.
Booker writes that “here in college [James] studies a lot, and he also have to adjust to college life,” and the final paragraph of the essay is very much concerned with the importance of setting priorities. 51
While there is a minor tension between the earnestness of Booker’s characterization of James’s concern for adjusting to college life and setting priorities and the mild cynicism
and devil-may-care individualism that creeps into Booker’s portrait of James, a greater tension-a tension that more powerfully deconstructs even the most richly described
characterization of the typical first-year student-is created by the silences in Booker’s essay. However much Booker works to validate the stereotype of the first-year university
student in his portrait of James, there are raptures in the text where that typical student role breaks down. The second paragraph of Booker’s essay is such a site. In this paragraph,
Booker breaks the flow of information about James and switches into comparison between his own background and James’s background. Booker recognizes that “James didn’t have
much trouble in school, which is the opposite for me. I had much trouble in school, especially my elementary school years,” and Booker goes on to note “I didn’t enjoy neither reading nor writing. Come to think of it, I didn’t enjoy any subject that dealt with communication.” At this point, though, the paragraph abruptly ends. Booker avoids going any further into an exploration of the differences in his educational experiences and James’s
educational experiences, and he refuses to consider the consequences of those differences for the stereotype of the first-year university student that emerges in his characterization of James. Although Booker’s second paragraph lays out tantalizing lines of inquiry that have
the potential to undermine any kind of monolithic characterization of first-year university
students, he does not pursue such an inquiry. The final paragraph of Booker’s essay about James is filled with a similar silence. At the conclusion of the essay, Booker claims that in spite of their very different backgrounds, both he and James share the same fears. These fears, though, are only vaguely characterized as “not accomplishing om purpose in life, in our set time frame.”
Booker avoids looking at the sources of their fears or at the potentially very different obstacles he and James will face in accomplishing their goals. Booker may be willing to accept that he and James are “very similar^’ in spite of their “totally different backgrounds,” but his silence when it comes to the specifics of their commonalities and the consequences of their differences works against the stereotype of the first-year student that Booker is 52
drawing upon in this essay. As a particularly situated reader, recognizing the ways in which Booker’s essay accomplishes this deconstruction of the stereotype is far more
enriching and enlightening than following Booker’s cues to his authorial audience to
acknowledge that he has appropriately answered the list of questions generated by his classmates. Just as reading Booker’s first essay threw into relief my literacies, literacies
which enabled me to recognize the ways in which the institutional authority of the academy
and its representatives were being critiqued, my movement through Booker’s second essay is shaped by my recognition of Booker’s unwillingness to fall outside the typical stereotypes of what it means to be a university student In addition to recognizing that each individual component of Booker’s portfolio is loaded with more meaning than he directs his
authorial audience to recognize, offering a local and particular description of my reading
experience also allows me to see connections and coherences among the different “acts” of
Booker’s portfolio. For me, each element of Booker’s portfolio reflects his attempts to write himself into the university, rather than being merely separate attempts to try and get a
good grade. In his final project, Booker’s attempt to write himself into the university continues to manifest itself for me when I read beyond the invitation he extends to his authorial
audience. Instead of conforming to the traditional format and organization of an academic
essay or paper, Booker’s final essay is divided into four separate sections which speak to each other, revise each other, and contradict each other, more like a bricolage. Rather than joining Booker’s authorial audience in recognizing his mastery of a variety of resources (Webster’s Dictionary, Piaget, Mike Rose, etc.) in four unconnected sections, I read
Booker’s final project as his attempt to establish an identity for himself in the narratives of
academic discourse which have dominated his past.
In the first section of his final project, Booker offers a traditional academic summary of Piagetian theories of childhood development, taking academic or essayist 53
literacy to its extreme and creating an anonymous, impersonal, and “objective” text. ’
Although his account of how a child might progress from the “sensorimotor stage” through
the proportional, concrete operational, and formal operational stages is clear and well described with easy-to-understand examples, the text is, for me, quite lifeless. Booker has effaced himself as a writer from his text, and as reader, I have no idea of what connections
Fm supposed to make with this summary. The second section of Booker’s final project speaks in a very different voice. As
Booker describes “The Known Me,” he tells his own story of human development-or at least of his own development as a writer during his first quarter as a university student.
Rather than the halting beginning of his literacy history (“I guess I’ll start off...”), Booker begins with ‘“Great ! now I’ll get to do regular English work,”’ and he goes on to reveal that he is a confident man willing to take responsibility for his texts. Booker reports that he
“received either a 97%-99% on all o f... [his] English assignments, from the last part of
. . . [his] junior year till graduation.” And he does not hesitate to make bold statements that
“I knew I was a pretty good writer.” More importantly, Booker critiques the sort of arbitrary labeling that can categorize individuals in unsatisfying ways. Although he is more than willing to take responsibility for the placement exam that he wrote (“I don’t know why my paper wasn’t good enough for them to give me a passing score. But no excuses, it was my fault I failed that assignment, 1 guess.”), Booker critiques not only the testing process where students are packed into desks in an echoing lecture hall and told to write against the clock, but also the labels which arise out of such tests.
While the content of this section of his final project seems to critique the sort of labels that Piaget would apply to youngster, Booker’s style of writing also works against the essayist literacy that he evidenced in the first section of the project In “The Known
" Scollon and Scollon offer definitions of essayist literacy, and John Trimbur’s “Essayist Literacy and the Rhetoric of Deproduction” explores how essayist literacy functions as a “legitimation strategy which authorizes statements by concealing their production,” thus convincing “our students that when they read, they are not subject to persuasion but only decoding the words on the page” (75). In “Essayist Literacy and Other Verbal Performances,” Marcia Farr contextualizes such literacy as a historical and cultural development of Western civilization, and she goes on to argue for an ethnography of communication that would accommodate verbal performances in a variety of cultural contexts. 54
Me,” Booker draws on his personal experience and he takes risks in his text. As he
describes his hallway conversation with the representative from the university mentoring
program, he makes humorous asides—“oh contrare” and “Hold up, math, why math?” The contrast between the “official” account of childhood development that Booker offers in the
first section of his childhood project and his more personal account of his own development as a first-year university student in English 1 lOW/Hl 10 implicitly critiques
“academic” understandings of the stages of human development. Booker’s own story is far more interesting, and it reveals the inadequacy of both Piaget’s theories and of academic writing.
While sections one and two of Booker’s final project offer contrasting ways of
understanding who people are and how they might labeled and classified along a continuum of development, Booker’s third section is an exploration of how such labeled people interact in academic settings. Booker states that his original goal for his final project was “to contrast the writing style, and the early childhood experiences which had an effect on literacy, of the IlOW students and the HI 10 students.” However, Booker was “surprised to find out that... [he] didn’t notice any remarkable differences.” Along with many of his classmates, Booker seems to have come to recognize that although the university segregates honors students from those students who are labeled “at risk” and perpetuates a campus- wide educational caste system, there really are not such remarkable differences between basic writing students and honors students. And Booker goes on to attribute differences in the way people “communicated on paper” to the fact that “people put more time, and effort into what they are interested in.” However, Booker does not trust in the credibility of his own articulation of his experiences and he brings another “authority” into his text-Mike Rose instead of Piaget But instead of adopting an essayist strategy and offering a cold and formal summary of Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, Booker makes connections between his experiences and Rose’s text Booker expresses a certain amount of empathy for Mike
Rose’s fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Wilson, who asks only the best students to read aloud from science and language arts textbooks, but then Booker goes on to explain that as a student he too has experienced “the waiting fo r my turn syndrome.” 55
While the third section of Booker’s final act suggests to me that he is capable of interweaving his own experience with that of academic authorities and published authors,
the conclusion of Booker’s portfolio closes down this possibility. In his Hnal paragraph
Booker suggests that anyone interested in further defining literacy should conduct
additional traditional research: “one would have to do research on the words standard (a
model to be followed or imitated) and civilized (to endow with law, order, and the
conditions favorable to the arts and sciences; to refine) in order to Know the definitions of their original language.” For members of Booker’s authorial audience this is a strong cue
indicating that they should value the “research” he has done in quoting Piaget, Rose, Macionis, and the others whose names appear on his bibliography, but for me it is only
frustrating. Booker seems to be retreating from the more innovative moves that he makes
in this final project and returning to the traditional codes of academic discourse whose
authority he tries to appropriate for himself. But as Bartholomae remarks in the conclusion of “Inventing the University,” “It may very well be that some students will need to learn to
crudely mimic the ‘distinctive’ register of academic discourse before they are prepared to
actually and legitimately do the work of the discourse, and before they are sophisticated enough with the refinements of tone and gesture to do it with grace or elegance. To say this, however, is to say that our students must be our students” (284). While I may be
temporarily frustrated by the conclusion of Booker’s portfolio, I must remember that he is a student in the process of continually becoming a new and different student. His gracious agreement to allow me to read, study, and write about his portfolio has allowed me to follow his sometimes progressive, sometimes regressive, attempts to write himself into the
university, and by throwing into relief the literacies that I brought to the task, Booker’s
movie/portfolio has helped me as a reader who is continually in the process of becoming a new and different kind of reader. 56
MOVING WITH/AGAINST/ALONGSIDE THE “MASTER”: AUTHORIAL READING AND THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
While my analysis of Booker’s portfolio may succeed in showing the limits of authorial reading for texts by basic writers, it has not addressed the limits of such a model of reading for literary works traditionally labeled masterpieces. Although Rabinowitz argues that the authorial audience is “not just an arbitrary convention invented by academics for their own convenience” and that it has “a broader social usage” (23), his construction of the authorial audience is predicated on literary reading as the norm. He writes that the “artistic choices” made by authors “are based upon assumptions-conscious or unconscious-about readers, and to a certain extent, artistic success depends upon their shrewdness” (21, emphasis added). Reading to become of a member of the authorial audience means working to fulfill these assumptions and join the particular social/interpretive community constructed by the artistic writer. Gingerly allying himself with Culler, Rabinowitz acknowledges that within social/interpretive communities the
“conventions that precede the text have enormous consequences for the processes of interpretation and evaluation” (29), and artistic writers are assumed to fully understand and control not only their own relationships to these conventions but also the relationships of their readers to such conventions. What will happen, though, when 1 move from the position a reader who is in a position to “master” a student text to the position of a reader who might be “mastered” by the text of a writer whose novels and critical writings have helped define the canon of Anglo-American literature? How will my argument about the need for local and particular descriptions of reading need to be complicated when 1 turn my attention to the texts of artistic writers who are presumed to be in control of their audiences’ experiences? Would reading in ways other than to become a member of the authorial audience be an appropriate strategy when a writer declares himself to be offering explicit and visibly controlled instructions about how his or her text should be read? In what ways could accounting for the particulars of my reading experience be a useful contribution to conversations about literary texts? And can local and particular descriptions of reading 57
mount a challenge to Rabinowitz’s claim that “certain kinds of political criticism can be
strengthened if they are built on a foundation of authorial reading” (31)?
Readers of Henry James’s late novels typically find themselves encountering such a
literary “Master^’ who challenges his readers while also making clear that he will guide them as they develop an appreciation of the range and depth of his talents and the subtleties of his moral sensibilities. With its complicated development of the mimetic and thematic dimensions of the characters of Kate Croy, Merton Densher, and Milly Theale, The Wngs of the Dove is one of the carefully nuanced novels of James’s final period, and as an anonymous London Times book reviewer described it shortly after its publication: “it is not an easy book to read. It will not do for short railway journeys or for drowsy hammocks, or even to amuse sporting men and the active Young Person. The dense fine quality of its pages-and there are 576-will always presuppose a certain effort of attention on the part of the reader; who must, indeed, be prepared to forgo many of his customary titillations and bribes” {Times \Loviéovi\Literary Supplement, September 1902, p. 263. Rpt, in The
Wings o f the Dove, Norton Critical Edition). While readers who come to the portfolio of a student may justifiably expect to find a writer who is struggling to enter the community of his academic audience, most readers, like this reviewer for the Times, expect to submit to James’s authority as he uses his subtle expertise to guide and control his authorial audience’s encounter with this text. This expectation is reinforced by James’s Prefaces to the New York edition of his novels.
James’s Moves Toward Mastery While the cover letter to Booker’s portfolio/movie welcomes me into his text and puts me at ease immediately, James’s Preface to The Wings of the Dove functions quite differently. Rather than employing an overt address to his readers as Booker does, James begins in a more meditative fashion: “’The Wings o f the Dove, published in 1902, represents to my memory a very old-if 1 shouldn’t perhaps rather say a very young- motive; I can scarce remember the time when the situation on which this long-drawn fiction mainly rests was not vividly present to me” (3). This inward rumination is an appropriate 58
opening for a Preface that unfolds as James’s description of the circumstances surrounding the composition of his novel and his exegesis of the technical challenges he faced as a
writer. As I move through the Preface, James tells me that his subject~“a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die”--
“stood there with secrets and compartments, with possible treacheries and traps; it might have a great deal to give, but would probably ask for equal services in return, and would
collect this debt to the last shilling” (3). He goes on to explain his realization that “the poet essentially can’t be concerned with the act of dying” (4), and he describes as his
“compositional key” his recognition that his heroine’s “stricken state was but half her case, the correlative half being the state of others as affected by her” and that he could choose
with which “half’ he would begin and that he would have to “trust [himself] to know when to proceed from the one and when from the other” (7). Booker’s cover page reveals rather quickly the ways in which he is not entirely in
control of the process of constructing a rhetorical relationship with his readers, but James’s decision to preface his novel with a discussion of his own writing processes makes him seem completely at ease with his discourse and with his ability to control a writer-reader relationship in which the author is the dominant force. Although James requests in a parenthetical comment my “attention of perusal” as a reader and warns me that “the luxury
[of enjoying a work of art] is not greatest... when the work asks for as little attention as possible” (14; 15), he seems more concerned about creating “a sort of comprehensive manual or vademecum for aspirants to our arduous profession” (99), as he describes his New York edition prefaces in a 1908 letter to W.D. Howells. By focusing the Preface to
The Wngs o f the Dove on the ways in which his novel could “form a single-object lesson for a literary critic bent on improving his occasion to the profit of the budding artist” (13),
James asserts himself as the “Master” and seems to be creating for his readers a role in which they recognize his technical achievement and submit to his superior understanding of the narrative of Milly Theale and those who surround her. Although James declaims his decision not to dramatize for the reader many of the critical events that take place in Venice and admits that “the poor author’s comparatively cold affirmation or thin guarantee” is 59
likely to be seen as “a figure of attestation at once too gross and too bloodless” (12) and he bemoans his “regular failure to keep the appointed halves of my whole equal” (13), such a
mea culpa strategy is perhaps more manipulative than modest By acknowledging that readers may be left unsatisfied with his decision to exclude them from critical scenes in
Venice, James attempts to defuse any anger that might lead to a reader openly rebelling against the author.
Although James positions himself as a writer who intends for his readers to accept his discernible invitations to enter his authorial audience, when I plunge into the novel itself, I find, as with Booker’s portfolio, that accounting only for my attempts to enter
James’s authorial audience is a radical oversimplification that distorts the complex convergencies of literacies that characterizes my reading experience. As I move through
James’s novel, acknowledging my own personal and political positions allows me to account for the unstable relationship between an authorial reading and mine. The process of using a middle voice to acknowledge the cultural narratives of which I have already been a narratee and to construct a version of my public selves results in a political reading that does not build upon the authorial audience’s reading, but sometimes intersects with and
Sara Blair, Mark Seltzer, and Wayne Booth all offer more nuanced understandings of James’s moves toward Mastery. Blair notes that “the prefaces ironically dramatize their own raison d ’etre: that of consolidating James’s power to regulate his own representations, to achieve the closure of the commimicated, represented ideas. Performing a survey and surveillance of James’s process of production, the prefaces draw on the same metaphysics of authorial presence that James’s textual self-consciousness purportedly undermines. The prefaces do not altogether conceal James’s act of self-construction; characteristically, they represent the act via tiie displacement of metaphoi" (91). In Henry James and the Art of Power, Seltzer argues that “if James’s texts explicitly disown the exercise of power, the discourse of his fiction is a double discourse that at once represses and acknowledges a discreet continuity between literary and political practices.. .. In fact, the techniques of representation that James invents to defer, dissimulate, and disavow the technologies of power that pressure his texts reinvent these very technologies” (15-16). In his forthcoming ‘Taking Flight with The Wings o f the Dove,” Booth writes of his response to the Preface of Wings: “I had spent a lifetime, as it were, arguing that implied authors are always not only different from but intended as superior to their makers, purged of whatever those makers took to be their living faults. I was therefore not surprised to find myself engaged with a ‘James’ who was the most ‘Jamesian’ figure I had ever m et- even in his other late novels.” Booth goes on to develop his argument that both the Preface and the text of Wings required of James “a kind of conscientiousness that fuses morality and the love of beautiful form. And it requires of us [James’s readers] an echo of those virtues.” 60
sometimes ignores that reading. In offering a detailed reading of my encounter with Kate Croy, Merton Densher, and Milly Theale, I am not merely rewriting James’s novel or
constructing my own fiction as an alternative to The Wings o f the Dove, instead I am
working to document and record the convergencies of our literacies.
Sympathetic Details: Reading Kate Croy When I move beyond James’s preface and plunge into The Wings o f the Dove itself, I first encounter Kate Croy, who is waiting for her father in his seedy rooms: “he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantle, a face positively pale with irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once-she had tried it-the sense of the slippery and of the sticky” (21). Kate’s sense of duty and her ability to check her justifiable irritation allows her to rise above her father’s inconsiderate behavior, and this introduction to Kate serves to enlist my sympathies on her behalf. As I learn more about Kate and her family circumstances, my compassion and respect for her only grows. While she waits in her father’s “vulgar little room,” Kate puzzles over the seemingly inexplicable nature of her family’s collapse. She characterizes her family as travelers who were equipped for “a profitable journey” but who have broken down beside the road and “stretch[ed] themselves in the wayside dust without a reason” (21-22). As the early volumes of the novel progress, I learn more about the premature deaths of Kate’s brothers, her mother’s final illness, and her sister’s luckless marriage and gradual descent into poverty. Kate’s family history makes her a sympathetic character, and her troubles continue into the time of the novel’s action. Keeping his daughter waiting after he has summoned her to his Chirk Street lodgings on the pretext of a serious illness is an insignificant breach of common courtesy that pales next to Lionel Croy’s rejection of his daughter’s offer to make a home with him. Kate begs her father: “It’s simply a question of your not turning me away-taking yourself out of my life. It’s simply a question of your saying: ‘Yes then. 61
since you wUl, we’ll stand together. We won’t worry in advance about how or where; we’ll have faith and find a way.’ That’s a ü -à a twould be the good you’d do me. I should
have you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?” (32). Although Mr, Croy correctly surmises that Kate is partly motivated by her affection for a suitor who is not acceptable to
Mrs. Lowder, his rebuff is no less painful to Kate-or to me as reader. Once Kate’s father abandons her, a visit to her sister Marian makes clear that few options are available to Kate.
The widowed Marian lives in “comfortless Chelsea” in a “small house the small rent of which she couldn’t help having on her mind” (38-39), and Marian’s sisters-in-law present an even more horrific picture to Kate as she considers what the world may hold for her. The Miss Condrips “lived in a deeper hole than Marian, but they kept their ear to the ground, they spent their days in prowling, whereas Marian, in garments and shoes that seemed steadily to grow looser and larger, never prowled,” and “there were times when
Kate wondered if the Miss Condrips were offered her by fate as a warning for her own future-to be taken as showing her what she herself might become at forty if she let things too recklessly go” (44). This detailed portrait of Kate and her situation prompts me to position her in a long line of young women with withdrawn, absent, or abusive fathers: Cinderella and Snow White, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, less in Tess o f the D'Urbervilles, Celie in
The Color Purple. The process of articulating this list, though, causes me to recognize the range of possible progressions that can develop from general cultural narratives about young women who are physically or psychologically abandoned by their fathers.
Handsome young princes can function as surrogate fathers and save damsels in distress; wise and witty daughters can come to recognize both the strengths and limitations of their paternal legacies and then marry well; women who have suffered horribly at the hands of abusive fathers can escape to find happiness and healing in more nurturing communities of women. Or, as in Tess’s case, a father’s foolish ambitions can lead to tragic results. While
I may recognize the prevalence of cultural narratives about young women who are challenged by the lack of a benevolent father-figure in their lives, the variety of circumstances and outcomes of specific stories makes it difficult for me to anticipate how 62
Kate’s story will unfold. At this early stage in the progression of James’s novel, I am
aware of a vast number of complementary and conflicting interpretive conventions available
to me. While it seems fairly obvious that Kate’s story will not be as “light, bright, and sparkling” as Austen’s comedy about the Bennet sisters, still in play for me are possibilities
that a dashing young knight (Merton Densher?) could rescue Kate, that Kate, like Celie, might find support in relationships with other women and eventually free herself from her father, or perhaps other possible outcomes exist that I haven’t yet imagined. While my mind rushes forward to try and determine what lies ahead for Kate Croy, my immediate experience of her is rooted in the detailed portrait James’s presents of her existence and her response to her difficult circumstances.
Throughout these first two books of volume one, James’s narrative offers me a carefully constructed mimetic portrait of Kate, and she emerges as a generous, smart, and vigorous young woman. Not only is Kate willing to help make a home for her father, but she is also willing to give half of her inheritance from her mother to Marian and her children. While Lionel Croy suggests that people in general and his daughter in particular are no longer sufficiently aware of their familial and communal connections, Kate’s thoughts after visiting her sister reveal that she is all too conscious of the ties that bind: The sharpest pinch of her state, meanwhile, was exactly that all intercourse with her sister had the effect of casting down her courage and tying her hands, adding daily to her sense of the part, not always uplifting or sweetening, tiiat the bond of blood might play in one’s life. She was face to face with it now, with the bond of blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most clearly to have “come into” by the death of her mother, much of that consciousness as her mother had absorbed and carried away. Her haunting harassing father, her menacing uncompromising aunt, her portionless Uttle nephews and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of natural piety superabundantly to vibrate. (38)
It is this vibrating chord of natural piety that restricts Kate’s range of movement as she tries to navigate her way through the worlds of Chirk Street, Chelsea, and Lancaster Gate, but
Kate’s response to her desperate situation is far from fatalistic: “She didn’t hold herself cheap, she didn’t make for misery. Personally, no, she wasn’t chalk-marked for auction. She hadn’t given up yet” (22). And in the second book of volume one, Kate vigorously declares to Merton Densher that she shall “try for everything” (60). 63
I expect that Kate’s considerable intellectual powers will no doubt be her greatest asset as she works to redeem her family. Kate is astute enough to understand the true
nature of her seemingly benevolent aunt She dubs Maud Lowder “Britannia of the Marketplace,” and she likes to picture her aunt with “a pen on her e a r. . . a helmet, a
shield, a trident and a ledger" (37). Although she has a clear understanding of Mrs.
Lowder’s character, Kate has “already perceived... the mistake of trusting to easy
analogies” (37). Just as she is very perceptive about her aunt, Kate knows herself equally weU: “[she] knew what to think of her own power thus to carry by storm; she saw herself as handsome, no doubt, but as hard, and felt herself clever but as cold; and as much too imperfectly ambitious, furthermore, that it was a pity, for a quiet life, she couldn’t decide to be either finely or stupidly indifferent” (52). Even though Kate describes the potentially
“hard” and “cold” facets of her character, her ability to take an honest and unblinking look at herself only heightens my respect for her mental capacities. Kate is determined to overcome the circumstances of her family and refuses to be coerced into complying with her father’s vision of her future, and she also reveals at least a tacit understanding that her tenacity and resoluteness are in some ways incompatible with traditional female roles. As she considers the situation of her family “there was a minute during which, though her eyes were fixed, she quite visibly lost herself in the thought of the way she might still pull things round had she only been a man” (22). The mimetic and detailed portrait of Kate and her sharp insight, her frustration with the limitations imposed upon her by traditional gender roles, and her insistence that “if she was the last word” her family’s story '"'would end with a sort of meaning” make her a very appealing character to me (22). Unlike fairy tale princesses whose passivity and victimhood make them all the more appealing to dashing heroes, Kate is committed to action and she assumes responsibility not just for her own fate but also for the future of her family. Because of ray position as a woman living in the second half of the century in which the work of women like Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, and Susan
Fahludi has combined with the quietly insistent lives of countless mothers and 64
grandmothers to create options for women that would have been unthinkable to James in the early decades of the century, I respect and admire Kate.
While the details of Kate’s life make me sympathetic to her, James’s strategy of
using details to develop the mimetic dimensions of Kate’s character strengthens my alliance
with her. In my introduction I cite Elting Morison’s argument about the power of the particular in a mechanistic society and about the importance of the localized and specific as
“a steadying concreteness of actuality that gets muffled up and insulated in the generality of abstraction” (182). Feminist critics extend this argument for the particular by
acknowledging the link between details and the feminine. In her archaeology of the detail as an aesthetic category, Naomi Schor explains how the detail (seen as insignificant, trivial,
and ordinary as well as decadent and the effete ) is indissolubly linked to the problem of
gender. Schor writes: The irreconcilability of details and the sublime and the concomitant affinity of details for the effete and effeminate ornamental style point to what is perhaps most threatening about the detail: its tendency to subvert an internal hierarchic ordering of the work of art which clearly subordinates the periphery to the center, the accessory to the principal, the foreground to the background. Given the persistent association of all manner of devalorized or threatening details with the feminine, it is scarcely surprising to find the insubordinate detail singled out as distinctively feminine.” (20)
If the detail, in its “material contingency” and with its “tendency to proliferation” is
incompatible with the Idea land the Sublime, associating the detail with women and with femininity neatly performs an exclusionary function, sequestering women and femininity from fields of high classical and neo-classical art (15). Elizabeth Langland’s reading of
Middlemarch can function as a corollary to Schor’s point. When, in realist fiction, the
detail gains legitimacy, there is still considerable concern about distinguishing “essential”
from “inessential detail.” In Middlemarch, Langland charges, George Eliot seems to define
inessential details as those associated with the lower class. Langland criticizes the debilitating lack of details about the household managerial skills of Mary Garth and her mother and the ways in which that lack leads to an effacement of “the place of woman in domestic management and thus in the political life of Victorian England” (106). With this awareness of the ways details can function in circumscribing representations of gender and 65 class, it is not surprising to me that it is the very details of Kate’s portrayal that make me sympathetic toward her. Although I am suspicious that James may be closer to the classicists and neo-classicists who would argue that the achievement of the Ideal aesthetic beauty is disrupted by the intrusion of particularities and details, I want to look to details in order to understand the lives and representations of women. My developing relationship with Kate and with the details of her life is a result of the particularities of my personal and political positionings, but in what other ways does it intersect with the experience James seems to be prescribing for his authorial audience? I assume that Kate’s generosity and her commitment to her family would be almost universally applauded, but as I come to understand and respect Kate’s intellectual powers and her vigorous determination to redeem her family, I begin to wonder if James isn’t asking me to develop a negative attitude toward this young woman. Is James, as a narratee of different social and cultural narratives, assuming that his authorial audience will judge Kate as a ruthless and conniving mercenary and condemn her decision to “try for everything” (60)? James is quite explicit in his preface that he values the ability of women to suffer in silence. Although he is discussing Milly Theale and is referring to “mortal affliction,” James writes; “men... suffer on the whole more overtly and grossly than women, and resist with a ruder, an inferior strategy” (4). In his Preface, James also remarks that Kate’s experience with her reprobate father “was all effectively to have pervaded her life... to have tampered with her spring” (9). Is Kate in her resistance to being entombed in either a loveless marriage to Lord Mark or the poverty of her family’s circumstances suffering in a mde and inferior way? Does James intend for his strategy of using concrete details to present Kate as a further indictment against her? Is James asking me to adopt interpretive conventions that would necessitate such a view of Kate? There have certainly been plenty of critics throughout the years who have been willing to condemn Kate. Dorothea Krook writes of Kate’s “streak of brutality-the kind of brutality which enables her to dismiss another human being with the easiest of contempt when that human being happens merely to violate her standard of good breeding” (537); Charles Thomas Samuels sees Kate as “the book’s chief embodiment of evil” (61); Paul Harland 66
suggests that “Kate, as a newcomer to Lancaster Gate, manifests with the zeal of the
converted the assumptions of that polite society... where the law of the jungle is in force”
(317); and Janet Gabler-Hover argues that Kate “performs a sort of black magic with her
sophistic language” and that “her denial of the reality of human suffering takes form in her manipulative attempts to get what she wants without paying a price” (174). In condemning Kate none of these critics acknowledge or interrogate how their own personal and political
positions cause them to deploy specific interpretive conventions that lead to such judgments. These critics are apparently adopting Rabinowitz’s prescription for authorial reading and are transcending their own gender, class, race, and academic biases in order to have the experience the implied James intends for them. Presumably such critics might choose to go on and criticize the politics of the author they find implied by the text, but by beginning with authorial reading, as Rabinowitz and these critics do, the politics of authorial reading as a practice which carries its own interpretive conventions (privileging the author over the reader, positioning “the reader” outside of categories of race, class, and gender, etc.) remains covert. In acknowledging ray own position as a female reader who has been a narratee of specific social and cultural narratives, my developing account of my encounter with The Wings o f the Dove more fully acknowledges the complicated convergence of literacies that occurs as I move through James’s text, and it also creates an opportimity for me to recognize the political interestedness of my own reading for details and its relationship to feminist practices.
The Devil is in the (Lack of) Details: Reading Milly Theale
The introduction of Milly Theale in book three of volume one further complicates my position(s) as a particular reader of The Wings o f the Dove and causes me to continue to question the relationship between authorial reading and political criticism. While Kate is incredibly ensnared by the demands of her family and her competing desires to help them as well as to become the wife of Merton Densher, I immediately become aware that Milly Theale is not trapped in the same familial and financial strictures that bind Kate. Having experienced the “the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage,” 67
Milly’s life story has become a “legend... of romantic isolation” (77). In her “isolated, unmothered, unguarded” state, Milly has a freedom not available to Kate, and this freedom
is not just the result of a lack of relatives (94). It is also a function of Milly’s incredible wealth. Susan Stringham recognizes that at least part of Milly’s special liberty “came back
of course to the question of money. . . [and that] it was just this, this incomparably and nothing else, that when all was said and done most made it” (85). While James devotes 75
pages to developing a mimetic portrait of Kate and the entrapping details of her life, James
describes Milly far less particularly and spends only 20 pages of book three of volume one
on Milly’s character and condition. There are no details about the precise nature of Milly’s illness or about the deaths of her family members. The heroine to which James is so
devoted in his Preface is quite detached from the world around her, and James does not offer me the same sort of rich details about her life that he takes care to develop so fully in his presentation of Kate. In critical conversations there seems to be an easy alliance between this lack of details about Milly Theale and her status as a victimized heroine. Just as numerous critics have condemned Kate, there has been an extended critical conversation about Milly as an innocent and unsuspecting victim. P.O. Mathiessen suggests that “Milly has been wrapped around and isolated by sinister forces, almost as though she has been literally smothered off stage by Kate’s terrifying will” (57). Sallie Sears notes that the
Londoners “value material wealth and social status, and give... both tacit and open approval to any means utilized to obtain them,” and she argues that “Milly’s fundamental error of judgment with respect to her English acquaintances is her failure to recognize this inversion of values, her assumption that she and they speak common moral language” (79).
Paul W. Harland is perhaps most succinct in his claim that Milly is “desperately out of touch with her social environment” (316). Such critics seem to be employing interpretive conventions that allow them to accept (at least initially) James’s indications about the value of young women who are removed from the details of life, and they all conclude that Milly serves as a testament to the power of renunciation and transcendent goodness. Because of my own recognition of the importance of the local and particular in accounting for the lives and contributions of women, my reading of The Wings o f the Dove is quite different from 68
the “authorial” reading offered by critics like Mathiessen and company. My continued
progress through James’s novel becomes shaped by the tensions between the two
constructions of women’s lives represented by Kate and Milly and by my awareness of the consequences of adopting such a reading strategy that focuses on the local and particular.
While Milly Theale is presented as an isolated and elusive princess removed from
the details of life, she has become quite dissatisfied with her detached state. She seems to
want to become part of the social web, or at the least, she wants to take a closer look at it. After viewing the kingdoms of the earth from her alpine perch, Milly recognizes “that what
she wanted of Europe was ‘people,’ so far as they were to be h ad ... She was all for scenery-yes; but she wanted it human and personal” (93). Milly’s perspective from atop
the Swiss Alps is a poignant contrast to Kate’s relationship with Merton. Rising above the
everyday cares of the world and no longer being pressed by the demands of her family
seems to be exactly what Kate wants to achieve in her relationship with Merton. As she mentally reconstructs her first meeting with Merton, Kate imagines an almost fairy-tale situation in which “she had observed a ladder against a garden-wall and had tmsted herself so to climb it as to be able to see over into the probable garden on the other side. On reaching the top she had found herself face to face with a gentleman engaged in a like calculation at the same moment, and the two enquirers had remained confronted on their ladders” (49). This description of her first encounter with Merton reveals how Kate idealizes their relationship. For Kate, Merton represents “what her life had never given her and certainly, without some such aid as his, never would give her; all the high dim things she lumped together as of the mind. It was on the side of the mind that Densher was rich for her and mysterious and strong” (47), As a young woman mired in the entrapping details of her life, Kate seeks the sort of detachment Milly achieves on her alpine peak.
Conversely, Milly seeks out the sort of details and human relations that have made Kate’s life so difficult. For me, the progression of the novel is driven by this chiasmatic intersection of the lives of these two very differently positioned young women. However, as I move through the final two books of the first volume of The Wings o f the Dove the continued interactions of Kate and Milly muddle any neat dichotomies. 69
Milly daims to want “people” and to become a part of the social web; but even as MUly comes to understand the details of Kate’s family and their lives, she tends to romanticize
away such details of life. Although Kate “gradually become[s] not a little explicit on the
subject of her situation, her past, her present, her general predicament,” MiUy fails to recognize the hard reality of Kate’s position (112). Instead MUly romanticizes Kate as being “of English, of eccentric, of Thackerayan character” (112). Upon learning of the
circumstances of Marian Condrip, Milly pleads with Kate for an introduction to the beleaguered widow; but rather than undertaking a journey of genuine discovery or beneficence, Milly seems to be searching for spectacle. James tells us that Milly “seemed
really to count more on the revelation of the anxious lady at Chelsea than on the best nights
of the opera” (115). After Milly’s whimsical quest to try and find some Dickensian characters hiding in the shadows of London and Chelsea, James tells his readers that
The conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social atlas- these it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady, in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary legend-a mixed wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps mostly of Dickens- under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much appealed. (123)
Because Milly’s motivations to visit Kate’s sister and her reactions to her meeting with Mrs.
Condrip seem oblivious to the very unromantic reality of trying to make ends meet, Tm
suspicious of the sincerity of Milly’s communion with the lower classes after her second visit to Sir Luke StretL Although Milly begins her walk with the feeling “that her only company must be the human race at large,” as she wanders in streets “peopled with grimy children and costermongers’ carts” she hopes she has found some “slums” (152; 153). With her romanticized view of poverty, Milly believes that she can share with “smutty
sheep” and “idle lads” a sense of “the blessed truth that they could live if they would”
(153). Milly seems to be naively smoothing over the very material details that differentiate her situation from the lives of the people she encounters on her walk, and she easily co-opts people outside her own social circle as mere curiosities to be assimilated into her unrealistic view of lives lived in poverty. 70
My reading of Milly’s romanticization of the lower classes is complicated by the fact
that she is evidently perfectly able to discern the rules of engagement that govern the social interactions among her new friends at Lancaster Gate. As MiUy converses with Lord Mark at Mrs. Lowder’s dinner party, she “found of a sudden her ease-found it all as she bethought herself that what Mrs. Lowder was really arranging for was a report on her quality and, as perhaps might be said her value, from Lord Mark” (106). Milly quite accurately perceives that Aunt Maud has positioned the place cards at her dinner table in order to obtain an appraisal of the young heiress from New York, and rather than becoming uncomfortable as her “value” is assessed, Milly “found of sudden her ease.” Such passages reveal that Milly fully understands the world of Lancaster Gate, but Milly goes even further and even participates in the same sorts of calculated withholdings of information and subtle deceptions that mark many of the conversations in The Wings o f the Dove. After Mrs. Lowder asks Milly to fmd out from Kate if Merton Densher has returned from America, Milly duplicitously reports to Mrs. Lowder that “I don’t think, my dear lady, he’s here” (172), even though earlier in the evening it had “pass[ed] between...
[Kate and MiUy] that he [Merton] was in London” (166). While Milly’s detached and isolated state might in some way justify her inability to understand the material circumstances of the lives of people like Marian Condrip, her negotiation of the world of
Lancaster Gate reveals that she is astute enough to read the subtle social manipulations of Maud Lowder and company. These detaUs of MUly’s behavior complicate not only my understanding of her character-they also affect my relationship to Kate. WhUe there is no denying that Kate intentionaUy deceives MiUy about her secret engagement to Merton and that she encourages Merton to engage in behaviors that wiU aUow MUly to beUeve she might provide solace to him as Kate’s rejected suitor, Kate’s behaviors are consistently driven by the pressing details of her situation and her famUy’s needs. By contrast, MUly has been presented as far above such messy impingements, and MiUy’s attempts to appropriate the experiences of people whose material circumstances are significantly different from her own circumstances only reinforces my aUiance with Kate. 71
When MiUy stands before the Bronzino portrait at Matcham, she sees only herself: she found herself. .. looking at the mysterious portrait through tears ----- the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair, rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her slighUy Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage-only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead. MUly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her. “I shall never be better than this.” (137)
MUly goes on to remark to Lord Mark that “Of course her complexion’s green . . . but mine’s several shades greener.,.. Her hands are large. .. but mine are larger” (138). Just as MUly sees Kate as a character out of Thackeray and visits Marian Condrip in the same spirit as if she were going for an evening at the opera, MUly turns herself into the
Bronzino portrait. But when Kate arrives on the scene with Lord and Lady Aldershaw, she sees something very different. Kate immediately recognizes MiUy’s distress and turbulent emotional state, and with considerable social finesse, dismisses Lord and Lady Aldershaw in order to give MUly a moment of privacy. MUly recognizes “A minute or two later the situation had changed, and she knew it afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate” (139). Watching Lord Aldershaw move away, Milly worries briefly that she has been rude, but her thoughts immediately turn and she rationaUzes “[b]ut Lord Aldershaw was in every way a detail and Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn’t ill” (139- 140). For MiUy, the people around her are easily dismissed as mere detaUs when they inconveniently intrude upon her process of turning her life into a fairy tale. Kate, though, recognizes subtle shifts and nuances in behavior, and she acts, in this situation before the
Bronzino portrait as well as with her family, to help people manage the details of their lives.
Choosing Interpretive Conventions and the Conclusion of The Wings of the Dove In the first volume of The Wings o f the Dove, the convergence of my Uteracies and James’s Uteracies have aUowed me to construct detaUed portraits of two young women who have very different responses to the detaUs of life. As 1 move through the second volume 72
of the novel, my interest in particularities and localized details leads me to criticize the
politics of the resolution of Kate’s and Milly’s plots within the narrative’s larger progression. Reading the details of The Wings o f the Dove has allowed me to recognize the ways in which James’s narrative is freighted with ideologies that disarm the people who
seek to negotiate among the competing demands of their lives and which instead valorize those who choose to refrain from the struggle. This reading, however, arises out of my
particular situation as reader interested in particularities, and although it intersects with my
perceptions about how James’s authorial audience might read the novel’s progression, it is not predicated on such an authorial reading.
Leo Bersani’s influential article, “The Narrator as Center in The Wings o f the
Dove,” provides a useful point of contrast as I articulate ray own response to the conclusion of James’s novel. From Bersani’s perspective, James achieves a “fusion of all
the possible points of view on the story-the characters’ and the narrator’s-into the
perspective of a single consciousness” in the second volume of Wings, and for Bersani, the
characters come to “serve mainly allegorical functions” (135; 131). Moving from this observation about the function of free, indirect discourse in the novel, Bersani goes on to argue that “James’s heroes and heroines seldom ‘annex and possess’ life. They start out with a tremendous desire to do this, but they end with what is for them-and for James-the superior choice of renunciation” (137). Referring specifically to The Wings o f the Dove,
Bersani describes the “moral point of view throughout the narrative... [as] that of a single individual justifying and consecrating his alienation from everything except his inner vision of an ideal above and beyond the unacceptable real possibilities of life” (144). For
Bersani, James’s strategies of decreasing the mimetic functions of characters as the novel progresses and of subsuming their consciousness into a larger narratorial voice complements James’s validation of Milly’s transcendence of the mundane realities of this world on “wings” capable of both bearing her on “a flight to some happiness greater-!”
(377) and covering Merton in a protective gesture that offers him absolution for his complicity in Kate’s plot. Like the other critics I have cited, Bersani offers his reading as an authorial reading, even though you can sense Bersani’s disdain for way the James 73
privileges renunciation. Bersani's article concludes: “The merging of points of view in the
narrative perspective of the novel reflects James’s failure to conceive of a meaningful
contact with the human community. The psychological and moral point of view throughout
the narrative is that of a single isolated individual justifying and consecrating his alienation
from everything except his inner vision of an ideal above and beyond the unacceptable real
possibility of life” (144). Bersani offers this critique only after reading as a member of
James’s authorial audience, and he does not account for what leads him to this conclusion. My focus on details and particularities also leads me to critique renunciation as a response to life (and imminent death), but the way in which I have offered a detailed and self-
reflexive account of my movement through James’s novel affords me a very different
position from which to comment on the politics of the novel.
Unlike Bersani, I am unwilling to allow a larger narratorial consciousness to replace
Kate and Milly as the focus of my reading, and I continue to focus on the details of the lives and actions of Kate and Milly. In book two of The Wings o f the Dove, Kate continues to tiy and negotiate her way among the competing details of her life. As they stand in SL Mark’s square, Kate acquiesces to Merton’s demand that she come to his rooms. At Christmas time in London, Kate leaves her aunt’s house and goes to Chelsea because, as Mrs. Lowder reports to Merton, Lionel Croy “has come upon Marian, and
Marian has shrieked for help” (379). And as Merton turns to Kate for support as she works through the spiritual crisis precipitated by his last visit with Milly, Kate does not shy away from acknowledging the details of her own actions; she freely admits the responsibility she bears for allowing Milly to believe that Merton’s love for Kate was unrequited, telling Merton: “It wasn’t through anything you did-whatever that may have been-that she gained her certainly. It was by the conviction she got from me” (358).
While Kate is struggling to work through the details of her life, she continues to cling to her relationship with Merton as the one site immune to the pressures of details. When visiting Kate at her sister’s home where Lionel Croy has sought refuge, Merton asks Kate “Can I in any way help you with him?” and Kate responds, “Yes . . . By our making your visit as little of an affair as possible for him-and for Marian too” (391). By casting 74
Milly’s final letter into the fire without reading its details (and without allowing Merton to read them) Kate struggles to ensure that her relationship with Merton remain uncontaminated with messy realities. Kate’s final cry, “We shall never be as we were” is, for me, a deeply pained cry of failure. Kate’s relationship with Merton has been affected by the same details that have plagued all her other relationships." In contrast to Kate who confronts the details of life, Milly turns “her face to the wall” after Lord Mark’s final disastrous visit to the Palazzo Leporelli (331). This leaves
Merton to stand in as a measure of the power of Milly’s special magnificence, but upon returning to London, Merton’s attempts to deal with the details of his life are only specious exercises in moral hairsplitting compared to the complicated negotiations Kate attempts to make. Merton has demanded his “payment” from Kate by insisting that she come to his room in Venice, but he believes that he can repay her sacrifice by offering her Milly’s final letter. As Merton gives the letter to Kate, the dialogue between them reveals Merton’s inadequate understanding of the material differences in what he demanded of Kate in Venice and what he now offers her in order to ease his conscience:
“You played fair with me Kate; and that’s why—since we talk of proofs-I want to give you one. I’ve wanted to let you see-and in preference even to myself-something I feel as sacred.” She frowned a little. “I don’t understand.” I’ve asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I can peculiarly recognise--” “Peculiarly recognise what?” she demanded as he dropped. “The admirable nature of your sacrifice. You were capable in Venice of a splendid act of generosity.” “And the privilege you offer me with that document is my reward?” He made a movement. “It’s all I can do as a symbol of my attitude.” (393)
Merton’s belief that he must offer Kate an equal payment for the services she rendered him in Venice seems as inadequate a moral response to their circumstances as does his decision to turn into Brompton Oratory in order to “make him[self] right” after he falsely tells Mrs. Lowder he is on his way to Christmas morning church services. Milly’s effect on Merton
" My reading of Kate’s position is compatible with (and has been influenced by) Susan Mizruchi’s reading of The Wings o f Dove. Mizruchi argues that Kate is trying to work through the social realities of her life in ways that Müly Theale is not, and Mizruchi reads Kate’s final line as a sign of Kate’s historical consciousness, i.e. her recognition that the details of her life have changed materially and irrevocably. 75
seems only to have made him incapable of significant moral behavior. She has imparted to him her values of romanticization and renunciation. At the end of the novel, Merton is left sitting immobile in his room, paralyzed and unable to deal with life. Bersani’s critique of the way the conclusion of The Wings o f the Dove validates renunciation and a transcendence of the details of life seems to be “tacked on” to his analysis of the relationship between narrative technique and the thematic progression of the novel. But Bersani offers no explanation of why he finds renunciation problematic nor does he investigate the politics of his own argument and his decision to interpret the implied author’s linking of narrative technique and thematic development In accounting for the details of my own reading experience, I have worked to account for the social and cultural narratives that have influenced my reading and have constructed myself as a public reader who attends to details and who is committed to feminist principles. From this position, I can acknowledge the political implications of attending to details as a particular interpretive convention. Rather than beginning with an articulation of an implied author’s intentions, my critique of the conclusion of The Wings o f the Dove takes as its starting point my own position as a reader, my commitment to the local, specific, and particular and my understanding of the relationship between details and the status of women in textual worlds. My reading, though certainly interacts and intersects with an awareness of James’s as the Other whose text I am encountering. I have tried during my movement through The
Wings o f Dove to acknowledge that at times I am perplexed by James (as a father-less daughter, what will be Kate’s fate?), amused by him (some of the characterizations of Maude Lowder evoke wry laughter from me), and annoyed by him (why does he have to apotheosize another dying virgin?). Rather, though, than merely critiquing the political commitments I might attribute to James based on his representational practices in this novel, I have worked to understand my own positions and how they affect the interpretive conventions I employ. Instead of offering a pohtical reading from a “disinterested” (or at least unexamined) position which critics like Bersani claim for themselves, I have tried to make available for discussion my own political positions. 76
Thus, ray encounter with The Wings o f the Dove, stands, I hope, as an alternative to sort of political criticism that Rabinowitz imagines “can be strengthened if [it is] based on a foundation of authorial reading” (31). However, while I have suggested that critics
ranging from Dorothea Krook and P.O. Mathiessen to Leo Bersani are operating from a
(sometimes implicit) notion of the authorial audience, it is perhaps unfair to suggest that they are fully satisfactory representatives of the sort of relationship between authorial reading and political criticism that Rabinowitz is suggesting. Let me turn briefly to “End Sinister: Neat Closure as Disruptive Force” as an example of Rabinowitz’s own political criticism. Rabinowitz’s goals in “End Sinister^’ are to explore the ways in which endings serve to structure the reading experience and to argue that the constitution of the literary canon encourages readers to experience “bad” texts in ways that conform to canonical preconceptions about their “badness.” To concretize his claims, Rabinowitz examines the ending of Mrs. E.D.E.N. South worth’s Allworthy Abbey, and his analysis leads him to delineate two contradictory readings of the marriage of Annella Wilder and Valerius
Brightwell at the end of the novel: (1) that this marriage is an “unintentional clumsy redundancy” that reflects Southworth’s slavish devotion to the norms of the sentimental novel, or (2) that the Wilder-Brightwell union is an “intentionally excessive cadence” designed by Southworth to highlight the artificial and ideologically problematic nature of those conventions. Although given Rabinowitz’s commitment to the notion that political criticism can be strengthened by building it on a foundation of authorial reading, one might expect him to attempt to determine which of these readings most aptly describes the experience of the authorial audience, Rabinowitz dodges the question: “My point here is neither to defend one or other of these readings nor even simply point out that the novel is ambiguous” (128). Instead Rabinowitz makes a move that is seemingly compatibly with my own sense of the importance of examining how one goes about choosing the interpretive frames one reads with. He turns his attention away from the politics embodied in Southworth’s novel and focuses instead on the politics of academic reading practices, noting that “by the currently prevailing academic standards, which privilege the ‘not yet coherent,’ my second reading of the text (the subversive reading) makes Allworthy Abbey 77
into a ‘better’ book than the ‘conventional’ reading does” (128). Rabinowitz goes on to state that the “subversive, noninertial reading of the text is available only to the
contemporary reader if he or she is prepared, before reading the text, to see the ‘neat’ ending as a disruption of the apparent surface of the novel’s fabric-only if he or she, in
other words, is already prepared to treat Southworth as a ‘good writer’” (128). But the broadness of the term “contemporary reader” functions just as the concept of the authorial
audience does. It effaces the ways in which even among “contemporary readers” gender, class, race, sexuality and host of other personal and political factors come into play during
the reading process. If Rabinowitz is truly committed to the notion that political criticism can be strengthened by building it on a foundation of authorial reading, then it is puzzling
that he acknowledges that readers might choose to apply different interpretive conventions in their reading of Southworth and that a “contemporary reader” would perhaps be a different sort of authorial reader than the readers of Southworth’s time. Furthermore, Rabinowitz never addresses the question of how readers (authorial, contemporary, or otherwise) might choose between competing interpretive conventions. And it is in choosing between interpretive conventions that the politics of reading are ultimately enacted.
My reading of Booker’s portfolio exposed the politics of using the interpretive convention of the authorial audience to read student texts. By denying the particular positions of readers, authorial reading creates a writer-reader relationship in which power is invested in the (implied) writer. Thus, writers, like Booker, who have more tenuous relationships with their readers or who fumble in trying to establish their authority are relegated to the margins of the university or the literary canon. Accounting for the particulars of my reading experiences in moving through both Booker’s portfolio and The Wings o f the Dove makes available for discussion the personal and political dimensions of reading that are obscured when the abstract experience of an authorial audience is described. More specifically, I have made two claims for the value of such particular, local accounts of reading in this chapter: (1) such accounts allow for a greater variety of writer- 78
reader relationships and thus work against hierarchies of privilege in the academy, and (2) such accounts engage readers not only in an examination of the representational politics
attributable to implied authors, but also in a self-reflexive examination of their own literacies.
In the following chapters, I will extend my consideration about the value of local and particular descriptions of textual encounters by positioning myself at the intersections
between reading and class, gender, and race. If detailed and specific accounts of reading are to extend our current critical and pedagogical conversations about the interactions that
occur when literacies converge, then it is necessasry to investigate whether such
descriptions are capable of giving voice to the complex personal and political interactions
that occur when readers encounters texts produce by various kinds of writers all of whom
work from multiple subject positions. I will turn in the following chapter to Edith
Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl. I will investigate not only the personal and political dimensions of my reading experience as I move through the texts of these writers who are positioned in very different social classes, but I will also take up questions about whether the literacy practice of offering detailed descriptions of textual encounters is itself implicated in ways in which particular social classes exercise power. CHAPTER i n
DETAILED READINGS/READING DETAILS: LITERACY AND CLASS IN W H A R TO N 'S THE AGE OF INNOCENCE AND LE SUEUR’S TH E G IRL
In The Violence o f Literacy, I. Elspeth Stuckey dispels easy notions about literacy
as a means of erapowermenL She argues instead that literacy is a brutal mechanism of social control that perpetuates a class system of unequal economic enfranchisement
According to Stuckey, America is committed to the myth of a classless society, and the
viability of this myth is dependent upon equal educational opportunities and promises of success for anyone with an appropriate work ethic. But instead of enabling freedom and
social mobility, literacy is, according to Stuckey, actually “a function of culture, social
experience, and sanction. Literacy education begins in the ideas of the socially and economically dominant class and it takes the forms of socially acceptable subjects, stylistically permissible forms, ranges of difference or deviance, baselines of gratification.
Becoming literate signifies in large part the ability to conform or, at least, to appear
conform ist (19). A quick glance at the Laubach literacy materials used today largely to
help mostly poor and minority adult learners achieve a minimal level of functional literacy confirms that in addition to teaching standard edited English, the workbooks and texts are
also encoded with messages about socially accepted behavior that ultimately serves the interest of the upper classes. In typical elementary classrooms across the country, the children plodding through worksheet exercises will be the children from the least affluent families who are most likely to find themselves someday plodding through repetitive, menial labor jobs. By contrast, the children shepherded off to Talented and Gifted (TAG) classes where they will do hands-on science experiments, visit art museums, and write
79 80
their own computer programs are the children who, like their affluent parents, will enter
professional fields or rise to the upper levels of management in the world of business. As
Stuckey would say, “Literacy itself can be understood only in its social and political context, and that context... can be seen as one of entrenched class structure in which
those who have power have a vested interest in keeping it... Far from engineering freedom, our current approaches to literacy corroborate other social practices that prevent freedom and limit opportunity” (vii). While I think it is inevitable that my project of reconceiving reading as a convergence of literacies, positioned as it is as a dissertation
within an academic community, will in some ways collaborate with the socially and economically dominant classes in sanctioning “acceptable subjects, stylistically permissible
forms, ranges of difference or deviance, baselines of gratification,” I want to explore not
only exactly how that collaboration occurs but also to investigate the ways in which detailed descriptions of reading might also have the potential to make space in critical conversations
for less privileged literacies. To address these questions, I will turn to two narratives
produced by writers from different social classes. In this chapter I will begin by “studying up,” investigating how my literacies
converge with the literacies of the privileged class as represented by Edith Wharton in The
Age of Innocence. In her 1969 contribution to a volume entitled Reinventing Anthropology^ Laura Nader argued for the need to “study up,” i.e., to study socially and
economically empowered groups. In surveying anthropological and ethnographic studies,
Nader found that while there is “a relatively abundant literature on the poor, the ethnic groups, the disadvantaged; there is comparatively little field research on the middle classes
and very little first-hand work on the upper classes” (289).
Little seems to have changed since 1969—field studies of literacy continue to focus on marginalized groups. Literacy Across Communities (1994), a volume edited by Beverly Moss, offers five studies of literacy in “nonmainstream communities,” including a network
of Hmong refugees, a ChicagoMexicano neighborhood, and a group of preadolescent African American males; John Lofty has studied the literacies of junior high students in a Maine fishing community imperiled by economic hardship (1990); Andrea Fishman has 81
focused on the literacies of the Amish (1988); and Heath’s ground breaking study in the Carolina Piedmont focused on workers in textile mills (1983). Nader notes that indignation
over social injustices has been a powerful motivating force in ethnographic and
anthropological circles, but she wisely recognizes that “Anthropologists might indeed ask
themselves whether the entirety of the field work does not depend upon a certain power relationship in favor of the anthropologist, and whether indeed such dominant-subordinate
relationships may not be affecting the kinds of theories we are weaving. What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty?” (289). It is through studying the affluent and
the powerful that I can come to understand my own complicity in it. Although, as Richard Ohmann has noted, most members of the liberal intelligentsia like to identify themselves as neutral problem-solvers with only the purest of interests in the common welfare, studying up creates opportunities for me to problematize that notion, to recognize the ways in which
I too participate in the literacies of the upper class. But acknowledging my relationship to upper class literacies is only a first step in understanding how my project of describing reading narrative as a convergence of literacies might function as Stuckey describes. In the second half of this chapter I will turn to Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl as a site for investigating whether my strategies for describing the personal and political dimensions of literacy can help me move through a working class text.' Although Wharton’s novel affords me to the opportunity to “study up,” I am uncomfortable with the inverse suggestion thatThe Girl is a site where I can “study down.” In “Ethnography in the
Modem World System,” George Marcus criticizes the interpretive stance Paul Willis adopts in his Learning to Labour, an ethnography of a group of twelve working class boys in
' See Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations, pages 86-128 for a summary of the debates that surrounded the definition of proletarian literature in the 1930s. Foley points out the folly in trying to define a genre based on criterion such as the status of the author, the status of the audience, subject matter, or perspective. While I do not want here to undertake the broad project of defining working class literature as a genre, let me just note that The Girl, a novel about the lives of women of the lower class, based on the author’s own experience of living in an abandoned warehouse, and directed toward an audience of other working class women, would seem to fit within even the most narrow definitions of working class fiction. 82
England. Marcus notes that Willis does not recognize the hermeneutic problem of textually representing one’s encounter with the working class, and he accuses Willis of making the
traditional Marxist move of assuming the stance of a “midwife, as it were, who delivers and articulates what is vernacularly expressed in working class lives” (180). It is the problem of textual representation that I want to engage in my reading of Le Sueur. Is accounting for the details of my reading experience a textual strategy that corroborates with socially and economically dominant classes? Or can such a strategy also be a productive way to represent one’s encounters with less privileged classes?
TYRANNICAL TRIFLES: THE DETAILS OF LIFE AND LITERACY IN THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
With its thick description and rich characterization of the community of families that comprise the socially elite of class in new York City during the final decades of the nineteenth century, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence offers me a site for “studying up.” Mary Ellis Gibson has already cogently argued that Wharton’s New York novels can be read as ethnographic texts.^ Drawing on A Backward Glance and R.W.B. Lewis’s biography of Wharton, Gibson begins with Wharton’s extensive reading in anthropology, sociology, and ethnography and her acquaintance with Bronislaw Malinowski as evidence for the way in which Wharton’s metaphors of tribe, totem, and taboo are part of an
^ Katie Trumpener and James M. Nyce and James Tuttleton have also noted the ethnographic or archaeological elements in The Age o f Innocence. Trumpener and Nyce seem to me to place too much emphasis on Newland as the protagonist who adopts an ethnographic perspective on his own culture. Tuttleton argues that Wharton “had an impulse to reconstruct-archaeologically, as it were-the social world of her youth: the traditions which vitalized the culture of old New York in the period from about 1840 to 1880” and that “she hoped to revive the memory of a set of slowly evolved cultural values suddenly wiped out by a succession of destructive changes in American life beginning in the 1880’s” (564-65). While Tuttleton insightfully positions Wharton’s archeological concern for tradition in conversation with die work of T.S. Eliot, Henry James, W.D. Howells, his claim that Wharton wished in her New York novels to demonstrate that “Old New York in the age of innocence provided a certain kind of social norm for the modem world” (569) seems to ignore the way the progression of the novel develops the vices as well as the values of the world of Wharton’s childhood. 83
intentional system of meaning. Gibson then positions Newland Archer’s futile struggles
against the seductive stability of his community’s traditions within anthropological models that seek to account for an individual’s position within a larger society. Gibson reaches the thematic conclusion ûiat^TheAge of Innocence does not blink [at] the price that conventions and traditions exact: it demonstrates that restrictive conventions may be the price of traditional stability,” and she praises Wharton’s “ironic poise, the poise of a longing, even a nostalgic longing, for what one would not wholly have wished to have” (67). Implicit, though, in Gibson’s argument is an assumption I would like to question.
By moving from the rich details of Wharton’s texts to the conclusion that Wharton’s novel is a study of the way social stability is enabled by adjustments of personal desire, Gibson suggests that the goal of ethnography is to offer a “true” reading of a culture and that the goal of criticism is to reach a “true” thematic reading of a narrative. In this oversimplification of ethnography and overquick thematizing of the novel, Gibson overlooks the ways in which ethnography has come to eschew “objectivity” in favor of reflective subjectivity as a goal in describing strange and distant cultures. If one’s ethnographic goal is not to make truth claims about a culture, but is instead to offer a reading of that culture that acknowledges the interested position of the person constructing that reading, then I must examine not only the literacy practices of the privileged social class but also investigate how my own literacies interact with and are interanimated by the literacies of the upper class.
Before I plunge into The Age of Innocence, 1 should begin by acknowledging how my status as a narratee of social/cultural narratives might affect my reading of Wharton’s novel. In telling the story of Newland Archer, May Welland, and Ellen Olenska, Wharton writes of a world of social privilege that I know only through fiction, movies, and television. Although one might expect folks who move through opera houses, the Bea.ufort ballroom, and summer gardens at Newport to be envied and applauded, I come to realize that most representations of the wealthy to which I am exposed tend to take a rather sneering attitude. Although Robin Leach rhapsodizes about The Lifestyles o f the Rich and
Famous, the stories of Leona Helmsley, Claus Von Bulow, and the illicit sexual escapades 84
of the young members of the British royal family seem more typical in their representations of the corruption of the upper classes. While the upper classes are often portrayed as
morally bankrupt, a competing cultural narrative is constructed by the barrage of advertisements for luxury cars, expensive jewelry, premium beer, and status home
furnishings. Although the upper classes are often characterized as immoral, there is still a powerful message about the desirability of achieving that status. Each of these competing narratives taps into a different dimension of somewhat schizophrenic cultural ideologies about wealth-the first tapping into an anti-aristocratic ideology that sees wealth as corrupting and the second tapping into the belief that success equals income and income brings with it the mandate to consume conspicuously.
In addition to my exposure to these contemporary narratives, I have, as a student of the novel, come to appreciate the middle class origins of my favorite kind of reading. I aware of how these origins are manifested in the progressions of the narratives.^ In
Richardson’s Pamela, the aristocratic Mr. B is reformed by the moral rectitude of his mother’s maid, and in Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the simple voice of Jeannie Deans is so persuasively eloquent that the Queen grants Jeannie’s sister, Effre, clemency for a supposed infanticide; on this side of the Atlantic, Huckleberry Finn, the story of a poor boy and his African American cohort who is in constant danger of being forced back into slavery has been proclaimed as the great American novel. These British and American novels (and hundreds of others like them) are freighted with an ideology that critiques more privileged social groups. Further complicating this is the fact that in many of these novels the moral sensibilities of middle class women is their ticket to a higher status. Jane Eyre ensures that she will never again have to answer an ad for a governess by maiTying
“ Ian Watt’s landmark The Rise o f Novel documents the ways in which changes in the reading public and the rise of the middle class in seventeenth-century England precipitated the birth of the novel as a genre, and Watt analyzes the ways in middle-class values and perspectives are present in the works of Defoe and Richardson. In The Origins o f the English Novel, 1600-1740, Michael McKeon extends and complicates Watt’s work by applying a dialectical theory of genre to the novel. He argues that 1600-1740 was a time of generic and social instability as successive narrative epistemologies of romantic idealism, naive empiricism, and extreme skepticism replaced each other and as virtue was reconstructed within aristocratic, progressive, and conservative ideologies. For McKeon, the novel “comes into existence in order to mediate” these changes in attitudes about how truth and virtue are signified (20-21). 85
Rochester, and Elizabeth Bennet becomes mistress of Pemberley by marrying Darcy.
While middle class men prove their worth through hard work and education, a middle class woman should be a composite of other worldly virtue and everyday common sense. Just as Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen offer positive examples of this middle class construction of gender, Daniel Defoe and William Makepeace Thackeray tap into its power by offering characters like Moll Flanders and Becky Sharp as negative examples. My recognition of the intersection between middle class morality and gender complicates my status as a narratee of cultural narratives about the virtue of the middle class and the immorality of the upper classes. While these tensions make me want to define a space for myself outside of class structures, I realize that would be as impossible as defining a space beyond gender or race. The best I can do is to recognize these narratives and their counter narratives and my position(s) among them. Acknowledging my status as a narratee of these cultural narratives about social classes is a first step in documenting the convergence of literacies that occurs when I pick up Wharton’s novel. I should also acknowledge, however, that my status as a narratee of these social/cultural narratives intersects with the public self I would construct through hypomnemata. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, my maternal great- grandparents were not summering at Newport or attending the opera but were instead struggling to clear a small, subsistence-size farm on a mountain ridge in West Virginia. While Edith Wharton was drawing upon her private education and her famous friendships with Henry James, Percy Lubbock, and Howard Sturgis as she composed her novels in the early decades of the twentieth century, my grandma was completing her eighth grade education and going to work as a cook’s helper in a boarding house. A decade later my grandma was sending her children off to a one-room school house just like the one she had attended, and my grandpa was working the strip mines while also struggling to keep up with chores on his small farm. My mom, with her master’s degree in geriatric nursing, surpassed the educational accomplishments of her parents and was able to offer me and my brother a more comfortable standard of living than she enjoyed as a child. By working on a PhD I am surpassing my mom’s educational level, and although academics are not the 86
most highly paid members of our society, a string of degrees after one’s name does
generate a certain amount of respect in our culture. I am not, however, intending here to
present a traditional up-by-the-bootstraps story of generational progress, but am instead acknowledging my own origins in the lower-middle classes.
Although my roots are in the lower-middle classes, I would still not align myself with Vernon L. Farrington, who has described Wharton as “our literary aristocrat.”
Farrington writes of Wharton:
She belongs to the “quality,” and the grand manner is hers by right of birth. She is as finished as a Sheraton sideboard, and with her poise, grace, high standards, and perfect breeding, she suggests as inevitably old wine and slender decanters [But] her distinction is her limitation She is too well bred to be a snob, but she escapes it only by sheer intelligence. The background of her mind, the furniture of her habits, are packed with potential snobbery, and it is only by scrupulous care that it is held in leash. She is unconsciously shut in behind plate glass, where butlers serve formal dinners, and white shoulders go up at the mere suggestion of everyday gingham. She belongs in spite of herself to the caste which she satirizes, and she cannot make herself at home in households where the mother washes dishes and the father tends the furnace. If she had lived less easily, if she had been forced to scrimp and save and plan, she would been a greater and richer artist” (151-53)
Farrington seems unaware that he has, perhaps, been the narratee of social and cultural narratives about what it means to be an artist and about appropriate subject matters for novels. Acknowledging my status as a narratee of social/cultural narratives that are critical of the upper classes and establishing through hypomnemata that my own origins are in the lower middle class allow me to recognize some of the interested positions I bring to
Wharton’s novel. By articulating these positions, I can hegin to establish a certain distance from them.
The Literacy Practices of Old New York: A “Hieroglyphic World” When I open the pages of Wharton’s novel I fmd the best of 1870s New York society assembled to hear Christine Nilsson singing in Faust at the Academy of Music, a hall which “the sentimental clung to for its historic associations and the musical for its excellent acoustics” (3). After the opera, I travel with members of the ‘“exceptionally 87
brilliant audience’” to the home of Julius and Regina Beaufort for their annual ball (3). Wharton’s narrator tells me that “The Beaufort house was the one that New Yorkers were proud to show to foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball” and that “the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses’) one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d ’or), seeing from afar the many-candied lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo” (21), The Beauforts’ library is “hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite” (21), and in the bouton d ’or drawing room, “Beaufort had had the audacity to hand ‘Love Victorious,’ the much discussed nude of Bouguereau”
(22). By so carefully establishing the physical realities of the world of New York’s leisure class in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Wharton begins to give me a sense of the sorts of literacies enacted by the members of this elite caste. This is a world where malachite and polished parquetry, Spanish leather and costly camellias are signs to be read, where one’s familiarity with the names of opera singers and painters mark one as an insider or an outsider.
While my education allows me to place names like Christine Nilsson and
Bouguereau in a larger cultural context, I have never sat in a box at the opera or attended a formal ball. But instead of feeling like an outsider, I find that the narrator of the novel almost immediately invites me to join her in standing superior to this fashionable society. She begins by explaining to me the symbolic import of the conveyances which ferry the leisure class to and from the opera:
To come to the Opera in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way of arriving as in one’s own carriage; and departure by the same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in line, instead of waiting tiU the cold-and-gin congested nose of one’s own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy, It was one of the great livery- stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it, (3-4) 88
The narrator takes an additional poke at New York Society by ironically noting that no one questioned that “the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be
translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences” (5). While the narrator seems to be inviting me to join her in poking a bit of fun at the
‘“exceptionally brilliant audience’” assembled at the Academy of Music, this position is not entirely comfortable for me. If I adopt such an attitude of superiority, will I not be engaging in the same sort of narrow-mindedness that Farrington exhibits? Furthermore, I have to wonder about my status as an academic. Although the typical academic stance is to disdain the ostentatious trappings of material success and to feel morally superior to the people who have been most successfully at amassing wealth in our capitalist society, I realize that academics are in many ways dependent on the upper class. Money for endowed chairs comes from wealthy benefactors; the libraries where we do our research are able to expand their holdings by attracting donations from large corporations and wealthy individuals. And as educators, even those of us most interested in enacting liberatory or critical pedagogies participate in the process of sorting and certifying students who make up the labor force that helps the rich get richer. Recognizing my multiple positions makes my alliance with a narrator who is so disdainful of the upper class uneasy at best My position only becomes more troublesome when I encounter two representatives of old New York society. As insiders in this world of privilege, Lawrence Lefferts and Sillerton Jackson further my sense of the literacy practices which bind together the people who sit in the red and gold boxes at the Academy of Music and who attend the Beauforts’ ball. Wharton introduces me to Larry Lefferts as “the foremost authority on ‘form’ in New York,” who can “tell a fellow just when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and when not to” (8). While Lefferts is the authority on form, Sillerton Jackson is a master of genealogy: He knew all the ramifications of New York’s cousinships; and could not only elucidate such complicated questions as that of the connection between the Mingotts (through the Thorleys) with the Dallases of South Carolina... but could also enumerate the leading characteristics of each family: as, for instance, the fabulous stinginess of the younger lines of Leffertses (the Long Island ones); or the fatal tendency of the Rushworths to make foolish matches; or the insanity recurring in every second generation of the Albany Chiverses. (9-10) 89
By becoming authorities in their respective fields of form and family, Lefferts and Jackson
seem to have made themselves masters of the literacy practices of their community.
Because Jackson “carried between his narrow hollow temples, and under his soft thatch of
silver hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the last fifty years” (10), he is a popular dinner guest, and even “his sister, Miss Sophy Jackson, who lived with him . . . was entertained by all the people who could not get her more-sought-after brother” (32). As the “high-priest of form,” Lefferts’s authority “on the question of pumps versus patent-leather ‘Oxfords’ ... had never been disputed” (8). These two men both clearly understand the permissible topics and styles of their world and the range of deviance that might be tolerated, and they have established their expertises in response to the literacies enacted and valued within their world. However, even the detailed descriptions of the particular expertises that Lefferts and Jackson have developed do not offer me a comfortable place from which to critique these characters and the world in which they operate. While it might be easy to feel superior to men who expend their intellectual energies in mapping a “forest of family trees” and debating which kinds of shoes to wear, their mastery of these areas works to trivialize all specialized knowledge and to foreground how such specialized discourses are frequently used to justify inequality and social privilege. Furthermore, the fact that Jackson’s knowledge of the scandals makes him particularly valuable as a dinner guest underscores the way in which it is not often the kindest and most generous behavior that translates into social prominence. Instead, it is knowledge of secrets and private embarrassments that brings one social power.
Lefferts’s encyclopedic knowledge of “form” and Jackson’s mastery of genealogical alliances along with the prominence of details about home furnishings, carriage accouterments, and clothing allow me to begin to understand and describe the literacies of old New York society and to establish a tenuous relationship to these literacy practices. Later in the novel the “du Lac Sevres and Trevenna George II plate” on the van der
Luydens’ dinner table will function as signs of their commitment to the rehabilitation of
Madame Olenska’s social reputation. Newland’s desire for Eastlake furniture and “plain 90
new bookcases” will function as a sign that he is different and wishes to break out of the
traditions of his society. And May’s preference of “How they brought the Good News
from Ghent to Aix” over “Sonnets from the Portuguese” is reflective of her active nature and her apparent inability to accommodate more subtle sentiments. The literacy practices of
the upper class as represented by the Mingotts, the Archers, the Wellands, and their friends seems to be founded on small details, and the members of this society are well schooled in deciphering the messages sent by fine china patterns, styles of furniture, and the latest poetry from Britain.
While I am working to develop an understanding of the literacy practices of old New York, Newland Archer quickly becomes the character who is the focus of my interest in the early pages of Wharton’s novel. I first meet him as he enters his club box after the curtain had gone up at Nilsson’s performance: “There was no reason why the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at seven, alone with his mother and sister, and had lingered afterward over a cigar in the Gothic library with glazed black-walnut bookcases and finial-topped chairs which was the only room in the house where Mrs. Archer allowed smoking” (4). This opening description of Newland in which the physical details of his surrounding are more developed than his internal thoughts helps solidify my growing sense that the literacy practices of New York society are intimately tied to one’s ability to “read” material objects like “glazed black-walnut bookcases” and “finial-topped chairs.” The description of Newland continues, though, and I do begin to get a sense of
Newland’s inner life. Wharton’s narrator tells me early on “he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation” (4). As he gazes across the Opera house at his soon-to-be fiancée. May Welland, Newland imagines such a “pleasure to come”: reading Faust by the Italian lakes with his new bride. But Wharton goes on to add that Newland was “somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honeymoon with the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to reveal to his bride” (7). This blurring of the lines between masterpieces of literature and his own honeymoon suggests to me that Newland’s literacies do not allow 91
him to consider the complex details of human interaction in the same ways in which the material realities and family alliances of his world can be catalogued and read. Instead, the messy details of this world are often managed by silence. As Newland enters the Mingott family box at the Opera in order to show his loyalty to May’s family as they support the newly arrived (and somewhat scandalous) Ellen Olenska, no words pass between Archer and May. Wharton explains: “The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and that fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done” (16). Just as I moved with the narrator away from the people assembled at the opera and from Lefferts and Jackson, these silences filled with “faint implications and pale delicacies” cause me to step away from old New York society and to make judgments about this world I am encountering. At the Beauforts’ ball, Newland, seeking to avoid the ritual congratulations occasioned by the announcement of his engagement, sweeps May on to the dance floor saying, “Now we shan’t have to talk.” But as more of Newland’s thoughts are exposed, I come to understand how this lack of talk is one mechanism by which this particular society’s stereotypes are perpetuated, and I come to recognize that perpetuating stereotypes means also perpetuating power relations, including those based on gender. As he dances with May, Newland thinks “What a new life it was going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one’s side!” (23). Because May knows (at least tacitly) that men of her social set value women who can be apotheosized into such ultimately un threatening paragons of virtue and domestic goodness, she is content to remain süent and let Newland perceive her this way. On Newland’s part, it is much simpler to avoid talk that might reveal that his fiancée is a more complicated creature than his stereotype of the ideal bride might accommodate. Like Elizabeth Ammons, I recognize the ways in which a process of “infantilization” is taking place in this exchange between Newland and May, and their 92
actions on the dance floor function as a synecdoche for the ways in which gender relations
are constructed in this society."
It is no surprise that Newland’s final thoughts of May on the night that their
engagement has been made public are that “Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the ‘unpleasant’ in which they had both been brought up” (25). The world in which Newland
Archer and his family and friends moves is one in which the more complicated and sometimes unpleasant and unassimilatable inner lives of people that might threaten social stability are subordinated to the physical details and surroundings in which they move.
This is a world where “when, again as usual, [Mrs. Beaufort] rose at the end of the third act [of the Opera], drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared, New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin” (20), but no one chooses to read Regina Beaufort’s desperate cry for help when she appeals to her aunt, Catherine
Mingott, in the face of her husband’s financial ruin. Mrs. Beaufort’s cousin (May’s father-- Mr. Welland) can only exclaim, “Don’t destroy my last illusions” (272) as he closes down conversation about his cousin’s misfortunes. This is a world where everyone remembers that during her childhood Ellen Olenska was dressed in “crimson merino and amber beads” when she should have been in mourning black for a deceased uncle, but where Mrs.
Welland’s reaction to Ellen’s painful married life is “I don’t know any of the details; I only ask not to, as I told poor Ellen when she tried to talk to me about it” (59; 145). The literacy practices of the leisure class of old New York are such that the messy realities of human lives are left unarticulated, and instead the members of this social caste engage in a reading and writing of the world that is centered on encoding and decoding physical artifacts (patent-leather pumps, bookcases, and chairs) and rituals such as nights at the Opera and armual balls. As Wharton’s narrator puts it: “In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs” (44).
‘ See pages 142-56 in Edith Wharton's Argument with America for a full articulation of Ammons’s views about how The Age o f Innocence reflects Wharton’s dissatisfaction with gender roles in American society. 93
Bound by Tyrannical IVifles: My Implication in the Literacy Practices of the Upper Class Although, as I will articulate in the following pages, Wharton’s narrator and the progression of the novel seem to be asking me to see what is lost in these literacy practices,
I still find myself participating in them. While I might read The Age o f Innocence in
accordance with the moral/ethical stance that I bring to the novel based on the personal and
political dimensions of my own literacies, I find that I can do so only by enacting the same reading of details that characterizes the literacies of this elite society. My awareness of cultural narratives about the moral corruption of the upper classes and my roots in the lower middle classes might lead me to read the narrative as a story about the justifiable decline of this decadent and hypocritical society, but these literacies are disabled by the fact that I can enact them only by participating in reading such details as Beaufort’s invitation to Madame
Olenska to dine on Sunday “at Delmonico’s . .. with Campanni and Scalchi” in the same way that the Mingotts, Wellands, Archers, Lefferts, and Jacksons would read them (105).
My awareness of the ways in which the construction of gender roles intersects with issues of class might lead me to think about the ways in which May and other women are positioned and position themselves in this world, but I can come to this realization only through reading the details of Mrs. Archer’s appearance in “her grandmother’s seed-pearls and emeralds” at the van der Luyden dinner or May’s decision to have a “Roman punch” and “roses from Henderson’s” at her farewell dinner for Madame Olenska (61; 327).
Although I may never master the literacies of this class as Larry Lefferts and Sillerton Jackson have, I do find myself reading the material details of people’s lives just as the old
New Yorkers seem to do. In fact, I come to recognize that even as the novel’s progression and the narrator’s commentary overtly suggest that such literacy practices are problematic, the progression and the narrator’s commentary are themselves dependent on the details elaborated in the text. For Newland Archer, things like dinner invitations, heirloom seed- pearls and emeralds, and Roman punches are a “whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others,” and for me, these “tyrannical trifles” bind me into the literacy practices of the upper classes (218). 94
While my first impulse would be to resist the pervasiveness of the representational politics of this privileged society, the way in which I find myself unable to extricate myself from
these literacies actually does allow me to develop a greater empathy and understanding for Newland. My futile struggle to find a way out of these literacy practices parallels his
struggle. From the moment Newland first enters his club’s box at the Opera, he is marked as
clearly belonging to the world of New York society. After departing from a betrothal visit to
Mrs, Mingott and an unexpected encounter with the unusual Countess Olenska who is staying with her grandmother, Wharton reveals Newland’s thoughts: “in spite of the cosmopolitan views on which he prided himself, he thanked heaven that he was a New
Yorker, and about to ally himself with one of his own kind” (31). Tensions and
instabilities are introduced and complicated by Newland’s repeated encounters with Ellen Olenska. The details of Ellen’s life--from her failed marriage to a Polish count to the odd
little house she rents on an unfashionable street in New York-makes her more than a bit of
an outsider despite her familial connections to society, and Newland’s attraction to Ellen and his developing understanding of her as a very different kind of woman from May brings Newland to the brink first of breaking off his engagement to May and then to having
an affair with the Countess. As I watch Newland’s fascination with Ellen’s emotional
depths grow and his satisfaction with May’s conventionality diminish, I use the literacy practice of reading details as a way to understand his shifting positions.
Early in the progression of the narrative, Newland reveals himself to be a very astute reader of his social world. He knows that Ellen’s return from Europe is a bit uncomfortable for her family, and he knows the appropriate steps to take in order to minimize the impact of this for May: he lobbies for the announcement of his engagement at the Beaufort’s ball in order to show his support for the Mingott family. Newland also knows exactly how to read the rejected invitations when the Mingotts invite the members of their social caste to a dinner to meet Ellen, and he knows that presenting the Mingotts’ situation to the van der Luydens “who impressively emerged from the super-terrestrial 95
twilightf’ as “the arbiters of fashion, the Court of last Appeal” will be the best strategy for
recouping the social advantage (50; 55).
As the narrative progresses, though, and Newland’s relationship with EUen intensifies he becomes less interested in reading the old familiar signs. As he stands at the
altar waiting for May, Newland’s eyes roam over the guests assembled for his wedding, and he considers how his relationship to them has changed:
Archer wonder how many flaws Lefferts’s keen eyes would discover in the ritual of his divinity [“Good Form”]; then he suddenly recalled that he too had once thought such questions important The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood. A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents should be “shown” had darkened the last hours before the wedding; and it seemed inconceivable that grown-up people should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance. (182)
As the gulf widens between Newland and the world in which he was formerly so comfortable, his mental relationship with Ellen becomes “the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books that he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside of it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room” (263). Such a “bumping into the furniture of his own room” occurs after a Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Newland’s mother where
Ellen’s refusal to return to her husband has been discussed. First Newland allows himself to be provoked into an impassioned (and self-incriminating) defense of Madame Olenska by Sillerton Jackson’s insinuations about her and Beaufort, and then Newland is unable to
“read” very accurately his wife’s reaction as they drive home: “May remained oddly silent; through the darkness, he still felt her enveloped in her menacing blush. What its menace meant he could not guess” (266).
The nuances of a more extended exchange between Newland and May further underscore the ways in which Newland has lost touch with the literacy practices of his 96
community. Newland begins by lying to May about going to Washington on a patent case, and she tells him that he must be sure to call on Ellen while he is there. The narrator then
glosses the conversation for me: “It was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant: ‘Of course you understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen, and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort to get her to return to her husband. I also know that for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in approving’” (267). The construction of the sentence here is interesting. While it is clear that Newland has been raised to understand this code, the narrator does not say that
Newland did understand it in this particular case. And, in fact, as the progression of the novel advances, it becomes clear that Newland did not fully understand the implications of his wife’s suggestion that he see Ellen. It is only at the farewell dinner party for Ellen that Newland realizes that everyone thinks he and Ellen are lovers:
And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to “foreign” vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin. (335)
Later in the drawing room, Newland “caught the glitter of victory in his wife’s eyes, and for the first time understood that she shared the belief’ that he was Ellen’s lover (339).
While the progression of the novel allows me to witness the way in which Newland’s investment of his emotional energy outside his marriage leads him to increasingly abandon the literacy practices of his social set, I must still participate in them in order to understand this change in Newland.
A few examples should sufficiently demonstrate that in order to understand the novel’s progressive revelation of Newland’s resistance to the literacy practices of the upper class 1 must continue to enact those very principles. As he struggles to find happiness in 97
his marriage to May, Newland tries to persuade May to forego the usual Newport summer and instead “spend the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called
appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians and Philadelphians were camping in ‘native’ cottages, and whence came reports of enchanting and a wild, almost trapper-like existence amid the woods and water” (206). Just as the New Yorkers
read such physical details as dinner plates and family jewels, this passage places me in a position to read “Bostonians and Philadelphians” as different from and inferior to New Yorkers and such a detail serves as a marker of the change in Newland and desire to escape from the world that had been so familiar to him. My understanding of the separation Newland is trying to achieve from his society and the ethical response I might have to his desire is complicated by the fact that such a response is based on my reading the details as the members of the upper class read them. In order to understand Newland and his position, I have to enact the very literacy practices that have placed him in a position he finds so intolerable. Similarly, when Lefferts tries to provoke Newland while Newland is sending a telegram to Ellen about her grandmother’s stroke, I read Lefferts’ “raised eyebrows and ironic grimace” as a condemnation of Newland before Newland realizes that Lefferts is reminding him that “Nothing could be worse ‘form’ than any display of temper in public” (277). Furthermore, the fact that Lefferts has to remind Newland of the dictates of “form” serves to underscore Newland’s new illiteracy. Here it is Lefferts’s “faint implications” and the way in which he articulates through silence Newland’s deviance from
“good form” that clues me into the assumptions people are making about Newland and his wife’s cousin. Most significantly, I find myself in a position to decipher the
“hieroglyphic” signs that May is pregnant-signs that Newland misses until May tells him both of her condition and of her revelation of it to Ellen. Scattered throughout the final climactic chapters of the novel are references to May as “paler than usual” and tired (314; see also 292 and 322), and although Newland notices that May’s “outline was slightly heavier,” he even misses his mother-in-law’s pointed remark, “don’t let May tire herself too much” (328). Newland does not “read” these details as he might have before his encounters with Ellen changed him, but in order to understand how Newland has changed, I am still in 98
the position of having to notice details such as a pale face and pointed remark from a mother-in-law. In order to understand how Newland has eschewed the literacy practices of
the upper class, I find myself in the position of having to continue enacting the very literacies Newland no longer participates in.
Enacting these literacies complicates ray ethical response to the narrative. Not only must I read details just as the member of Old New York society do in order to understand
Newland and his changing position, my ethical response to the gender politics which pit
May and Ellen against each other is predicated on my reading of details and the specificities of physical artifacts. In order to understand the different positions May and Ellen occupy in the social system, I have to read the physical details of Ellen’s home from her “foreign- looking maid,” her “drawing-room hung with red damask,” and “the vague pervading perfume. . . a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses” (70) against May’s “sofas and arm-chairs of pale brocade” and her “Maillard bonbons in openwork silverwork baskets” (332; 328), Realizing that my ethical response-whether it is to the changes Newland undergoes or to the gender politics of Old New York society—is grounded in the literacy practices of this particular upper class community makes me uncomfortable. I want to pull back from ethical judgments because I realize that I can make them only if I enact literacies which seem problematic to me. In a sense, my ethical response is forestalled by the ways in which I am implicated in the representational politics of the upper class as depicted in this narrative. Even though the progression of the narrative works to demonstrate what is lost by such literacy practices of the socially elite, the stages in that progression of Newland’s resistance to the literacy practices of his community are available only to me if I recognize shifts in details. And even though, the narrator of the novel goes to great lengths to point out the foibles and limitations of the New Yorkers, she uses the details of a Brown coupé and titles of Robert Browning poems to do so, thus replicating the power of details. It would seem as though Ellen Olenska, the woman who has such a powerful effect on Newland Archer might hold the possibilities of other kinds of literacies. But even with her unconventional European background, I find myself reading the details in order to 99
understand Ellen’s difference, and Ellen herself makes uses of details just as all the other New Yorkers do. In Ellen’s first appearance at the Opera, it is the difference in her clothing
that sets her apart. She is characterized as “a slim young woman. .. with brown hair growing in close curls around her temples and held in place by a narrow band of diamonds.
The suggestion of this headdress, which gave her what was then called a ‘Josephine look,’ was carried out in the cut of the dark blue velvet gown rather theatrically caught up under bosom by a girdle with a large old-fashioned clasp” (9). Later Newland’s sister remarks on the inappropriateness of Ellen’s opera-night dress, describing it as “perfectly plain and flat- like a nightgown” (39). Even when Ellen herself speaks bluntly-a discursive strategy that almost no one else in the novel deploys-it is in the specifics and details that her meaning is carried. In the carriage with Newland, she defuses his desire that they find somewhere to be together-somewhere that categories like “mistress” don’t exist. She says to him “ Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?... I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo-and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous” (290). Ellen’s invocation of specific place names-Boulogne, Pisa, Monte Carlo-matches the ways in which her family trades in place names like Newport and Washington Park. I must read the details of these “dingier and more promiscuous sites” just as I read and understand what it means for Newland and May to have a home on East Thirty-ninth Street And when there might be the greatest chance of Ellen functioning as a model of a different kind of literacy- when she is in Paris at the end of novel-she is sUent, and her presence is felt only in the lowering of a shade. I do not get to see or hear Ellen, and if, removed from New York, she us able to sustain different ways of reading and writing her world, I am not witness to them. If I cannot find an ally or model in Ellen as I seek viable alternatives to the literacy practices of the New Yorkers, where should I look? Living in the cracks and seams of the novel are folks like Ned Winsett and Professor Emerson Jackson, an archaeologist and cousin of Sillerton Jackson who fills his house with “long-haired men and short-haired 100
women” (220). Characters like Winsett and the professor, though, never emerge for me as independent entities. My views of them are always refracted though the readings of them constructed by the upper class-readings that are once again founded on “tyrannical trifles” such as “long-haired men and short-haired women” or Winsett’s “sub-editorial job on a women’s weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated New England love stories and advertisements for temperance drinks” (123). While I do have some sense of the lives of such artistic and academic types, Altered though as they are through the upper- class literacies that I can’t seem to escape in this novel, the middle and lower classes are completely obscured. Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the wife of a shoe polish manufacturer, is never allowed to make an appearance in the novel, although her Sunday evening entertainments are mentioned as the sort of things husbands slip off to attend while wives attend to children in the nursery. Even more absent from the pages of the novel are the members of the lower class whose “vigilant hand[s] had as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed” so that Newland could enjoy an after-dinner cigar in his library (42). The maids and housekeepers, cooks and coachmen whose work is evidenced in the elaborate dinners, well-kept fires, and tidy drawing-rooms are never mentioned as people. The mulatto maid employed by Catherine Mingott functions only as the means by which Mrs. Mingott is put to bed after Regina Beaufort’s visit; the Sicilian maid employed by M a d ^ e
Olenska is merely the means by which Beaufort’s unwanted flowers are carried to Ned Winsett’s wife. The members of the lower class exist in this world only as the products they produce to be consumed by the upper classes or the services they render to their employers.^ By describing the ways in which The Age o f Innocence traps me in “tyrannical trifles,” it may seem as though I am being critical of Wharton’s novel and am offering only
® In A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton describes her mother’s reaction to a story she wrote when she was eleven. Wharton’s story began ‘“Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?’ said Mrs. Tompkins. ‘If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room’.” As Wharton describes, “Timorously 1 submitted this to my mother, and never shall I forget the sudden drop of my creative frenzy when she returned it with the icy comment: ‘Drawing rooms are always tidy’” (73). I sort of facetiously wonder if this earliest criticism didn’t perhaps affect Wharton quite deeply and in this anecdote is perhaps the key to understanding why there are virtually no servants in Wharton’s New York novels. 101
a more developed version of Farrington’s indictment that Wharton is “our literary aristocrat.” That has certainly not been my intention. For me, it is a testament to Wharton’s
power as a novelist and narrative strategist that she so completely involves me as reader in the world she is depicting. I very much value the experience of reading The Age o f
Innocence, and I appreciate the opportunity it provides me for “studying up.” But while
Newland Archer is forever suspended as he turns from Madame Olenska’s window and
walks back alone to his hotel room, I realize that I must return to students and colleagues. Having been made complicit in the semiotic system of the leisure class of old New York makes me reconsider the implications of suggesting we offer detailed descriptions of converging literacies. Naomi Schor has documented the positions of aesthetic theorists like Adolf Loos and Baudrillard who would characterize the function of detail among people like the Archers, the Wellands, and their friends as an ornamental decadence that merely advances consumeristic desires by disguising mass-produced objects as something unique and personal. And I find myself asking how then does my call for a move toward particular and detailed accounts of reading participate in the same sorts of representational politics that characterize the literacy practices of the upper classes as represented by
Wharton? Am I similarly asking my readers to decode a “hieroglyphic world” or binding them with “tyrannical trifles”? Rather than creating opportunities for pluralistic discourse that gives voice to social and moral complexities, have I merely implicated myself in a hegemonic discourse that discourages critical thinking? 1 hope to work toward answers to these questions by turning to Mendel Le Sueur’s The Girl.
“EVERYONE IS IMPORTANT': DETAILING MULTIPLE VOICES
IN THE GIRL
Drafted in 1939, The Girl is the result of Le Sueur’s experiences in living with a group of women and children in an abandoned warehouse in St. Paul during the 102
Depression.® The women shared not only their relief money and meager food but also their life stories. When they assembled in the evenings to tell each other their stories, Le
Sueur would record the narratives. As Le Sueur describes in the “Afterwords” to The Girl,
“As part of our desperate struggle to be alive and human we pooled our memories, experiences and in the midst of disaster told each other our stories or wrote them down. . . . we met every night to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of sagas, poetry,
cry-outs.” Chronicling the sexual and economic conditions of these working class women.
The Girl focuses on the experiences of a young, unnamed protagonist who has left her
rural home for S l Paul and found work as a waitress in a speakeasy called the German
Milage. The novel traces the inexperienced and naive protagonist’s initiation into the
politics of gender and class as she falls in love for the first time, becomes involved in a failed bank robbery that results in her lover’s death, and finally gives birth to a child while surrounded by a supportive and caring but economically impoverished community of
women. The world of the German Village where “a German band which was Irish” would play polkas and where “a lattice with painted roses hid the bifries with signs saying Fritz
and Frau” (2) is a far cry from the Academy of Music in New York where Newland Archer and his clan assemble to hear Christine Nilsson sing “Faust.” And Meridel Le Sueur’s life
as the daughter of middle-class socialists, her attempts to earn a living as a Hollywood
stunt woman, waitress, and factory worker, her involvement in labor causes, and her membership in the communist party could not be more different from Edith Wharton’s privileged up-bringing within the leisure class of old New York or from Wharton’s adult
° Although Le Sueur was by 1939 recognized as an accomplished writer whose work had appeared in the Did, Scribner's Magazine, New Masses, American Mercury, Yale Review, and Kenyon Review, The Girl was originally rejected by a New York publisher because the bank robbery scene was deemed unauthentic. (Le Sueur claims that she sought the opinion of an actual bank robber in order to ensure the authenticity of her description of the robbery scene.) Sections of The Girl were published as short pieces of riction in the following decades, but the novel manuscript lay forgotten in the basement of Le Sueur’s daughter’s home until 1977 when it was recovered and published by the West End Press. This publication information is summarized in Elaine Hedges’s introduction to Ripening and in John Crawford’s “Publisher’s Note” which appears at the end of the 1978 West End Press edition of The Girl. 103
life as an elegant, expatriate writer in France/ By moving from the upper class world
evoked so strongly by Edith Wharton in The Age o f Innocence to Le Sueur’s novel of the working class, I hope to test the powers of accounting for the particulars of one’s reading
experience. Reading Wharton’s novel raised questions for me about the ways in which detailed descriptions of reading experiences might participate in the representational politics
of the upper classes as depicted by Wharton, Offering an account of my movement
through Le Sueur’s novel will allow me to see if such detailed descriptions can be useful
for describing the experience of reading working class fiction. My exposure to the work of literacy scholars on working class literacies and ray
own research into the literacies of members of the UAW working at the plant of a subsidiary of one of the Big Three Auto manufacturers give me a starting point for thinking about the literacies of the working class.® In “The English Department and Social Class,”
James Thomas Zebroski writes about his discovery during graduate school that his father, a factory worker, was fluent in Polish and could read Russian and Slovak. In “Protean
Shapes in Literacy Events,” Shirley Brice Heath documents the fusion of oral and literate traditions in the discourse of the citizens of Trackton, a working class, African American community in the Carolina Piedmont. In my own study of the newsletter articles and announcements written by members of the UAW, I found multiple discourses surfacing in the texts written by people who spend their days assembling car door frames and locks: in a personal interest feature profiling a co-worker who sings in church choirs, one writer opened with the typical management practice of identifying the worker by job site and supervisor, but by the end of the article, the rhythms of the prose echoed those of a gospel choir and the article closed with “Say Amen Somebody”; in an underground union newsletter, an anonymous editor was able to satirize management’s discursive style in an
^ Hedges’s introduction to Ripening provides an excellent overview of Le Sueur’s life. In “The Ancient People and the Newly Come” Le Sueur, at the age of 76, offers a more intimate and autobiographical perspective on her childhood and her experiences during the Depression. “ I am indebted to Professor Kitty Locker who invited me to work as her research assistant while she studied corporate culture and the function of written communication in enacting cultural change at a manufacturing plant Professor Locker’s larger study was funded through a grant from the UAW, Ohio State’s Research Foundation, and Inland/Fisher-Guide. My research was a small part of Professor Locker’s larger project. 104
announcement of profit sharing plan that had never materialized. The richness and diversity of literacies among the working class that I have been exposed to far outweigh the social/cultural narratives about illiteracy among the lower classes that have become more
prevalent as the United States moves toward an information-based economy. When a
woman writes to Ann Landers seeking advice about how to handle the “traumatic” discovery that her husband, John, (a dependable construction and farm worker, caring
husband, and lover of nature and animals) is illiterate, I want to question her about what
nonacademic literacies her husband might have.® Can he, as a construction worker, interpret blueprints? Is he literate in animal husbandry? Can he walk through the woods naming the flowers and trees and does he understood the conditions under which they thrive? Ann Landers’ correspondent also makes me think of my own uncle Jim, an assembly-line worker and union steward in a plant that makes brake linings who is a far more skillful user of language than I, although the surface features of his writing would make many English teachers bleed red ink. My uncle Jim can joke with the other workers on the line; he can argue with the plant management, turning their own impersonal and bureaucratized language right back at them; he can make me and my cousins howl with laughter when he breaks into an auctioneer’s cant and tries to sell off his wife to anyone passing by in a local mall.
My uncle Jim, the residents of Trackton, Zebroski’s father, and the UAW members I studied, all seem to live on the “frontier” that Arnold Krupat invokes in his study of
Native American literature. For Krupat, a frontier is not “the farthest point to which civilization has advanced, a series of those points apparently marking a clearly discernible line between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Rather... the frontier is understood as simply that shifting space in which two cultures encounter one anotheri’ (5). Such a space is not “fixed or mappable,” but is an ever-shifting site where people with different cultural identities meet and deal with one another. While Wharton seems to position me so completely in the upper class literacy practices she depicts, I expect that working class writers, as a nondominant group, may offer me a different experience. People who live on the frontier
“ Robert Pattison refers to this letter in On Literacy, although he never cites the newspaper in which he found the letter or the date on which it appeared. 105
of class difference may develop what Gloria Anzaldua would call a “la conciencia de la mestiza” or “mestiza consciousness.” Such a “consciousness of the Borderlands” results
from “racial, ideological, cultural and biological crosspollinization” (77). While Anzaldua’s formulation of the mestiza consciousness has arisen out of her position as a Chicana lesbian
living on the Mexican-United States border in South Texas, working class writers who must continually deal with economically empowered people from dominant social classes
may find themselves in a similar position of “perceiv[ing] the version of reality that our
culture communicates,” but like others who live in more than one culture, they get “multiple, often opposing messages” (78). The assembly line worker who is at his most effective among his fellow workers when his calls for union solidarity are phrased in the first-person plural finds that when dealing with plant management he is accused of diffusing blame and not accepting responsibility for his actions because he does not use the more individualistic first-person singular. Zebroski writes that “If [his father] had had degree initials-AB, MA, PhD-behind his name, his knowledge of languages would have been seen as the mark of a letter man, a cultured man” (81). Instead, such a familiarity with the languages of Eastern Europe in a factory worker could only reinforce his status as an immigrant. Anzaldua describes the results of such a clash of voices that is heard along frontiers: “The ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity. Internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness. The mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness” (78). Anzaldua cautions though that it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to the common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and for this, it is proudly defiant All reaction is limited by and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority-outer as well as inner-it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once, and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. (78-79)
Anzaldua goes on to describe how “the new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for 106
contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity.. .. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a
plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode-nothing is thrust out, the good the bad
and the ugly, nothing is rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (79).
In reading The Girl, I find evidence that Le Sueur has developed such a mestiza consciousness and that in moving through the novel, I too must enact multiple literacies, tolerate ambiguities, and work to avoid the counterstance of the oppressed and the oppressor. In accounting for the details of my movement through Wharton’s novel, I became aware of the ways in which The Age of Innocence refuses to admit literacy strategies that diverged from the representational politics of the detail as employed by Old
New York society; Le Sueur’s novel embraces a polyphony of voices, and rather than implicating ray ethical response in the very system I would like to critique, it is in the details that such voices emerge.
Paradoxically, though, such a plurality of voices is precisely what is typically denied in texts written by working class writers during the early decades of the twentieth century. The Girl is often included on lists of “proletarian,” “revolutionary,” or
“ideological” fiction. Such texts are often faulted for being tendentious, for offering only stereotypical portrayals of worker-heroes and capitalist-villains, and for sacrificing aesthetic principles in order to achieve ideological ends.’° In her book. Authoritarian Fictions, Susan Suleiman argues that the most significant trait of ideological fictions is that they formulate, in an insistent, consistent, and unambiguous manner, the thesis or (theses) they seek to illustrate. In a roman à thèse, the “correct” interpretation of the story told is inscribed in capital letters, in such a way that there can be no mistaking i t ... the roman à thèse is essentially an authoritarian genre; it appeals to the need for certainty, stability, and unity that is one of the elements of the human psyche; it affirms absolute tmths.
Barbara Foley offers a detailed history of American proletarian fiction. See pages 63- 64 for an account of the origin of the term; pages 86-127 document the difficulty literary editors had in defining proletarian based on subject matter, author, audience, and perspective. 107
absolute values. If, in this process, it infantilizes the reader..., it offers in exchange a paternal assurance. (10-11)"
While Suleiman acknowledges that authoritarian fictions can be “intertextual” and that “several discourses” can “coexist in a single (inter)textual space,” she would argue that authoritarian fictions are, in Bakhtin’s words, monological, despite the presence of several discourses. Suleiman defines the monological works “as one in which ideas are either affirmed or refuted, with no middle ground possible; the affirmed idea is what gives the monological work both its narrative shape and its ideological unity” (71). For Suleiman, ideological fiction can contain multiple voices, but those voices must ultimately be either subsumed within the monologism of the text or be invalidated by it. In the end, an ideological novel will tolerate no contradictions. Such a perception of the monologism of ideological fiction does not seem sufficient for accounting for the mestiza consciousness of working class workers. Or, perhaps, the mestiza consciousness is not an accurate description of the literacies of the working class?
How can these competing possibilities be adjudicated? The first step, I think, is to examine some of Suleiman’s ancillary goals in Authoritarian Fictions. While Suleiman’s primary goal is to use an investigation of the generic status of the roman à thèse as a springboard for theorizing about issues like “the nature of reading and interpretation, [and] about the often contrasted notions of narrative authority and modernist writing” (2), she also seeks to establish the roman à thèse, as a genre that can be “conservative or radical, defending the status quo or calling for its abolition” (10). Among her examples of the roman à thèse are texts with political perspectives as divergent as Bourget’sL’Etape in which a young man ends up espousing the values of his traditionalist professor after rejecting the radical social politics of father and Nizan’s Le Cheval De Troie in which Communists vow to continue to fight for human dignity and freedom even after the death of one of their own in a mass meeting turned violent by the intrusion of fascist demonstrators. By working to establish
" “Ideological fiction” is used by Suleiman to refer to the larger category of the roman à thèse. Although Suleiman’s study focuses on French novels produced in die first half of the twentieth century, she makes explicit that her analytical framework is applicable to “other national literatures and other periods” and she specifically cites “American fiction in the 1930s” (16). 108
generic traits for the roman à thèse which accommodate texts which affirm the status quo as well as those which challenge it, Suleiman begins to eUde the potential for difference in
texts by members of the dominant class and those produced by writers from marginalized groups. This elision invites investigation and gives me license to take the next step of
turning to The Girl as a text produce by a marginalized writer; Will this working class text reflect the mestiza consciousness that comes from living on the border of class difference?
Or will it establish an ideological authority through monologism? More broadly speaking, is there a one-to-one relationship between ideological fictions and monologism? In attempt to answer these questions, I will put use my strategies for articulating the details of my movement through Le Sueur’s narrative, and I will conclude by returning to the issue of whether detailed readings are an appropriate strategy for engaging the texts of working class writers.
Encountering Multiple Voices in The Girl Before I begin the narrative proper of Le Sueur’s text, I am first confronted with an epigraph adapted from the book of Jeremiah:
O that my head was water and mine eyes a flood of tears that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughters o f my people. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician? Is not the health o f the daughters o f my people recovered? They are broken with a great breath, with a grievous blow. Through all the land the wounded shall groan. The harvest is passed and the summer is ended and we are not saved. The land is desolate because o f the presence o f the oppressor. For the daughters o f my people, I am hurt.
In revising and rearranging Jeremiah’s text. Le Sueur does not destroy or subvert the
Biblical message. The plaintive tone of the lament is not diminished, and the powerful rhythms of the individual lines remain intact. By adapting but not destroying the original message. Le Sueur seems to be enacting Anzaldua’s strategy for coping on the frontier; Le
Sueur is “operating in a pluralistic mode-nothing is thrust out, the good the bad the ugly, nothing is rejected, nothing abandoned” (79). As I move into the early chapters of Le Sueur’s novel, attending to the details of my reading experience will, I hope, allow me to 109
continue to acknowledge the diversity of voices (such as the original voice of Jeremiah overlaid by Le Sueur’s harmonic rearrangement) that can be heard when my literacies
converge with Le Sueur’s. The Girl opens on a busy Saturday night at the Gennan Village where the girl is
serving up drinks and Booya-“an elegant stew of chicken and veal and beef and every kind of vegetable [that] you cook... all night and all day very, very slow” (1). As she bustles
from table to table, the girl is also learning from Clara, the other waitress, “how to dodge and not make anybody mad” when men are grabby with “their too-free paws” (2;1).
Although the girl’s vision and voice shape my experience of the narrative as she tells her
story in the first person, her own foregrounding of her inexperience and naiveté makes me aware of her limitations as a narrator. The girl admits “Sometimes I didn’t even know the words Clara spoke” (1), but, as a reader, I do understand Clara’s words as well as the other words in the first chapter that carry connotations from a wide range of semantic fields.*^ When the girl repeats her mother’s warning “that the cities were Sodom and Gomorrah,” she inadvertently invokes the Old Testament languages of divine judgment and punishment. In the next paragraph this language of judgment and punishment is transmuted into the modem dialect of discipline in a police state. The girl describes Clara’s warnings: “I was lucky to have Clara showing me how to wander on the street and not be picked up by plainclothesmen and police matrons. They will pick you up, Clara told me, and give you tests and sterilize you or send you to the woman’s prison” (1). Furthermore, as D. A. Miller notes in The Novel and the Police, “official police share their ghetto with an official criminality” (3), and the girl is as threatened by Ganz “who brought bootleg from
Dakota and paid protection [for several speakeasies]” as she is by the plainclothesmen and police matrons. Ganz’s voice enacts the criminalized version of the language of discipline and punishment. As the girl serves Ganz his Booya, she describes their conversation:
In an echo of Karcevskij, Le Sueur writes in Worker Writers that “The word, like the plow, the chisel, the needle, the spindle, is a tool. Of all the materials man works with the tool word is perhaps the most social. It is through the word that you speak to others, influence others, tell other what has happened to you. Everyone must make this tool his or her own. You must not be afraid of this tool simply because you have not had a formal training in its use. With practice, like any other tool, it will turn to your hand” (no page number). 110
he said, you might as well as know I keep this place going. I nodded, and he began to tell me how he good he was, how he knocked out Four Round Hogan once. He said he gave him a good beating because he got mad and when he got mad at anybody he didn’t know what he did-he was a fierce one and pretty tough. He said it wouldn’t hurt a girl to be nice to him, though, he was very nice when he was nice. I could hardly sit beside him. (4)
Piggy-backing on the presence of these threatening voices of discipline and punishment is the language of violence invoked to describe the relations between men and
women in this first chapter. The girl is “hot” for Butch, an unemployed man who frequents the German Vdlage and is friends with Ack and Hoinck, who, along with Belle, run the speakeasy. Clara cautions the girl that “Butch is a dangerous cat” (1), and when the girl despairs that Butch will forego his usual Saturday night visit to the German Village, Clara tells her “He’ll turn up, the bad penny he is” (3). When Butch finally does appear, the girl characterizes him as “smooth and sleepy as if about to spring like a cat” and his long face is “lean like a fox” (4). The girl describes her own reaction to Butch’s presence, “I was scared. I couldn’t see very well. I was shaking in my bones. There was a danger in the way he walked towards me, his hands out his face about me” (4). When Butch calls out a greeting to the girl, “How you doin’ baby... how you doin’ tonight?”, I have to wonder about the potential threat that might lie behind his friendliness. The languages in this first chapter, though, are not all threatening. Through Clara I hear a language of dreams; she tells the girl, “everything comes to those who wait,kid- you would get anything you hankered for... if you’d believe and keep it in the mind’s eye
.. . You might find that rich guy here you know, or a movie director or a talent scout who is just looking for your face, and modeling is good too. O, there’s a rainbow for everyone
. .. a pot of gold and the dice falling right. Just keep your eyes peeled, kid, and shine up to them” (1-2). I also hear descriptions of female beauty constructed in the language of beauty magazines-the girl describes Clara and Belle: “Clara was so pretty with a little heart-shaped face and white soft skin she greased every night,” and Belle “must have been a beauty once. She still was on Saturday nights. She’s so big, with dyed red hair and white skin and her eyes made up so they glitter” (2). As a member of the Workers I l l
Alliance, Amelia’s presence at the bar introduces yet another language. The girl pulls from
Amelia’s satchel a leaflet that says “Don’t starve-Organize” (3).
Although Le Sueur casts all these languages into the idiom of urban, working-class women and men and this first chapter of the novel is filled with run-on sentences and snippets of direct speech not set off by quotation marks, these diverse languages still echo through. While I might be tempted to sort out these different languages, to establish a hierarchy among them, and to determine which ones might ultimately be endorsed by the narrative, Amelia articulates a different possibility: “Everyone is important” (3). All of these voices are connected and playing off of each other. The threats articulated by the girl’s mother, the police, and Ganz all work symphonically. The violent overtones in the description of Butch and the girl’s reaction to his physical presence play off the slap-and- tickle games Belle enjoys with her male customers and the way she aggressively and suggestively jokes with them. Clara’s visions of pots of gold at the rainbow’s end are implicated in her advice to the girl when Ganz requests that the girl serve his booya: “I know, kid, you feel all lighted up if Butch should come in the door but you need butter on your bread and cream in your coffee. Butch can’t give you anything but love, baby-here angel, take this to Ganz and she gave me the bowl of Booya. Look forward baby, she said, look up” (3). Amelia’s sign, “Don’t starve-Organize” is part of the message of the Workers Alliance, but at the German Village such a slogan becomes inflected with entirely different meanings. With Ganz secretly controlling things from upstairs, the speakeasy is a well organized establishment, and it is the protection of Ganz’s organized crime syndicate that makes it possible for people to enjoy the steaming bowls of Booya on Saturday nights.
Ganz, with Belle and Hoinck as his underlings, have made the message of the Workers Alliance their own. The range of voices playing off one another continues to expand as I move through subsequent chapters. Butch often invokes baseball metaphors, and it is most often through him that the language of individualism enters the novel. The language of petty gangsters dominates the bank robbery episode. Female sexuality is expressed in the language rich with images of nature and the earth. Amelia’s continued presence allows for the 112
introduction of the language of the Workers Alliance. The richness and diversity of these voices emerges in an account of the particulars of my reading experience, just as the
unrelenting representational politics of the upper classes emerged in my reading of The
Age o f Innocence.
Resisting Completeness: The Dialogism of The Girl
It is unnecessary, I think, to catalogue all the voices and languages that surface in the pages ofThe Girl. The more important question to ask is does the progression of the narrative privilege any of these discourses? Does the structure of the narrative or the fate of particular characters subvert any of these voices? If Suleiman is correct about the monologism of ideological fictions regardless of an author’s position within dominant or oppositional groups, then The Girl should make clear which discourses are to be valued and the narrative’s progression should eradicate any discordant voices. The few critics who have written about The Girl have tended to adopt such a view of the progression of the novel. In part of her effort to construct a gendered history of literary radicalism, Paula
Rabinowitz argues that The GirVs “narrative motivation comes from two sources- heterosexuality and maternity. The first half of the novel locates female desire within a heterosexual economy. In the second half, the maternal, as a source of feminine historicity, takes over after the girl’s memory of her mother and Amelia’s celebration of maternity link the desire for children to history” (116). With such a conception of the motive engine of the novel, it’s not surprising that Rabinowitz reaches the conclusion that Le Sueur “places women’s (re)production, rather than men’s production, at the center of her narrative of female class consciousness,” (123), and in Rabinowitz’s reading of the novel, the final scenes of the girl giving birth speak with only one voice: “the maternal becomes the tunnel that burrows through the semiotic to the symbolic” (121). Such a monologic view ofThe Girl leads Rabinowitz to charge that the novel “verges on essentialism because it invokes women’s biological capacity to bear children without interrogating the cultural platitudes surrounding motherhood” (123). 113
While Blanche Gelfant initially recognizes multiple languages operating in Le Sueur’s novel, she too ultimately constructs a monologic reading of the text. Gelfant
describes The G irls style as “conflicted, its various discourses remaining dissonant despite
Le Sueur’s attempts to conflate the rhetoric of proletarian politics with the language of fertility myths, urban working-class vernaculars (male and female), hieratic incantations, and biblical prophecy,” and she sees The Girl as “a confusion of genres ... a novel of radical social protest that contains within its form a feminist jeremiad, a woman’s bildungsroman, and a fertility myth” (183-84). But in order to make sense of this confusion, Gelfant argues that “the girl’s ultimate transformation, easily overlooked, but striking, is from silent witness to storyteller” and although Gelfant makes clear that Le
Sueur recognizes limitations of the girl’s language, she still goes on to identify Le Sueur with her protagonist; “In the novel, she [Le Sueur] projected her lifelong quest for a language of her own upon a heroine who was moving, emblematically from speech to silence” (184). Gelfant argues that at the ending of the novel, the girl “becomes the unitary being the text envisions-at once girl woman mother-language loses its power to penetrate and divide. Instead of talk, the Girl hears wordless sounds that make silence audible. For the silence that signifies spiritual communion is not soundless. It is heard as ‘a kind of woman’s humming,’ *a kind of sound like AHHHHHHH of wonder and delight’” (192).
In Gelfant’s reading, the novel once again becomes monologic and all the voices are co opted into a bildungsroman of language acquisition. The progression of the text as posited by Gelfant leads to the conclusion that the result of language acquisition is a homogenization of all voices into an articulate “AHHHHH.”
My experience of the novel, though, is somewhat different from these two readings. While Rabinowitz and Gelfant each suggest that the text is monologic-in different, but not necessarily contradictory ways" —I find my experience of the novel is far more dialogic. As Amelia says in the first chapter, “Everyone is important,” and for me, the divergent voices in The Girl are all important. Unlike Rabinowitz and Gelfant, I don’t find that the ending of the novel places me in a position to elevate any of languages into a
" One might read the existence of two different readings of the monologism of the text as a sign that the text isn’t monologic at all. 114
monologism that expresses the ideology of the novel. By accounting for the particulars of
my experience of the ways in which closure but not completeness is achieved for some of
the narrative episodes prior to the conclusion of the entire novel, I come to see an ambiguity in the concluding birth scene that is not recognized by the readings Rabinowitz and Gelfant
offer. This ambiguity can accommodate a dialogism that others would deny to ideological fictions. Specifically, I want to focus on the way in which instabilities regarding the bank
robbery episode are short-circuited and the way in the girl’s confinement in a maternity jail is concluded. This foregrounding of closure in the absence of the completeness of the
narrative action in these episodes prompts me to read the novel’s ending not as a final conclusion, but as a stopping point With such a view of the novel’s ending, the dialogism
of the text remains intact
Much of the action in the middle of the novel centers on plans of Ganz, Butch, Ack, and Hoinck to rob a bank, and the girl is selected to drive the getaway car. The robbery
goes horribly wrong when a customer tries to enter the bank while the would-be criminals are cleaning out the safe. The customer slips out of Butch’s grasp and attracts the attention of a nearby policeman. In the ensuing confusion, shots are fired. Ganz and Hoinck are left mortally wounded on the bank floor, but Butch manages to make it to the car. The girl drives away with her wounded lover, and during their cross-country drive, many issues raised by the narrative are resolved. When the girl stops at a gas station “built like a cottage” with “paper geraniums at the window,” the owner undermines the idyllic vision by describing how Standard Oil is squeezing him out and will soon take the station away from him (99). This makes the dying Butch realize the futility of his own dream of someday owning a gas station. As the girl drives away Butch swears, “Oh, the Goddamned dirty bastards. They got you coming and going. They got you” (100). Just as Butch comes to a new understanding of his position in the world in this episode, the girl too seems to reach a new understanding about her relationship with this man who has been both very cruel and very satisfying to her. As she listens to Butch’s delirious ramblings and attends to his broken body, she comes to recognize that “It seemed like there was everything bad, and our bodies were sweet and good to us” (106). While the bank robbery episode does achieve a 115 certain completeness in terms of Butch’s life and his dreams and the episode seems to move the girl along in her understanding of the world, other instabilities in the bank robbery episode are short-circuited through a sort of deus ex machina maneuver. During the robbery scene, instabilities about whether Ganz and cohorts, including the girl, will be caught drive the narrative forward. Even before they steal the car that will be used in the robbery, Butch pulls the girl into the park when a police car cruises down the street, telling her “Don’t let 'em get used to your face” (61). On the morning of the robbery, the girl drives Ganz, Butch, and Hoinck to the bank, and when they circle the block, Ganz cautions the girl not to let a janitor in a tire store near the bank see her face.
Thus it seems as though it will be a major problem when the girl, waiting in the car while the men enter the bank, reports that a “man walked by and looked at me and I thought his eyes got larger,” and she notes that a nearby cop directing traffic “kept turning full face to me” (95). Having noticed the ways in which the danger of being seen is established by
Butch’s and Ganz’s warnings to the girl, the fact that the girl recognizes that she has been seen leads me to expect that the girl may be in danger of having to accept the legal consequences for her participation in the scheme. But when the girl makes her way back to
Belle’s after leaving Butch’s body on the prairie. Belle informs her they never suspected there was another car, that they nabbed Ack’s car when Ack drove too near to see what was happening, like the fried cod fish that he was, and they thought he was the only contact and kid... you sure must have got out of there on the natural. There wasn’t a word about there being anybody else, not a whisper except the pig who squealed, said he didn’t think the fellow who grabbed him looked like either one of the dead men, that’s what he said, but they didn’t follow it up, so you’re clean. (111)
Belle’s information allows the main narrative to line about the girl’s growth and development to proceed unimpeded, but this arbitrary means of tying up loose ends about the bank robbery suggests to me that I am moving through a text in which my typical strategy of looking for both closure and completeness will obscure other ways of understanding endings. A similar arbitrary resolution occurs when the girl is imprisoned in a jail-like maternity home after breaking down at the relief office and attacking a policeman trying to detain her. In the relief home, the girl comes in contact with Alice, a deaf woman who, like 116
Amelia, is a member of the Workers Alliance. As the girl cries herself to sleep on Easter Sunday, Alice slips her a comforting note: ''Don’t cry. We, the common people, suffer
togethef’ (133). As they continue to pass the note pad back and forth, Alice explains that the Workers Alliance is demands food and jobs and that "Nothing can stop us.” The girl
responds excitedly, "I worked all my life,” and she is welcomed by Alice into the cause, "We are all workers!” The chapter and the exchange of notes concludes with Alice’s
hopeful "Wake tomorrow!”, suggesting that the girl will take a conscious role in class struggles. But as I turn the page to the next chapter, these expectations are not fulfilled. The chapter opens, “It was Amelia got me out of there before I delivered,” and the girl goes on to describe the discomfort of being near the end of a pregnancy during a hot summer in
St. Paul (134). There is no explanation of how Amelia worked for the girl’s release (demonstrations? a letter-writing campaign? political connections?), and the girl takes no active role in her own liberation other than smuggling a note notifying Amelia of her whereabouts out of the maternity home through a woman being released after her delivery. Just as the Easter Day service in the relief-run maternity home ends inappropriately with the Major leading the inmates in a rendition of “Hark the Herald the Angels Sing,” this narrative episode ends in a way that overtly declares its inadequacy. Having seen the arbitrary ways in which these episodes are brought to closure, but not necessarily completeness, is part of what I bring to the concluding chapters of The Girl. Although it has been on the level of action that these episodes have foregone completeness, I extend the devaluation of completeness into the realm of voice. Describing the details of the multiple languages in the opening chapter of the novel affirmed for me the usefulness of thinking of Le Sueur, as a working class writer, as enacting a mestiza consciousness, and in the conclusion of The Girl, 1 find that just as the “energy [of the mestiza consciousness] comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (80), the conclusion of The Girl seems to break down paradigms of completeness and closure. By rejecting the traditional marriage or death conclusions of female bildungsromans. Le Sueur is, in the words of Rachel Blau 117
DuPlessis, “writing beyond the ending."" Although Paula Rabinowitz has pointed to an
undesirable essentialism in Le Sueur’s decision to use childbirth as a way to bring the girl’s story to an end, the birth of a new girl is certainly a way to suggest that the story of the girl
extends beyond the ending. But in the details of my movement through the ending, I find a
polyphony of voices here as rich and textured as in the opening chapters, and for me, these
voices work against Rabinowitz’s charges of essentialism. Furthermore, the polyvocality
of the novel coupled with way the ending resists completeness in terms of action as well as voices suggests that Suleiman’s characterization of ideological fictions as monological may oversimplify the position of oppositional writers working in this genre.
As the girl’s labor pains begin on a hot night, Clara begins to drift toward death. As she cradles her dying friend, the girl cries out “Memory is all we g o t... we got to remember” (142). The text in these final two chapters does a fine job of prompting me to remember all the voices and languages I have encoimtered in moving through the novel.
The language of hope and dreams that Clara so often gave voice to in the early chapters is echoed by the girl when she tries to revive her friend and says “I wanted to bring her back, let her teU me about the fourteen room house and the sunken baths and a room of her own”
(142). Through Sarah, who the girl describes as a “Jesus Freak,” the languages of the bible enter the narrative in these chapters. After Clara’s death, Sarah “was saying something from the bible-Set me as seal upon they heart, for love is stronger than death”
(145). Belle continues with her vulgar idiom-she tells the girl “O it’s shit to have to lie on the floor” (147). The activist language of the Workers Alliance is present in leaflets saying
In Worker Writers, Le Sueur tells would-be writers from the working class that “we need a dynamic and dialectic structure. We not only want to describe the world, we want to change it. Instead of description, narration, remov^ and objectivity, alienation, we need a structure that includes the thesis, antithesis, synthesis TTiis structure will help you to see life itself dynamically, alive in conflict, changing with inevitable and endless possibilities” (no page number). Critics like Lennard Davis have disputed Suleiman’s notions of ideological fictions on the grounds that all novels are ideological. I agree with Davis that “as soon as an author creates characters, puts them in a place, has them engage in dialogue, and gets embroiled in a plot. . . the novelist is stuck with the baggage of ideology, and no porter in the world is going to be able to help alleviate that problem” (228), but I am unwiÉng at this point to completely dismiss the notion of authoritarian fictions as carrying special problems and questions worth attending to. 118
“Milk and Iron Pills for Clara” (145), and the language of the law is present when Amelia declares “let our voice be heard in the whole city—a trial, a judgment against the city
fathers, a trial yes an accusation. We accuse” (146). A language of female sexuality
grounded in natural and earthy images is woven into these chapters. As the girl’s labor pains intensify, the other women gather around her, and “They seemed to breathe with [her], a kind of great wind through their bodies like wind in a woods” (147). Even Dutch’s
voice and the languages of sport, competition, and victory that he used to express himself are reintroduced when the girl thinks about the timing of her child’s birth; she imagines a conversation with her dead lover, “You always said, it’s the timing. That was about robbing the bank, making a homer, ringing the bell, bring home the bacon. But women know the most about that. When you’re going to have a baby there is some kind of strange timing” (141).
Although Gelfant might argue that the girl is appropriating and in the process feminizing and recuperating this aggressive, male language. Belle’s report on the outcome of the demonstration reveals that there is a place for this language. Belle tells the girl,
“some of those ball players caught the [tear-gas] bombs and threw them right back” (145). In these final chapters there is a place for all of these voices. Although the language of maternity reverberates most loudly in the final paragraphs, the narrative has worked against my desire for completeness. Thus, I don’t read this positioning as subsuming or subverting all the other languages, and it has been through accounting for the details of my experience with particular events in the narrative that I have come to affirm my sense that
Le Sueur is writing from a mestiza consciousness and that when our literacies converge, I too will develop a mestiza consciousness, at least temporarily. While Suleiman argues that ideological fictions are by definition monologic. Le Sueur’s novel seems to be an ideological novel that establishes its authority through heterogeneity. And the process of articulating the particulars of my reading experience allows me to recognize the inclusion and validation of multiple, often marginalized languages. In the non-hierarchical interplay
" Peter Hitchcock finds a similar multiplicity in Pat Barker’s working-class novels, and he argues that “heterogeneity is itself the hallmark of a significant counterhegemonic discourse” (96). While I’ve not read widely enough in working-class fiction to testify to the validity of Hitchcock’s claim, it certainly seems to apply in the case of The Girl. 119
of these languages, I find Le Sueur’s powerful recognition that the ideology of the
oppressed must be a dialogic one.
As a final move in this discussion of the particulars of my experience in reading
The Girl, I would like to acknowledge the ways in which understanding Le Sueur’s novel
as dialogic and recognizing the value of reading her text with a mestiza consciousness allows me to deal with one of the most troubling aspects of the novel-the violence inflicted
by men upon the women around them. I do not find that Le Sueur offers a simplistic
condemnation of this aggression. Instead, the dialogism of the text leads me to place the verbal and physical violence directed against women into conversation with a variety of
other elements in the text.
Because my experience of the novel is mediated by the girl’s voice and vision, the instances in which violence is directed against her are the most disturbing for me: the verbal
cruelty of her father’s final letter; the unpitying slap Butch delivers in order to silence the girl’s tears after they make love for the first time; the sadistic taunting Ganz makes the girl
endure in the hotel room before he knocks her unconscious. While I am deeply disturbed
by these moments of aggression and the pain they cause, I think it would be a mistake for me to focus solely on the way in which the girl suffers at the hands of angry men. Violence is much more systemic in The Girl. Incidents of men attacking other men also surface with great regularity as I move through the novel. The girl’s father attacks his own son; Hoinck attacks other card players; the strikers attack Butch and murder his brother, BUI, when they accept scab jobs at the Foundry. Furthermore, the most frighteningly violent character in the whole novel is a woman-the relief worker, Miss Rice. In her culturally sanctioned position of authority. Miss Rice is capable of having Clara subjected to electric shock treatments, and she threatens the girl with sterilization. Miss Rice is even capable of enacting violence against language, and she is able to drive all other voices out of her enunciations. In what I read as the novel’s most monologic moment, the girl reads the report on Miss Rice’s desk: The girl is maladjusted, emotionally unstable, and a difficult problem to approach. A most unfortunate situation. A change of environment would be helpful, with continuous casework followup, to inspire poise, and educational interests should be encouraged as a solution. In our opinion 120
there should be a referral to a psychiatric clinic if she shows indications o f further or aggravated mental and emotional disturbance. She should be tested for sterilization after her baby is bom. In our opinion sterilization would be advisable. (129)
Understanding that violence is systemic in The Girl and that the moments of abuse women suffer at the hands of men are part of larger cultural problems is one move I must
make in dealing with ray response to these acts of aggression. But condemning a dysfunctional cultural system and the violence it engenders is still engaging in the sort of behavior Anzaldua derides as a “stand[ing] on the opposite river bank, shouting questions”
(78). In order “to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once, and at once to see through serpent and eagle eyes” (78-79), I have to look further into the details of my reading experience.
Documenting the girl’s growth and development allows me to see that after Dutch’s death, her behavior begins to reflect some of the aggressiveness that I at first only associated with male characters in the book. After reading Miss Rice’s recommendation for sterilization, the girl describes her own behavior: “1 don’t know what made me do it, but I began to shout, and I never swore in my life before” (129). And as a cop puts his hand under her skirt as he shoves her into a police wagon, the girl admits: “I began to hit him with my fists until he held both my hands and began kissing me, and I bit and kicked, and then I remembered something Butch told me once, and I kicked him as hard as I could in the groin” (130). Later Belle describes the demonstration for Clara: “Kid you should have seen the demonstration, hundreds outside the courthouse and the cops threw tear gas out the windows and some of those ball players caught the bombs and threw them right back, and kid, you should have seen those bureaucrats, like rats, pouring out of the building, and the street littered with those leaflets saying Milk and Iron Pills for Clara” (145). As I find myself cheering for the girl and for the demonstrators, I come to realize that acts of violence can be a way to assert one’s power, to establish one’s ability to ask.’’ A facile condemnation of violence overlooks this and contributes to the disempowerment of people
In “Witness!to] the Suffering of Women,” Susan Sipple applies Bakhtin’s notions of the grotesque and the power of transgression to Le Sueur’s Women on the Breadlines. One can imagine a similar productive analysis of The G irl. 121
like the girl and the workers. While I’m not entirely comfortable with this position either,
seeing “at once through serpent and eagle eyes” is never easy. But for me, that is the
experience I have when my literacies converge with The Girl.
Although 1 took up Le Sueur’s novel with the concern that the very details of detailed accounts of reading might be implicated in the literacies of the upper classes (or at least of the upper classes as represented by Wharton), using such a strategy to engage Le
Sueur’s text reassures me that my methods are capable of crossing class lines. Such a
strategy is as appropriate for reading Wharton’s tyrannical trifles as it is for reading Le
Sueur’s multiple discourses and the the heterogeneity of counterhegemonic discourse. If ray readings seem to indicate that Le Sueur’s text is more dialogic than Wharton’s text, I am no means prepared to suggest it is a “better” novel or vice versa. As Ursula LeGuin has
written, “Like and different are quickening words, brooding and hatching. Better and
worse are eggsucking words, they leave out the shell.” The experience of reading The Girl and The Age o f Innocence in tandem, of recognizing the ways in which they are
different kinds of narratives, has indeed been one of brooding and hatching, but in my next
chapter, I will turn to conversations about gender and reading where “better^’ and “worse” have all too frequently been the labels assigned to writers, readers, and texts on the basis of sex. I will take up the question of whether local and particular accounts of the convergencies of literacies can move beyond the oppositionality of such binary systems. CHAPTER IV
BEYOND OPPOSITIONALITY; GENDER AND READING IN GATHER’S LUCY GAYHEART k m HEMINGWAY’S A FAREWELL TO ARMS
In the previous chapter I cited Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of the mestiza consciousness, and I argued that accounting for the particulars of the ways my literacies converged with the literacies of The Girl was a way to give voice to the multiplicities of such a consciousness. Particularly important to me was Anzaldua’s cautionary statement that it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to the common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the dominant culture’s views and beliefs, and for this, it is proudly defiant All reaction is limited by and dependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counterstance stems from a problem with authority-outer as well as inner-it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once, and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. (78-79)
Such an oppositional stance, though, is precisely the posture many feminist theorists have assumed in pursuing the intersection of gender and reading. Judith Fetterley’s The
Resisting Reader set the standard in 1978. Fetterley argued that the cultural reality reflected in the canon of American literature “is not the emasculation of men by women, but the immasculation of women by men” (xx). According to Fetterley, “women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny” (xx). The remedy for
122 123
this process of immasculation is to engage in resistant reading, to disrupt the process of immasculation by calling attention to the way in which androcentricity has customarily
passed for universality. Patrocinio Schweickart’s “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” the 1984 winner of the Florence Howe Award for Outstanding
Feminist Scholarship, extends Fetterley’s arguments.’ Schweickart suggests that “the
feminist story will have at least two chapters; one concerned with feminist readings of male
texts, and another with feminist readings of female texts” (39). Like Fetterley,
Schweickart’s feminist readings of male texts would expose the ways in which the androcentric canon of Anglo-American literature “serves as a meeting ground of the personal and universal” for male readers (41), but Schweickart goes on to take Lawrence’s
Women in Love as a male text that not only derives its power from the false consciousness
into which both men and women have been socialized but that also gains strength from the female reader’s authentic liberatory aspirations. For Schweickart, her identification with
' Such oppositional frameworks are also evident in the work of Judith Kegan Gardiner, Aiinette Kolodny, Lillian Robinson, Susan Winnett, and others; much research and scholarship on gender and literacy is also structured on oppositions between men and women. In “Reading Student Papers from a Feminist Perspective I,” Elizabeth Flynn documents her own transformation from a masculine “evaluator" of student texts into a more empathetic and feminine reader whose goal is to help students see ways to improve their writing. Susan Gabriel’s study of reading in the composition classroom begins with the premise that “since males in our schools are seldom required to read about female experiences, they should be able easily to identify with male fictional characters but should exhibit some difficulty in relating to female characters or feminine experiences” (130), and Gabriel concludes that “some raades and females are are indeed reading the same texts differently and in accordance with a gender-based schema they have brought to the reading of the text” (137). In spite of Shirley K. Rose’s Burkean interpretive method and dramatistic analysis, “Reading Representative Anecdotes of Literacy” advances the oppositionality drat female literacy autobiographies are grounded in a myth of participation while male literacy autobiographies are grounded in a myth of autonomy. In “Reading and Writing Genders,” Nancy R. Comley describes a writing assignment in which she asked students to rewrite Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” from the perspective of either the man, the woman who is pregnant, or the woman who serves them in the bar. Men who assumed the position of one of the women in the story were praised by Comley, and she notes that this re-visioning of the text “for most of the men, provided a creative experience in cross-dressing which enabled them to investigate feminine experience” (190) No mention is made, however, of women who might choose to identify widi the man in the story, and presumably, they would not benefit from such cross-dressing. While these articles have made important contributions to our understanding of gender and reading and writing, they still leave us looking at and reinforcing the differences in men and women that Anzaldua suggests we must break down. They do not offer strategies for examining how people build lives out of bridging these gaps. 124
Birkin is “emotionally effective because, stripped of its patriarchal trappings, Birkin’s
struggle and his utopian vision conform to my own” (43). Although Schweickart
acknowledges that certain male texts like Women in Love “merit a dual hermeneutic: a negative hermeneutic that discloses their complicity with patriarchal ideology, and a positive
hermeneutic that recuperates the utopian moment-the authentic kemel-from which they
draw a significant portion of their emotional power” (43-44), she reserves a far more
generous kind of reading for women’s texts. Using Adrienne Rich’s “Vesuvius at Horae” as a positive hermeneutic model, Schweickart advocates a dialectic approach to reading
which recognizes the ways in which the physical absence of the author threatens the necessary duality of subjects in the reading experience. In order to overcome this potential threat, Schweickart suggests a shift from a duality of subjects to a duality of contexts. According to Schweickart’s program for feminist readings of women’s texts, “reading becomes a mediation between author and reader, between the context of writings and the context of reading” (54). Such a model of reading is quite compatible with my discussion about the need to understand reading as a convergence of literacies, but by reserving this kind of reading for feminist readers of women’s texts and by advocating a negative hermeneutic for patriarchal texts, Schweickart perpetuates the oppositional framework established by Fetterley. By advocating different reading strategies for men and women, for male and female texts, Schweickart commits herself to a polarized conception of gender and to oppositionality as the normative mode of interaction between genders.
Numerous scholars have voiced concern about such oppositionality as the normative stance of female readers. In her review of Gender and Reading, Pamela L.
Caughie faults not just Schweickart’s feminist theory of reading, but the entire collection for “privileg[ing] women’s reading, women’s values, and women’s experiences over men’s” and for merely “inverting the androcentric reading paradigm these writers want to 125
subvert” (320; 324)/ In a similar critique of oppositionality, Ann Rosalind Jones argues
that by polarizing masculine and feminine modes of writing Hélène Cixous’s discourse on l ’écriture feminine merely succeeds in reversing “the values assigned to each side of the
polarity,. .. leav(ing] man as the determining referent, not departing from the male-female
opposition, but participating in it” (369)/ Other scholars have called attention to the ways in which such oppositional
strategies are pedagogically problematic. InGender Influences: Reading Student Texts,
Donalee Rubin notes that adopting an oppositional model in which male texts present hostile barriers that women need to topple would require us to “consider how gender
influences the dialectic between women teacher-readers and male student-writers” (18). The pedagogical limitations of oppositionality are also evident in Fetterley’s “Foreword” to
Composition and Resistance. In drawing a parallel between a family scene in which she deals with a resistant daughter and the classroom scene, Fetterley writes “I do better with the child who doesn’t resist and I do better with the class that agrees to strive to become a community of learners I ‘naturally’ adopt the stance of resistance when I am in the role of student, and I ‘naturally’ adopt the stance of non-resistance when I am in the role of teacher” (xi). By acknowledging that she adopts a resistant stance when she is in the
' In “Reading, Teaching, and the Ethics of Care,” Schweickart seems to avoid some of the problems Caughie points to by not specifically applying her notion of an intersubjective of care to specific texts and by wisely noting that “I do not mean to imply that all women conform to the ideal [of an intersubjective caring relation] Furthermore, I do not think that the ethic of care is applicable and accessible only to women” (93). But when one examines Schweickart’s reading of male reader-response critics, it seems she chooses not to enact her ethics of care, thus suggesting that such an approach is reserved for texts by other women. Robert Con Davis goes a step beyond Jones’s critique. He agrees that Cixous’s discourse is “actually an agent of what it opposes” and “inadvertently returns to and re enforces the masculine discourse it was supposed to go beyond and subvert” (274). But he goes on to argue that by its presence, Cixous’s own ideological critique “shows that change occurs in an economy of resistance in which the oppositional critic may fulfill a circumscribed but significant function” (281). For Davis, “the personal intervention of critics and theorists in culture is limited but dso enfranchised in specific ways,” and although politically engaged critics like Cixous “do not cause change. . . they participate in the ideological economy that does” (281). Recent work in narrative theory seems to opt out of the debate about gender, reading, and oppositionality. Critics like Margaret Homans, Gayle Greene, Molly Hite, and Alison Booth focus not on feminist theories of reading, but instead on the narrative strategies and techniques of women writers. 126
subaltern position of student but prefers her own students not engage in resistant behaviors
when she holds power as the teacher, Fetterley reveals the ways in which oppositionality
can collide with authority in the classroom. These critiques of oppositionality as the paradigm for feminist reading practices are
all founded on the political consequences of such a resistant stance-a stance in which feminists, in trying to seize power over texts, readers, and academic institutions, have only inverted power relations rather than imagining new kinds of relationships between variously gendered readers and various kinds of texts. Caughie, Jones, Rubin, and others who are all critical of this inversion of power focus on the point Anzaldùa makes when she notes that “All reaction is limited by and dependent on, what it is reacting against.”
However, Anzaldùa adds an additional layer when she goes on to note that such opposition is “not a way of life.” Founded on binaries and polarities, both oppositional reading stances and the critiques of oppositionality I have cited oversimplify the messy complications and contradictions in the ways people live their lives and the ways in which they read books. A reader might be enthralled with the way Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan foregrounds issues of recalcitrance in life and in reading but still feel a little edgy about the way violence toward women is used as the narrative engine of the book. A reader might tire of Emily S l Aubert’s melodramatic effusiveness in Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and might not be entirely satisfied with Emily’s fairy-tale marriage to Valancourt, but still respond strongly to her position as an orphaned young woman who must make her own way in the world. Oppositional constructions of gendered readings certainly don’t fully account for the life I live as a reader. While I may want to resist Philip
Roth’s construction of Maria as the ideal, pregnant wife in The Counterlife, I also love the tenderness of his description of her in a dress, “dark green and flowing. .. with a deep round collar and long sleeves that closed around her wrists” (325). While I admire Anna and Molly in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and I sympathize with their stmggles to define habitable psychological spaces for themselves in a patriarchal world, a part of me doesn’t really like them very well, perhaps as a result of a difference in our ages or as a result of the limits of my knowledge about life in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 127
My complicated response to these textual encounters reinforces for me the need to understand gender as a continually constructive process in which the performative behaviors an individual enacts throughout his or her lifetime interact with ever shifting and
changing social and cultural sexual mores and codes." Nancy Chodorow and Mary
Jacobus both offer powerful rhetoric about the importance of viewing gender as a
constructive process,^ Chodorow writes: “To speak of difference as a final, irreducible
concept and to focus on gender differences as central is to reify them and to deny the reality
of those processes which create the meaning and significance of gender. To see men and women as qualitatively different kinds of people, rather than seeing gender as processual, reflexive, and constructed, is to reify and deny relations of gender, to see gender differences as permanent rather than as created and situated” (16). Similarly, Mary Jacobus argues that gender differences should be “redefined, not as male versus female-not as biologically constituted-but as a multiplicity, ambiguity, and heterogeneity which is that of textuality itself. Writing, the production of meaning, becomes the site of both challenge
^ By focusing on the way in which gender is a constructive process, I do not mean to suggest that social class and race cannot productively be viewed as social constructions as well. Because of biology and the ways in which feminist criticism has in the past asserted essential differences between men and women, I feel the need to make a special case for gender as a construction. This acknowledgment of the specific history of gendered criticism places me in the same camp as Judith Butler who argues for the need to “resist the model of power that would set racism and homophobia and misogyny as parallel or analogical relations. The assertion of their abstract or structural equivalence not only misses the specific histories of their construction and elaboration, but also delays the important work of thinking through the ways in which these vectors of power require and deploy each other for the purpose of their own articulation” (Bodies that Matter 18). ' In Living Stories, Telling Lives, Joanna S. Frye notes that some female writers (e.g., Charlotte Perlons Gilman in Herland, Virginia Woolf in Orlando, and Doris Lessing in Vie Four-Gated City) have turned to fantastic, surreal, or futuristic narrative modes as a way to imagine new possibilities for the construction of gender roles. According to Frye, such fictions pursue “utopian directions for human development and illuminate the fallacies in current cultural assumptions about gender” (6). Similarly, Holly Devor concludes her study of “gender blending” women who are often mistaken for men with the utopian hope that genders might someday “become social statuses available to any persons according to their personal dispositions and their exhibited behaviors. Members of society might be taught to value adaptability and flexibility rather than obedience to gender roles, so that the most respected and socially valued personality types would be those which were able to make use of any behaviors which served their purposes in any situation. Under such a schema, the god of mature personality development would be to reach a balance of gender characteristics. Men and women, masculinity and femininity, would be seen as immature stages in the process of reaching a blended gender identity and display” (153-54). 128
and otherness; rather than (as in more traditional approaches) simply yielding the themes and representations of female oppression” (30). For Jacobus, “Reading woman becomes a form of autobiography or self-constitution” (4). While Chodorow and Jacobus make powerful arguments for viewing gender as a continual process of construction, they both turn to psychoanalysis as a methodological model for understanding this process. Jacobus makes a powerful argument that the ‘“peculiar nature’” of psychoanalysis is “not to describe what is, knocking its head against the opaque reality of observation or representation, but rather to uncover the process by which that reality or set of representations is constructed” (19), and thus it provides an ideal means for understanding the ways in which the play of difference and division “simultaneously creates and uncreates gender, identity, and a meaning” (24). Because of the power dynamics inherent in the analyst/analysand relationship, the psychoanalytic model, however, does not translate well into the classroom. In Shoshana Felman’s “Psychoanalysis and Education,” one finds very attractive rhetoric about possible links between psychoanalysis and pedagogy. Felman writes that “Proceeding not through linear progression, but through breakthroughs, leaps, discontinuities, regressions, and deferred action, the analytic learning-process puts indeed in question the traditional pedagogical belief in intellectual perfectability, the progressistic view of learning as a simple one-way road from ignorance to knowledge” (27), and she notes that “Like the analyst, the teacher. . . cannot in turn be, alone a master of the knowledge which he teaches Much more profoundly and radically, he attempts to learn from the students his own knowledge” (33). This is powerful language that many teachers would readily applaud, but in avoiding the political and cultural functions of educational institutions, Felman and other proponents of psychoanalytic models have yet to make a persuasive case for the transferability of their insights into pedagogical situations.
Judith Butler has recently offered what is, for me, a more satisfying way of approaching the constructed nature of gender. In Gender Trouble, Butler argues for the idea that the gendered body is performative: “gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of 129
acts” (140). In her more recent Boàes that Matter, Butler clarifies and extends her earlier
arguments by linking the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender. In
reformulating her position on gender as performance, Butler begins by defining “the matter of bodies as the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be
indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material affects” (2), and she goes on to acknowledge that “gender
performativity cannot be theorized apart from the forcible and reiterative practice of regulatory sexual regimes” (15).
The mass media which has so often come to author as well as to transmit many of
the social/cultural narratives of which I have been a narratee offers any number of “case
studies” about the ways in which individuals seeking to construct themselves as gendered beings encounter the limits placed upon their freedom by the sorts of regulatory regimes to
which Butler refers. Although young women in high school and college often have the Army ad slogan, “Be All That You Can Be,” preached at them, women like Hillaiy Rodham Clinton create enormous public discomfort by being educated, motivated, and powerful. Newspaper editorials and editorial cartoons mock “President Biliary Rodham
Clinton” and express concern about the power she exercises in the White House while Time offers a month-by-month analysis of the First Lady’s changing hairstyles. Even though Ms. Rodham Clinton is a graduate of Yale Law School and can list on her résumé that she has played a major role in shaping educational reform in Arkansas and has helped defined the terms of the national debate about health care reform, she cannot escape the regulatory regime of femininity under which a woman’s hairstyle is as important (if not more impoitant) than the quality of her mind. In discussions of the recent successes of all female singing groups, I witness a similar exposure of the ways in which individual’s freedom to perform as gendered bodies can be delimited. The members of “girl groups” like Salt-n-Pepa, SWV, and En Vogue bump and grind their way through the same exploitive poses that are so characteristic of misogynistic videos that feature male singers, but at the same time they celebrate female power and control with lyrics that describe the ideal man as one who “Spends quality time with his kids when he can” and is “Never 130 disrespectful / ‘Cuz his mama taught him that” (“Whatta Man,” Salt-n-Pepa, quoted in
Newsweek, January 31,1994). The “do-me feminism” of these female singing groups has complicated debates about gender politics and forced feminists and non-feminists alike to question their arguments and assumptions.
These social/cultural narratives are consistent with my own experiences in trying to construct myself as a gendered being. One of ray public selves is as an academic woman who has chosen for the time being to put my education and career before family life.
Within the academy, I encounter very little overt resistance to my choices. Among ray extended family, though, I am the oldest (at the age of 29) of my grandmother’s grandchildren who is not yet married, and thus, I am rarely accorded adult status at family gatherings, and I still find myself answering to the diminutive “Janie.” Regardless of my attempts to construct for myself an identity that is independent, intelligent, and female, within the context of my extended family. I’m fighting a losing batde. I recognize too, though, that ray struggles as a white, heterosexual woman with advanced degrees are in no way comparable to the struggles a working class, African American lesbian might experience as, according to Butler, a body “delegitimated” by the regime of heterosexuality.
In different contexts, women will be allowed to construct gender roles for themselves in different ways and with different limitations imposed upon them. And men too find that the potential constructions of themselves as gendered beings are delimited by regulatory norms. The poetry of Robert Ely and the rhythmic beating of dmras during sweat house gatherings all attempt to rally anyone with a Y chromosome around the cause of a beleaguered Ur-masculinity-a regulatory regime whose perhaps prematurely announced demise has created great anxiety for some men. A television show like Tim
Allen’s Home Improvement functions more complexly. Only by mocking the Ur- masculinist position with his grunts and growls and showing it to be the source of all kinds of comic idiocies and disasters can Allen get away with his program that places Allen’s character and his sons at the center of a world in which women are mere satellites. My awareness of these social/cultural narratives and my public self as constructed through this briefhypomnemata are part of what I carry with me as I use the strategy of 131
accounting for the details of my encounters with two texts-Willa Gather’s Lucy Gayheart
and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to A rm . In this chapter, I will work to examine
more closely how gender participates in textual encounters and how the different contexts of these two textual worlds both constrain and enable ray ability to construct myself as a gendered reader. Articulating the particularities of one’s reading experience can perhaps open up and make available for discussion how “regulatory norms” function in a local context. In turning to Willa Gather, I am encountering an author whose own personal life suggests she was profoundly aware of gender as a construction. As James Woodress reports in his biography of Gather, “Before she was thirteen she had cut her hair shorter than most boys and was signing her name William Gather, Jr., or Wm. Gather, M.D. She expressed a vast contempt for skirts and dresses, wore boys clothes, a derby, and carried a cane. She wrote in a friend’s album that slicing toads was her hobby, doing fancy work a real misery” (55). And Gather continued these masculine masquerades well into her college years. In reading Lucy Gayheart, my own understandings of the ways in which gender participates in our textual encounters are both challenged and complicated. Even in this novel about a young woman’s growth and development written by a female writer very aware of the constrictive power of traditional notions of gender, I find myself at times resisting and at other times acquiescing, at times celebrating and at other times mourning. Hemingway’s novel presents a different sort of challenge. Women readers have often been encouraged to resist this novel of male development in which, according to
Judith Fetterley, the only good woman is a dead one. Recent biographical work on
Hemingway documents the ways in which Grace Hemingway stretched the norms that governed childrearing in Oak Park, Illinois at the beginning of the century by dressing young Ernest like his older sister, Marcelline, and giving the two children identical, unisex, haircuts. However, Hemingway’s reputation as the epitome of masculinity remains largely intact. Will accounting for the particulars of my reading experience in A Farewell to Arms lead me to complicate my understanding of the construction of masculinity in Hemingway?
Will such an accounting make me vulnerable to co-optation by Hemingway’s apparently 132
masculine codes? And what sort of construction of the feminine might emerge in the details of my reading experience as I move through a text whose critical reputation defines it as a
masculine text? Will the details of my reading experience lead me back to an oppositional
stance that I have argued is theoretically problematic?
“A SLIP OF A GIRL IN BOY’S OVERALLS”: LUCY GAYHEART AND
THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER
Lucy Gayheart has long been considered a minor embarrassment occurring near the end of Gather’s distinguished career. Most readers who find fault with the novel base their
critiques on the problematic ways in which Lucy and her story are entirely too feminine. Dorothea Brand charges that “Lucy’s sense of life-that central focus of the book-is never
convincingly vivid for all the author’s reiteration of it” (284); John H. Randall condemns
the novel as “mawkishly sentimental” (353); Susan Rosowski argues that “Lucy’s story
begins as the stuff of women’s magazines, and so it continues” (“Writing Against the
Silences” 69); Janis P. Stout does not even bother to mention Lucy Gayheart in her account of how every other Gather novel from Alexander’s Bridge to Sapphira and the Slave Girl
reflects an intentional and self-protective silence engendered by Gather’s “position in a
patriarchal heterosexual society” (68). Lucy Gayheart does seem like an odd character to have come from the author who created women like Thea Kronborg, Alexandra Bergson, and Antonia Shimerda. Indeed,
recent critics who have attempted to rehabilitate Lucy Gayheart have done so only by
steering clear of the title character. Linda Chown argues that “Harry Gordon is the overlooked narrator of the entire novel” (119), and that “in the unexceptional person of
Harry and his conflicted perceptual-introspective environment. Gather explores a conviction that art is intimate with life and that people’s remembered pictures make an essential difference” (120). Similarly, Merrill Skaggs wants to outline “a positive way of looking at Lucy Gayheart’ (76), but does so by privileging Harry Gordon’s story over Lucy’s story: “The emotional energy Gather invests in this story does not derive from either of the lovers. 133
but from her identification with Harry Gordon, whose predicament [as a survivor of a
lifetime of pain] justifies the effort of writing” (84-85). Blanche Gelfant pursues a different
route and argues that Lucy Gayheart represents Gather’s testing of “the murky boundaries between the popular novel and art,” and “she hoped to effect a magical transmutation by
turning the popular romance into an allegory of Romantic desire” (120). Paul Comeau also argues that a redemption of Lucy Gayheart is possible if one reads the novel as “a
philosophical work in which the author reflects on the artistic process and its relationship to
life, death, and immortality from a long perspective... in the final analysis, the processes
of art and life are shown to be the same creative process of memory” (208).® These
recuperative readings all provide interesting insights into the novel, but they steadfastly avoid dealing with Lucy herself. Accounting for the particulars of my experience in moving
throughLucy Gayheart will not allow me to avoid Lucy, and thus it wül allow me to
witness the ways in which Lucy struggles to construct and reconstruct herself as a gendered being. By accounting for the subtle shifts and changes in my response to Lucy, I
can see her as both athletic and musical, as independent yet vulnerable, purposeful but
unmotivated. Furthermore, articulating the details of ray experience pushes me to acknowledge the ways in which my own status as a gendered reader is problematized by
Lucy’s strange relationship to Clement Sebastian and by the novel’s trajectory.
The Complex Construction of Lucy Gayheart The opening of Lucy Gayheart leaves me unable to find a place for myself among the narrator’s shifting pronouns: “In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of
Lucy Gayheart. They do not talk of her a great deal, to be sure; life goes on and we live in the present” (3, my italics). In the move from “they” to “we,” the narrator dislocates both herself and me. Is the narrator an outsider merely reporting on events and attitudes in this small Nebraska town? Or is the narrator part of this small town, sharing in its biases like
“ Such readings that avoid Lucy may stem from a letter Gather wrote to Zoë Akins. James Woodress reports that in the letter Gather described her heroine as “a silly young girl” and that “she was losing patience with her” (450). I would suggest, though, that Gather’s response, written while she was in the middle of drafting the novel, need not be considered final and definitive. It gives voice to some of the problems of reading Lucy, but it seems to me that such exasperation can co-exist with other responses as well. 134
Whitey in Ring Lardner’s “Haircut”? And am I supposed to include myself in the narrator’s
“we”? How wül I be implicated in this narrative? This feeling of disjuncture continues as
the narrator tells me “Photographs of Lucy mean nothing to her old friends. It was her gaiety and grace they lo v ed . . . .We missed Lucy in Haverford when she went away to
Chicago to study music” (5, my italics). Once again the shift from the “they” of Lucy’s old friends to the “we” of missing Lucy raises questions about the narrator’s relation to
Haverford and makes me question my position as I enter this textual world. Although the narrator does soon settle into a consistently omniscient voice capable of üluminating the
inner lives of Lucy, her father, her sister, Harry Gordon, and all the other characters, I find
my position as a reader remains unstable-not just because of the narrator, but because of
Lucy herself and the ways in which no easy gender alliances are possible as I follow the
progression of her narrative.
With a name like “Lucy Gayheart” lips like the “red of dark peonies-dark,
velvetly,” and “the singular brightness of young beauty,” (5), Lucy has all the physical
markers necessary to be a heroine in a popular romance novel. In Becoming a Heroine, Rachel Brownstein artfully interweaves autobiography and feminist theory to argue that for young women “Admiration of the heroine of a romantic novel... is love for an idealized image of oneself’ (xiv),’ Brownstein continues: “Girls, enjoined from thinking about becoming generals and emperors, tend to live more in novels than boys do, and to live longer in them. It is not megalomaniacal to want to be significant; it is only human. And to suspect that one can be significant only in the fantasy of fiction, to look for significance in a concentrated essence of character, in an image of oneself, rather than in action or achievement, is, historically, only feminine. Or mostly” (xv). Like Brownstein, as a child and young woman, I often lost myself in books, imagining myself as Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice, as Beth in Little Women, and even as Nancy Drew. But also lüce Brownstein, I have grown older and perhaps a little wiser, and I no longer “idealize virtuous virgins, but instead measure women with a yardstick marked off in degrees of achieved fulfülment” (xxv). That Lucy might be a conventional romance heroine makes
’ I am indebted to Katie Dyer for directing my attention to Brownstein’s work and to Joanne S. Frye’s Living Stories, Telling Lives which I cite elsewhere in this chapter. 135
me both a bit nervous and a bit nostalgic, but when I see that she is invested with a less conventional physical vitality and active nature, I rejoice. The narrator tells me when the people of Haverford remember Lucy “They still see her as a slight figure always in motion; dancing or skating, or walking swiftly with intense direction, like a bird flying” (3). When
Chapter Two opens analeptically with a return to the Christmas holidays of 1901 and I
encounter not the memory of Lucy but Lucy herself, she is “out with a party of Haverford
boys and girls, skating on the long stretch of ice north of Duck Island” (7). Later Hany
Gordon reveals that his earliest memory of Lucy is of her athleticism; “One afternoon I
was passing the rink and I heard a piano going, so I went in ... I picked you out first
shot,. .. You had on a short skirt and a skin-tight red jersey, and you were going a streak”
(19-20).'
While I admire and respect Lucy’s physical vitality, there are aspects of her character that seem a little more troublesome. The narrator tells me that Lucy was “talented,
but too careless and light-hearted to take herself very seriously” (5), and that Lucy was ice-
skating “when she should have been packing” for her return to Chicago (7). These negative
characteristics reverberate with the description of Lucy’s “ignorance and her foolish heart” as she reaches out toward a distant star on the ride home from the river. Ambiguities
surrounding the voice and vision in this epiphanic passage make it difficult for me to determine whether the narrator is judging Lucy negatively or whether Lucy is aware of her
own limitations:
In the darkening sky she had seen the first star come out; it brought her heart into her throat. The point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here. It overpowered her. With a mere thought she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between them. Something knew, then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known, forever! That joy of saluting what is far above one was an eternal thing, not merely somediing that had happened to her ignorance and her foolish heart The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. Then everything was confused again. Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry’s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost. (11-12)
° See Albertini for a historical/biographical perspective on Cather’s interest in athletic pursuits and how this interest is reflected in Lucy Gayheart. 136
The use of the third person pronouns “her” and “them” in the first four sentences of the passage seem clearly to mark the star and Lucy as the subject of the narrator’s vision and voice. But in the fifth sentence’s articulation of Lucy’s epiphany (“Something knew, then in the unknowing w aste.. . ”) it becomes unclear whether the narrator is offering me unmediated access to Lucy’s thoughts or is instead translating/distorting Lucy’s inner speech and offering her own assessment of Lucy as ignorant and foolish. The opening of the next paragraph closes the epiphanic moment, and the narrator assumes control again by describing the way Lucy closes her eyes and leans on Harry’s shoulder. By the end of the paragraph, though, it once again becomes difficult for me to attribute voice and vision. Is it Lucy who realizes that the brightness and sharpness of her communion with the star leads to her sense of pain and smallness? At what level of self-awareness is she operating? Or is the narrator more capable of articulating Lucy’s inchoate mental and emotional life than Lucy is herself?
My inability to pin down the distance between the narrator and Lucy in passages like this coupled with all of the multiple dimensions of Lucy’s character make it difficult for me to figure out what sort of relationship I want to have with her. Should I read her active nature as a sign that she will be a strong, robust character like Antonia Shimerda? Will her frivolity, her apparent tendency toward irresponsible behavior, and “her ignorance and her foolish heart,” lead her toward a deservedly bleak future? In these early pages of the novel, I solve (at least temporarily) the tensions created by the many layers of Lucy’s personality and the ambiguous stance of the narrator by positioning Lucy within a matrix of other Haverford characters. I can contrast Lucy’s physical vitality and her kinesthetic joy with the vulgar excesses of Fairy Blair, Lucy’s Haverford rival. As a group of students wait for a late train to take them to school at Lincoln, Fairy “caught two boys by the elbow, and between the stiffly overcoated figures raced out into the silent street, swaying from left to right, pushing the boys as if she were shaking two saplings, and doing an occasional shuffle with her feet. She had a pretty, common little face, and her eyes were so lit-up and reckless that one might have thought she had been drinking. Her fresh little mouth. 137
without being ugly, was really very naughty” (13-14). Later on the train, Fairy Blair’s laughter “like ableat... had the effect of an indecent gesture” (17).
Just as Fairy Blair serves as a counter-weight to Lucy’s athleticism, Lucy’s father,
Jacob, seems like he functions to diminish the negative impact of Lucy’s “careless and
light-hearted” nature (5). The narrator tells me that the mortgage on the Gayheart farm “troubled his older daughter, Pauline, but it did not trouble Mr. Gayheart” (6). And
although Mr. Gayheart was “a town character, of course, and people joked about him... He managed to enjoy every day from start to finish.... No one ever got more satisfaction
out of good health and simple pleasures and a blue-and-gold band uniform than Jacob Gayheart. He was probably the happiest man in Haverford” (6-7). While one might
expect negative consequences from Jacob Gayheart’s lackadaisical, pleasure-seeking attitude toward life, none of the tragedies of Lucy Gayheart are attributable to his
carelessness. He outlives both his daughters, remaining on the Gayheart farm until his own death in 1927. At the opening of Book Three, the narrator reports “Scarcely anyone
in Haverford could remember so large a funeral. Old Mr. Gayheart, as he had been called for years now, had many friends” (205).
While Lucy is closely aligned with her father in her care-free, artistic, and perhaps impractical ways, Lucy’s older sister Pauline offers one other way for me to understand
Lucy. “It was Pauline who had brought her sister up; their mother died when Lucy was
only six” (14).’ As Lucy waits for the train that will carry her back to Chicago, Pauline frets about Lucy’s trunk, and then in an awkward gesture of sisterly affection, she “took
Lucy’s arm determinedly, as if it were the right thing to do” (15). Before Lucy boards the train Pauline “snatched at her sister and gave her a clumsy kiss” (16). Diane Chambers has documented the ways in which “sisterhood” functioned as a powerful social/cultural narrative in the nineteenth-century that helped to define appropriate behavior for women.
According to Chambers, the failure to cultivate and maintain close and supportive relationships with one’s sisters was a mark of failed femininity and moral degeneracy. More specifically, Mary Ryder argues that Cather taps into myths of sisterhood throughout
“ For a detailed discussion of the consequences for Lucy of growing up motherless, see Susan Rosowski’s “Writing Against Silences.” 138
her fiction and that she uses sister relationships as a site for examining the roles, choices,
and destinies of women. According to Ryder, “For Cather,... the bond between sisters
was a fragile one, based on blood ties and family loyalties but threatened by the struggle for individuation” (46). Lucy’s indifference to Pauline’s gestures of sisterhood causes me to
begin to read beyond traditional models of the female heroine in order to understand Lucy. In fact, as Lucy journeys toward Chicago, I begin to question my whole strategy of
placing Lucy in relation to other Haverford characters and to wonder if I am enacting typical female literacies of reading connections and relations. Scholars like Shirley K. Rose, Elizabeth Flynn, David Bleich, Rachel Brownstein, and Joanne Frye generalize that such a strategy of reading for connections and the ways in which people participate in each
other’s lives is characteristic of female readers, but Lucy herself pulls me out of this. She very much wants to be alone and independent as she boards the train to head back to Chicago. She seems to be asserting her right to pursue a more traditionally male quest of
independence, detachment and self-definition.'° Although Lucy “ordinarily was glad to
meet Harry anywhere,” when Harry plops down in the Pullman seat next to her, the
narrator tells me “tonight, as it happened, Lucy wanted to be alone” (18). When Harry finally disembarks at Omaha, Lucy is able to retire to her berth, and she celebrates her
solitude: “At last she was alone, lying still in the dark, and could give herself up to the
In Cather, Canon, and the Politics o f Reading, Deborah Carlin offers a reading of Lucy Gayheart that is quite compatible with mine, although she focuses more closely on issues of genre and the ways in which Cather was working to script the female kunstelroman into a bildungsroman, thus highlighting the sexual/textual politics of these two forms. One might also productively turn to Joanne Frye’s Living Stories, Telling Lives for an analysis of the vexed relationship between women’s lives and the bildungsroman. Paradoxically, Frye valorizes texts in which women pursue self-definition and autonomy (e.g., Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Godwin’s Violet Clay, Drabble’s The Waterfall), but she goes on to argue that “One of the most immediate needs of women readers is also one of the most immediate effects of reading novels by and about women: the need not to be alone with one’s own experiences and perceptions” (191). In his chapter on “Feminism and the Politics of Community,” Jay Clayton suggests that texts produced by women writers in the 1980s engage this paradox. In numerous novels that focus on the bonds of family, community, and gender (e.g., Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Naylor’s The Women o f Brewster Place, Godwin’s A Mother and Two Daughters, Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt), Clayton finds a sophisticated discourse about home, family, and community that transcends the limits of both facile communitarian philosophies and rugged individualism. 139
vibration of the train,-a rhythm that had to do with escape, change, chance, with life hunying forward. That sense of release and surrender went all over her body; she seemed
to lie in it as in a warm bath” (23-24). The description of Lucy’s living quarters in Chicago
reinforces my sense that it is appropriate to read Lucy not only in relationship to other
characters, but instead to focus on her as an independent character struggling to shape her own future. The narrator tells me that when Lucy
first came to Chicago she had stayed at a students’ boarding-house, but she didn’t like the pervasive informality of the place, nor the Southern gentlewoman of fallen fortunes who conducted it. She told her teacher, ftofessor Auerbach, that she would never get on unless she could live alone with her piano, where there would be no gay voices in the hall or friendly taps at her door. Auerbach took her out to his house, and they consulted with his wife. Mrs. Auerbach knew exactly what to do. She and Lucy went to see Mrs. Schneff and her bakery. The Schneff bakery was an old German landmark in that part of the city. On the ground floor was the bake shop, and a homely restaurant specializing in German dishes, conducted by Mrs. Schneff. On the top floor was a glove factory. The three floors between, the Schneffs rented to people who did not take long leases; travelling salesmen, clerks, railroad men who must be near the station. The food in the bakery downstairs was good enough, and there were no table companions or table jokes. Everyone had his own little table, attended to his own business, and read his paper. Lucy had taken a room here at once, and for the first time in her life she could come and go like a boy; no one fussing about, no one hovering over her. There were inconveniences, to be sure... -burglars mightcome... but so far they never had. (27)
Lucy’s preference for privacy over companionship works against the traditional characterizations of young women as focused on relationships rather than autonomy. ' ‘ And in addition to the clear reference to Lucy’s feeling that she “come and go like a boy,” are the masculine pronouns (“everyone had his own little table, attended to his own business, and read his own paper'’) and the masculine occupations of other Schneff boarders {salesmen
” See Gilligan and Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule for discussions of the ways in which the development of young women is bound up in human relationships while the search for autonomy and independence is central to the development of young men. Evelyn Ashton-Jones and Dene Kay Smith’s interview with Mary Belenky is an interesting enactment of the connected and constructed knowing described in Women’s Ways o f Knowing. Not only does Belenky speak vety positively about the process of collaborative writing that led to Women’s Ways, she also, in contrast to some of the male interviewees in the volume, obviously invested time and energy in researching the field of composition so that she could make connections not just with Ashton-Jones and Smith but with the larger audience of (Inter)Views. 140 and railroad men) that further establish Lucy’s complicated relationship to traditional gender roles. This young woman of decidedly feminine appearance and demeanor is making traditional models of femininity accommodate her own quest for an independent and autonomous existence. And in trying to read Lucy’s story, I have to continually question my own assumptions about gender and what sort of status I want to claim for myself as a gendered reader. While I am comfortable with and even applaud the complicated ways in which Lucy is engaged in constructing her own gender identity and the ways in which she makes me question ray own strategies for reading her stmggles, Lucy’s relationship with
Clement Sebastian makes it difficult for me to wholeheartedly support Lucy.
Lucy In Love Susan Rosowski suggests that “Clement Sebastian is a descendant of the Gothic
Byronic hero, a lonely figure beneath whose sophisticated manner lies a secret renunciation of life” and that he is “in many ways more interesting than Lucy” {Jhe Voyage Perilous
222). As I watch Lucy’s relationship with Sebastian develop, I come to suspect that Lucy would herself be in complete agreement with Rosowski’s assessment of Sebastian. When
Lucy sees the aging tenor on the stage for the first time, she decides he is what a “great artist should look like,” and after listening to the him sing, Lucy concludes “that there was something profoundly tragic about this man” (29). After Lucy becomes Sebastian’s practice accompanist, she comes more and more to live through and for Sebastian. The narrator tells me that Lucy carried in her mind a very individual map of Chicago... a high building on Michigan Avenue where Sebastian had his studio-the stretch of park where he sometimes walked in the aftemoon-and the Cathedral door out of which she had seen him come one moming-the concert hall where she first heard him sing. This city of feeling rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition, --beautiful because the rest was blotted out She thought of the steps leading down from the art museum as perpetually flooded with orange-red sunlight; they had been like that one stormy November afternoon when Sebastian came out of the building at five o’clock and stopped by one of the bronze lions to turn up the collar of his overcoat, light a cigarette, and look vaguely up and down the avenue before he hailed a cab and drove away. (24-25) 141
Sebastian’s most minute actions (turning up the collar on a coat, lighting a cigarette)
become all important to Lucy, and the two hours a day she spends with him in his practice
studio become the only moments in the day that are real and significant for Lucy. Even when they embrace, Lucy’s pleasure is achieved not by any stirrings in her own body but
only by the loss of herself in Sebastian’s physicality. With her face pressed against Sebastian’s shoulder, Lucy “felt herself drifting into his breathing, into his heart-beats”
(89). While her relationship with Sebastian allows Lucy to feel the joy of having “the
freedom to spend one’s youth as one pleased, to have one’s secret, to choose one’s master and serve him in one’s own way” (86), as a reader, I find myself in an awkward position. I see Lucy’s relationship with Sebastian as highly problematic. While it replicates the
pattern traditionally used by male writers in their chronicles of male growth and development in which the male lover idealizes the female object of his desire and I would advocate Lucy’s right to engage in the same behavior, I also sense that Lucy is perhaps
disempowered by this strategy.
From Estella in Great Expectations whom Pip turns into a “princess” that he, as “a
young knight of romance,” will rescue from Miss Havisham’s enchanted castle, to the bird-
girl in The Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man whom Stephen Dedalus turns into a symbol of his own artistic aspirations, to Daisy Buchanan who comes to represent all of
Jay Gatsby’s aspirations toward social position and affluence, men in fiction have emptied
the female objects of their desire of all individual characteristics and then projected onto them their own fantasy visions. It seems that this is precisely what Lucy is up to with Sebastian. Their relationship is dependent on Sebastian being an emptiness into which
Lucy can project her own desires. It seems appropriate to me that the first time Lucy attends one of Sebastian’s recitals, he practically vanishes right before her eyes: “Sebastian was gone, though, Lucy had not been aware of his exit. The black cloud that had passed over the moon and the song had obliterated him, too” (30). Even as the narrative progresses and Lucy comes into daily contact with Sebastian, he remains an emptiness for her to fill. Instead of a more fully developed portrait of Sebastian emerging from the confluence of Lucy’s perspective 142
and the narrator’s perspective, the physical details of his studio are offered to me as a
substitute-- “a dressing-gown thrown on a chair, the silver on the dressing-table, the
spongy softness of the rose-coloured blankets the valet was smoothing on the bed, and
those gloves in the table drawer" (45). While such physical details seem to substitute for
any kind of emergent portrait of Sebastian, the ways in which Giuseppe acts as an
intermediary for his boss allows Lucy to continue projecting her fantasies onto Sebastian while at the same time restricting my view of him. It is Giuseppe who frequently greets Lucy at the studio door every morning, and he is the person who delivers to Lucy the note
in which Sebastian cancels a rehearsal because of the death of Madame Renée de Vignon.
Even in passages, such as Madame de \^gnon’s funeral, where there is a more concentrated
focus on Sebastian, Lucy’s act of projection is foregrounded. As she gazes at Sebastian
during the funeral, “It seemed to Lucy that a wave of black despair had swept into the church, carrying [Sebastian] and that black coffin up the aisle together, while the clergy and
worshippers were unconscious of it. Had this woman been a very dear friend? Or was it
death itself that seemed horrible to hira-death in a foreign land, in a hotel, far from everything one loved?’’ (54). The importance to Lucy of being able to project her own
fantasy image on to Sebastian is underscored by her resentment of James Mockford,
Sebastian’s performance accompanist whose perceptions of Sebastian challenge her own.
Lucy becomes quite peevish when Mockford divulges to her information about Sebastian’s relationship with his estranged wife and that Sebastian is “bored to death’’ in Chicago (58).
The narrator describes Lucy’s reaction to Mockford’s intrusion: ‘This was the first time a third person had in any way come upon their little scene, and she hated it” (60). It comes as no surprise to me that “It was night, when [Lucy] was quiet and alone, that she got the greatest happiness out of each day-after it had passed!” (93). In such quiet and solitary moments, Lucy has the greatest freedom to remake her day and the moments she has had with Sebastian into whatever she desires.
When I read stories in which male protagonists project their own desires on to women who are not afforded any distinct identity of their own, part of my response is often to channel my frustration outward, to understand the story as part of larger cultural system 143
in which women are subordinated to men. My reaction with Lucy, though, is quite
different. I can’t channel my frustrations with Lucy’s behavior outward because I am
unaware of social/cultural narratives about women who project into the void of a male character their own fantasies and desires. There are, of course, other literary women like
Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer who disastrously entangle themselves with partners
who are not what they imagine. But while Dorothea and Isabel are ultimately ennobled by
their struggles, Lucy just seems to get abused. Furthermore, there are a variety of other characters-Celia and Sir James Chettam, and Lydgate in Middlemarch and Ralph Touchett,
his mother, Madame Merle, and Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait o f a Lady--v^ho create a matrix of positions in which I can position myself. Lucy is far more isolated and alone in
her relationship with Sebastian, and I remain focused on Lucy herself and on the
consequences of such a relationship for her as an individual. While men typically emerge
stronger and more empowered after such a relationship with a woman, Lucy’s relationship with Sebastian seems to disempower her and places Sebastian in a position to treat her
badly. Sebastian thinks of Lucy as “rather boyish” and he turns her “young passion” into a “chivalrous loyalty” (80) that is unthreatening and makes his life more comfortable. When
Sebastian travels to Minnesota to perform with some choral groups, Lucy receives “a cheque, without any word, in a note written to Auerbach. It was much too large, and made
her feel paid off. She hadn’t cashed it; it lay in her top bureau drawer” (63). When Sebastian returns from his brief tour, Lucy is surprised to learn that Sebastian had been in
Chicago for a day before telegraphing her to come to his studio again. And it is Giuseppe who calls Lucy to tell her that Sebastian will return to Chicago from New York for only
three days before departing for Europe for the summer. Sebastian seems to have forgotten all about his young accompanist, and Giuseppe tells Lucy that no one had “asked him to communicate with Lucy; he had come on his own responsibility” (115). My sense of frustration at the way in which Lucy is disempowered by her relationship to Sebastian is compounded by the fact that the independent and assertive Lucy I admire is still very evident. When Lucy auditions for Sebastian, she does not defer to his suggestion that she wait until after Mr. Schneller tries his luck (“T’d rather try now, if you please,’ she said. 144
decidedly” [35]), and it is important to remember that Lucy is competing in a man’s profession. As she ponders her future, Auerbach cautions her: “Most singers are not
interesting to work with, and they don’t want to pay much. For the platform they always have a man” (133).
In addition to her commitment to a musical career which has led her from Haverford to Chicago, Lucy is also quite aggressive in her pursuit of Sebastian. When Giuseppe tells
Lucy that Sebastian will have to cancel their practice session to attend the funeral of a friend, Lucy buys a newspaper and scans the obituaries in order to determine where Sebastian will be the next morning. Not only do 1 see Lucy violating societal norms of
courtship in her pursuit of Sebastian, but she is also quite unafraid to face the consequences
of defying traditional gender roles. When Harry makes his unwanted marriage proposal, Lucy does not hesitate to sacrifice her own reputation as a virginal (and hence, marriageable) young woman in order to put an end to Harry’s persistence and to save him from further self-exposure. She tells Harry that things with Sebastian have gone “All the way; all the way!” (111). Later Lucy laments: “she hadn’t lied often in her life, she was too proud. And that was such a cheap, crawling, shabby lie! It was like boasting she had a claim on Sebastian when she had none. She had used his name in a way that she could never tell him, and her ears burned whenever she thought of it” (114). I come to recognize that Lucy is not concerned about having disrupted her image as an appropriately pure and virginal young woman; instead, her chagrin is based on her sense of self-integrity (“she hadn’t lied often in her life, she was too proud”) and the way in which she has unduly made a claim on another human being. Later when Sebastian has departed for Europe,
Auerbach, unaware of the way in which Lucy has squelched the marriage proposal, expresses his hope that Lucy will settle down with Harry; and she responds, “Family life in a little town is pretty deadly. It’s like being planted in the earth, like one of your carrots there. I’d rather be pulled up and thrown away” (134).
As 1 move through this narrative, 1 have to continually revise and re-evaluate the ways in which my own gendered literacies might be causing me to respond to the ways in which Lucy is constructing herself as a gendered being by engaging in performative acts 145
that are part of regulatory regimes of sexuality in our culture. While I want to afford Lucy
the same freedom male characters have as they objectify the human beings they desire as
part of their own growth and development, I don’t have the same strategies for coping with ray response to that behavior. The consequences of such behavior do seem to be different
for a woman than for a man, but does recognizing that such behavior can be particularly
destructive for young women mean that I am complicit in perpetuating binary gender roles
which allow men to pursue different agendas from women? And Lucy’s decision to
channel her energy and vitality into what seems to me like an unpromising and potentially
self-destructive relationship causes me to question my broad assumption that such qualities of independence should be valued in young women. In reading the story of Lucy Gayheart
whose mimetic dimensions range from those of a popular romance heroine to those of strong-minded, goal-oriented, young woman and whose behaviors seem like those which
are more traditionally ascribed to male characters, all my understandings about how gender
might participate in and affect my acts of literacy are thrown out of kilter.
Confounded Expectations: Lucy’s Disruptive Death The difficulty and confusion I experience is mirrored by the people of Haverford when Lucy returns there after learning of Sebastian’s death. All of the townspeople attempt
to fit Lucy into various traditional narratives of young womanhood. As Mrs. Norwall reports to Mrs. Ramsey, some of the townspeople believe that Lucy involved herself in an
imprudent love affair and lost her position as a piano teacher over it; other townspeople,
including Pauline, like to believe that Lucy was “jilted” (173); Harry is comfortable only
when he imagines Lucy as the little girl who watched him play baseball from the grandstands, rather than as the young woman who spumed his marriage proposal in
Chicago. Lucy herself takes refuge in traditional myths about women and hysteria-she tells her sister she had a “nervous smash-up” after working too hard for Auerbach (153).
But while Lucy returns to Haverford as a shattered young woman, the narrative does not end merely with the Lucy who used to be seen constantly “dancing or skating, or walking” now plodding through the streets of her hometown as though she were “walking 146
merely to tire herself out” (3; 146). Nor does the narrative move quickly to drop Lucy through a hole in the ice on the Platte River in a perverse parallel of her lover’s death on
Lake Cuomo. Instead, Lucy’s story continues, giving her time to work toward an understanding of what has happened to her in Chicago and pushing me to interrogate how
my own gendered literacies are challenged by the novel’s trajectory.
When a touring opera company arrives in Haverford just before Christmas, Lucy
attends with her father and sister. Lucy’s reaction to the aging soprano whose “voice was
worn, to be sure, like her face” is quite different from her initial reaction to Sebastian’s
recital. Lucy recognizes that while “there was not much physical sweetness left” in the soprano’s voice, “there was another kind of sweetness; a sympathy, a tolerant
understanding ... She gave freshness to the foolish old words because she phrased intelligently; she was tender with their sentimentality, as if they were pressed flowers which
might fall apart if roughly handled” (181). When listening to Sebastian for the first time,
Lucy had struggled with
something she had never felt before. A new conception of art? It came closer than that. A new kind of personality? But it was much more. It was a discovery about life, a revelation of love as a tragic force, not a melting mood of passion that drowns like black water. As she sat listening to this man the outside world seemed to her dark and terrifying, full of fears and dangers that had never come close to her until now. (31)
Lucy’s reaction to the aging soprano is quite different:
Singing this humdrum music to humdrum people, why was it worth while? This poor little singer had lost everything: youth, good looks, position, the high notes of her voice. And yet she sang so well! Lucy wanted to be up there on the stage with her, helping her do it. A wild kind of excitement flared up in her. She felt she must run away tonight, by any train, back to a world that strove after excellence-the world out of which this woman must have fallen. (181)
While Sebastian’s singing seems to isolate Lucy, to make her feel as though a “window had been broken that let in the cold and darkness of the night” (32), the voice of the nameless, aging, soprano calls Lucy forward and makes her want to participate in the process of artistic creation. A few days later when Lucy looks out of her window on Christmas Eve, the epiphany she has while reaching out her window toward a winter storm confirms the impact of the touring opera singer on her. And this epiphany is not undercut with the same 147
sort of unattributable comments about Lucy’s “ignorance and foolish heart” that undermined Lucy’s perceptions when she gazed at a star while tucked under buffalo robes
in Harry Gordon’s sleigh: What if-what if Life itself were the sweetheart? It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities-across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her. Oh, now she knew! She must have it, she couldn’t run away from it.. .. L«t it all come back to her again! Let it betray her and mock her and break her heart, she must have it! (184-85)
Coupled with Lucy’s response to the aging soprano, this epiphany makes me hopeful for
Lucy. I begin to expect that she will return to Chicago and resume her piano studies. Lucy’s reaction to the travelling opera singer suggests to me that the rejuvenation of Lucy’s
artist desires will lead to positive changes in her life and such a conclusion to Lucy’s story would give me a way to deal with the aspects of her relationship with Sebastian which were
problematic for me. If Lucy can return to a fulfilling career as an accompanist, then I will be able to position her relationship with Sebastian as a painful but instructive phase in her growth and development as a woman and as an artist. My expectations, though, are first frustrated and then destroyed.
Lucy writes to Auerbach on Christmas Day in order to regain her position as a piano teacher in Chicago, but he must delay her return until March because of his obligation to the young man who has replaced her. In waiting out the long winter months in Haverford, Lucy “began to feel trapped” (189) in a world where “the town and all the country round were the colour of cement” (190). Watching the winter weeks taking their toll on Lucy (“She was restless now, and trifles got on her nerves” [187]) increases my anxiety for her and at the same time this delay puzzles me.
Although the long winter months stretch out for Lucy, the tensions I experience about the function of this delay quickly become subsumed into larger questions about Lucy’s fate. In order to escape from an argument with Pauline and to release her multiple frustrations in physical exercise, Lucy grabs up her skates one afternoon and heads to the liver. Pauline’s thoughts as she watches her sister head down the road-“I wonder if she knows the old skating-place was ruined last spring when the river changed its bed? She’ll have her walk for nothing. Surely she wouldn’t be crazy enough to try the ice out there” 148
(194)-- are the first indication I have that Lucy might never return. Harry’s moment of
craelty when he passes Lucy in his cutter does indeed blind her to the change that spring floods had made in the river’s bed. The ice under Lucy cracks without her ever realizing
that she was skating on the river itself and not on the safe, shallow arm of the river between
its north shore and Duck Island. Even after the ice cracks under Lucy’s skates, I still, however, hope Lucy might survive. Rather than slipping quietly into the calm release of
death, Lucy’s strength asserts itself, and she looks for ways to manage this crisis: “Lucy was more stimulated than frightened. She had got herself into a predicament, and she must
keep her wits about her. The water couldn’t be very deep. She still had both elbows on the ice; as soon as she touched bottom she could manage” (199). Only when Lucy’s skate
catches on the submerged tree and then the ice cake slips from under her arms do 1 fully realize that Lucy is going to die. Tensions and instabilities created by the dynamics of the
triangle between Lucy, Sebastian, and Harry coupled with tensions and instabilities arising out of Lucy’s artistic ambitions have worked to engage and interest me in Lucy’s fate. The
sudden, jarring, and unexpected nature of Lucy’s death is radically disruptive. Lucy’s response to the aging opera singer had suggested to me that she was beginning to move beyond the deepest stages of her grief for Sebastian and that she might no longer need a gesture of support from Harry; but aU these tensions and instabilities are short-circuited when Lucy’s skate catches on the submerged tree and she drowns. None of the strategies 1 might use in dealing with the deaths of literary women like Clarissa Harlowe, Edna Pontellier, and Lily Bart are particularly helpful in Lucy’s case. The progression of Richardson’s novel leads me to condemn the sadistic manipulations of
Lovelace, but Sebastian has not pursued and destroyed Lucy in any similar sort of way. The deaths of Edna Pontellier and Lily Bart seem to function both as cathartic releases for the heroines who have suffered greatly within a closed system of gender roles and as thematic indictments of those systems.'^ The unexpected and unnecessary quality of Lucy’s death will not allow me to read Lucy as one more heroine in a long line of
This is the position Susan Hallgarth takes on Lucy’s death. She argues that Lucy is “victorious” and “triumphant” because she has, before her death, “discovered the female in art and then affirmed Life and her own autonomous self’ (173). 149
beautifully dead women. The trajectory of the novel’s progression pushes me to forego diminishing Lucy’s individuality by posthumously placing her among a community of
heroines whose deaths are fully thematized as narratively appropriate responses to constrictive gender roles. By disrupting my participation in narrative norms that would
allow me to make Lucy part of a larger community of dead women, Lucy’s death does in one way complete her struggle toward self-definition and autonomy. She stands alone in
achieving a death that is of a very different affective quality than any other literary heroine I
have known. Just as the people of Haverford remember Lucy as an individual who cannot
be pinned down (“They still see her as a slight figure in motion” [3]) and who cannot be captured in photographs (“photographs of Lucy mean nothing to her friends” [5]), Lucy
remains elusive to me. Although the vocabularies and critical apparatuses of various narrative theorists might provide me with alternative ways to explain the appropriateness of Lucy’s death on
mimetic or synthetic terms or to justify a negative evaluation of the narrative based on how
it violates rules of notice, signification, configuration, and coherence, such critical vocabularies would in many ways not merely explain Lucy but explain away the
uniqueness of her death. In all of Gather’s fiction Lucy Gayheart is the only novel titled solely by its heroine’s name: a possessive pronoun in My Ântonia forces Antonia
Shiraerda to share her novel with Jim Burden and Sapphira is only half the story in
Sapphira and the Slave Girl. I too want to insist on Lucy’s uniqueness and allow her death
to remain recalcitrant. I am reluctant to allow critical apparatuses and abstractions to distance me from the immediate and jarring nature of Lucy’s death. This reluctance to move away from the immediacy of the experience is, of course, implicated in my call for allowing readers to return to the particulars of their reading experiences, but I would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that I feel particularly committed to to preserving the recalcitrance of Lucy, her life, and her death because of the ways in which the oddities of her narrative disrupt traditional, restrictive notions about appropriate female behavior. 150
The Complex Construction of Harry Gordon But Lucy Gayheart does not end with the death of its heroine. Running alongside
Lucy’s story and the ways in which she works to construct her own gender identity, which draws upon both masculine and feminine traditions, Harry Gordon is also working to
construct for himself gender roles, and I am surprised to find myself, in the final book of the novel, reading Harry in light of “feminine” principles of connection and community,
rather than in terms of “masculine” norms of autonomy and independence. On the surface, Harry is merely the inverse of Sebastian, and in terms of the plot, Harry’s presence as a contender for Lucy’s affections is one of the instabilities that drive the narrative forward. But like Lucy, Harry is trying to construct for himself an inhabitable gender identity. Harry
is “the rich young man of the town, and he was not arrogant or overbearing. He was known as a good fellow; rather hard in business, but liberal with the ball team and the
band; public spirited, people said” (9). Harry is also physically attractive: “He, too, was a
fine skater; a big fellow, the heavy-weight boxer type, and as light on his feet as a boxer”
(8). In playing a traditional, rather chivalric masculine role by directing Lucy toward the fork of the island as they skate and by carrying her to his cutter and tucking her under the buffalo robes for the drive back to town, Harry is largely an unobjectionable young man. As Harry considers his matrimonial prospects, however, a certain ugliness emerges. The narrator gives me a glimpse of Harry’s thoughts as he thinks about Lucy’s social status: “He didn’t like the idea of marrying the watchmaker’s daughter, when so many brilliant opportunities were open to him. But as he had often told himself before, he would just have to swallow the watchmaker.... He meant to commit the supreme extravagance and marry for beauty. He meant to have a wife other men would envy him” (21-23). When his mind turns from Lucy to Harriet Arkwright “whose favor was flattering to a small-town man” like himself (21), Hany catalogues her numerous assets just as he might list the assets of a desperate farmer to whom he is about to offer a back-breaking mortgage: “managed her own property very successfully, travelled a good deal. . . good style; always at her ease, had the kind of authority money and social position give” (21). But against these positive assets, stands a significant problem for Harry, “she was plain. 151
confound it! She looked like the men of her family. And she had a hard, matter-of-fact voice. .. Whatever she spoke of, she divested of charm. If she thanked him for his
gorgeous roses, her tone deflowered the flowers” (21-22). While I might judge Harry negatively for these attitudes, I am also aware that a
patriarchal society prescribes restricting roles for men as well as women. When Harry
visits Lucy in Chicago, his imprisonment in traditional gender roles comes to the surface.
At the conclusion of an afternoon performance of Lohengrin, Harry notices tears in Lucy’s eyes: “He understood that she was deeply moved. He would have thought such a thing
ridiculous in a man, but in a girl it was rather attractive” (104). As they leave the theatre, the narrator tells me “There was a part of himself that Harry was ashamed to live out in the open (he hated a sentimental man), but he could live through Lucy. She would be his excuse for doing a great many pleasant things he wouldn’t do on his own account” (107). While it might seem as though Harry is using Lucy, he does try to be sensitive toward Lucy and her desires. He bought the “very musical” sleigh-bells for his cutter in order to please
Lucy, and when Lucy greets Giuseppe at the Lohengrin performance, Harry “patiently” holds her cloak, (11; 105). When Harry asks Lucy to take him through the Art Museum, he works hard to restrain his desire to be critical of the paintings because he knows it would annoy her. Lucy’s mental response to the museum visit (“Marshall Field’s was a much better place for Harry” [100]), seems churlish and unkind in light of Harry’s attempts to accommodate himself to her preferences. Harry’s life after Lucy’s death is the focus of Book III, and in many ways, Harry fate is a more “feminine” one. While Lucy sought to establish her own identity and to pursue a quest for autonomy and independence, Harry becomes part of the community. Harry realizes that “he would never go away from Haverford; he had been through too much here ever to quit the place for good. What was a man’s ‘home town,’ anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments and learned to bear them?” (231). And in lamenting his final cruelty to Lucy, Harry views his transgression in terms of the communal norms which he has violated. Harry admits that he “refused Lucy Gayheart a courtesy he wouldn’t have refused to the most worthless old loafer in town” (220). In addition to 152
taking his place in the community, Harry begins to behave in ways people might describe
as “feminine.” Milton Chase thinks his boss is somewhat erratic, unpredictable, and fickle.
Chase was actually happiest while Harry’s wife, the former Harriet Arkwright, managed
the business during her husband’s wartime absence: “She was a reasonable woman. When he gave her the facts about any proposition that came up, he could pretty well tell in advance what she would think aboutit” (211). In addition to volunteering to serve as an
ambulance driver during the war, Harry brings the suspicion of his clerk down upon himself by engaging in the traditionally feminine pursuits of philanthropy and social
service-he gives “not only his time but his money to the Red Cross” (212). More
significantly, Harry assumes a care-taker role not only with Jacob Gayheart but also with the memory of his youngest daughter. Harry holds mortgages on the Gayheart farm that
far exceed its value, but he never forecloses on Lucy’s father. And nightly chess games
become a ritual between Mr. Gayheart and Harry: “After Pauline’s death left the old man alone, Gordon managed to drop in at this shop every day, if only for a moment. Chess had
become one of his fixed habits Gordon had watched games between players of international renown when he was abroad during the way, and Mr, Gayheart like to hear him tell of them over and over” (210). Just as he cares for and protects Mr. Gayheart, Harry cares for and protects the memory of his youngest daughter by ordering Milton
Chase to always preserve the two slabs of cement where Lucy, as a little girl, had left her
“light footprints” when a mason had laid a new sidewalk (231),
In the final pages of the novel, a drunken Nick Wakefield challenges Harry’s masculinity (“you’re a damned coward, for all your big chest Afraid to go to poor Lucy
Gayheart’s funeral, weren’t you big man?”[213]), but the questioning of gender roles has functioned on a much deeper level for me. Accounting for the details of my movement through Gather’s novel allows Lucy Gayheart and Harry Gordon to emerge as characters whose lives challenge in small and local ways traditional notions, or as Judith Butler might say “regulatory regimes,” of masculinity and femininity. In the particulars of my reading experience I discover that Lucy is a complicated conflation of the conventional romance heroine and the less traditional female protagonist of a bildungsroman. Lucy’s physical 153
beauty, her sublime aesthetic sensibilities, and her status as the desired partner of a man who is her social and economic superior stand alongside the pleasure she finds in solitude, her somewhat aggressive pursuit of Sebastian, and her commitment to a career in a musical field dominated by men. The jarring and disruptive nature of Lucy’s death, however, works against any easy thematizing of her as a young woman suffocated by traditional
gender roles. Remembered as a “slip of a girl in boy’s overalls” (225), Lucy’s status as a
gendered being is indeed complex. Similarly, Harry emerges in my account of my reading experience as a composite of masculine and feminine characteristics. He is strong, physical, and seeks to heighten his masculine power by indulging in the extravagance of
having a beautiful but poor wife. But Harry is also capable of great sensitivity toward
Lucy and later her lonely father, and at the conclusion of the novel, it is Harry who functions as a member of the Haverford community in ways that are traditionally feminine, caring for others and engaging in philanthropic projects. As the ways in which these characters perform variously gendered behaviors emerge from the details of my reading experience, traditional notions of gender are set in motion. “Feminine” and “masculine” are no longer hypostatized and become instead ever-shifting and evolving fields of reference whose boundaries can be mapped only at local and particular sites. Articulating the details of one’s experience and working to acknowledge the personal and political dimensions of that experience elicits the sorts of multivalent responses that make such mapping possible and productive. If accounting for the particulars of my reading experience allows Lucy and Hany to emerge as characters whose lives challenge static notions of gender, what does offering a local and detailed account of my reading mean for me as a gendered reader? My life is perhaps a no less complicated commingling of gendered behaviors than the lives of Gather’s characters. My life as a reader of Lucy Gayheart is certainly one in which I enact variously gendered reading behaviors. Although theorists like Schweickart and Frye would generalize that I should as a female reader of a female character penned by a female writer read with a maternal “ethics of care” or that I should find in Lucy’s story comfort that I am not alone in my experiences as a woman, Lucy’s relationship with Sebastian 154
problematizes (at least temporarily) my allegiance to her. Because my dissatisfaction arises at the complex intersection where a young but active, independent and vital woman makes
herself subservient to an older, lethargic man whUe at the same time mentally constructing the relationship in order to fit her own needs, I am pushed to sort through my own
participation in traditional social/cultural scripts that delimit the vectors of power and gender in heterosexual relationships. Lucy’s relationship with Sebastian in some ways divides me
against myself and causes me to recognize the ways in which my feminist sensibilities can become entangled in patriarchal traditions. Furthermore my aversion both to thematizing
Lucy’s death as a sad but appropriate consequence of constrictive gender roles and to using
the tools of narrative theory to explain away the recalcitrance of her death and thus to
diminish its affective power causes me to recognize that as a gendered reader my feminist sensibilities and an alliance with female characters may operate to cause me to reject the
academic tools and explanatory power of critical/theoretical vocabularies in specific and
local circumstances. My experience with Lucy Gayheart, both in terms of the gendered characters I have encountered and of the ways in which I encountered myself as a gendered reader has
worked against a dualistic conception of the function of gender in textual encounters. And
as the sharp dichotomies between masculine and feminine behaviors blur so too do other dichotomies such as central/marginal, dominant/oppressed become fuzzy, and thus merely inverting power relationships becomes impossible. Rather than merely displacing and thus precluding the dominant perspectives that have controlled textual interactions by bringing marginalized perspectives to the center, muted discourses come into conversation with dominant ones. Allowing my own multiple perspectives (some of which result from my “marginal” status as a woman, some of which are derived from my “dominant” status as an academic) to interact with the multiple perspectives in the text results in a dialogic exploration of sameness and difference. The sort of dialogic exploration I have undertaken in reading Lucy Gayheart goes beyond oppositionality as a totalizing framework for describing what happens when literacies converge. Such a dialogic exploration does not preclude resistance to elements of a text (Lucy’s relationship to Sebastian) or to the 155
interpretive strategies of discursive communities (the field of narrative theory which might seek to explain the recalcitrance of Lucy’s death), but instead such an exploration
acknowledges the local and specific nature of that resistance, its sources, and its
consequences. What will happen, though, when I turn from Gather’s novel to Ernest
Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, another novel in which a young woman’s tragic death powerfully affects the man who outlives her?
CONFRONTING THE BODY: THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER, SEXUAL DIFFERENCE, AND A FAREWELL TO ARMS
Hemingway is the author, who, as Mark Spilka notes, “wrote a group of tales
called M m Without Women” and who “gave us male definitions of manhood to ponder,
cherish, even perhaps to grow by” (202). In spite of the 1961 publication of Marcelline
Hemingway Sanford’s A t the Hemingway’s: A Family Portrait which described the ways in
which Grace Hemingway raised her son and daughter as twins, giving them identical hair cuts, dressing them alike, and encouraging them both to play with “small china tea sets” as well as air rifles (62), Hemingway’s status as the spokesman for the red-blooded, all-
American, white, heterosexual male remains largely intact." By charting how the “simple, unadorned, and direct” plotlines of novels like A Farewell to Arms lead to “deserved” rewards for the “embattled masculine” and “pregnant feminine” characters (42), critics like Peter Balbert have defended Hemingway’s reputation against “today’s cultural commissars”
(43) who would undermine Hemingway’s status as the embodiment of masculine virtues.
Even Judith Fetterley’s feminist critique of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms as a “resentful cryptogram” that encodes the message that “male life is what counts... [and
" Only the most recent critical work by Mark Spilka, J. Gerald Kennedy, Peter Messent, and Debra Moddelmog has begun to disrupt this image. Prompted by the publication of recent biographies like Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway and James R. Mellow’s Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, and the posthumous publication of Hemingway’s The Garden o f Eden, such scholars have begun to reconsider the representation of gender in Hemingway’s work. See Moddelmog for a description of the ways in which Hemingway’s studies has resisted such complications which threaten the legendary masculinity of Papa Hemingway, 186-89. In what follows, I will be aligning myself with the work of these critics, and, I hope, extending it. 156
that] the only good woman is a dead one” (71) only reinforces Papa Hemingway’s image as one of “forefathers” of our culture’s most potent (albeit narrow and destructive) definitions
of masculinity. Will accounting for the particulars of my reading experience in A
Farewell to Arms allow me to read beyond Hemingway’s reputation? Or will I only become vulnerable to co-optation by Hemingway’s apparently masculine codes? Will such
an accounting lead me to complicate my understanding of “masculinity” and “femininity” as
I encounter them in Hemingway’s text? Or will the details of my reading experience give
me a new understanding of the importance of providing readers with ways to resist sexism and lead me back to the oppositional stance that I have argued is problematic? If accounting for the particulars of my movement through Lucy Gayheart engaged me in a dialogic
exploration of how various behaviors might be detached from their “masculine” and
“feminine” anchorages, will such a process of articulating my local and specific responses
to a text preclude the recognition of real sexual differences?
Accoimting for the particulars of my encounter with Hemingway’s novel allows Frederic Henry to emerge as not just a “callow, unreflective youth” whose growth into
“mature, strong man” (Phelan, “Discourse, Voice, and Temporal Perspective” 54) is
evidenced by his decision to leave military service and make a life with Catherine. Similarly, in the details of my reading I find myself confronting a Catherine Barkley to emerge as a character who is neither an “inflated rubber woman available at will to the
“ Jamie Barlowe-Kayes makes this point in “Re-Reading Women; The Example of Catherine Barkley.” Barlowe-Kayes argues that “despite the inherent destabilizing potential” of feminist readings such as Fetterley’s, such scholarship “has been tucked back inside and absorbed by the traditional scholarly and critical work on Hemingway (and thus neutralized), ignored and ‘proven’ wrong” (27). While 1 would agree with Barlowe-Kayes about the ways in which feminist readings of Hemingway have tended to reinscribe Hemingway’s status, Barlowe-Kayes continues to work within the oppositional framework that is unsatisfying to me. She writes that by rejecting the notion that “fully coherent, stable, replacement readings are not only possible but desirable” (32), “feminist critical and theoretical re-readings of Hemingway’s female characters [can] expose cultural codes and attitudes about women which continue to haunt and limit their Uves” (33). Such an assumption that feminist readings will expose the limiting and haunting cultural codes that constrain women is an echo of Schweickart’s delineation of the first of two steps in the feminist readings which I cited earlier in this chapter, and this assumption causes me to position Barlowe-Kayes in a long line of oppositional feminists. I am interested in the potential of articulating the particulars of one’s readings experiences as a strategy forgoing beyond oppositionality. 157
onanistic dreamer" (Bell 119) nor an unreproachable “ministrant, mentor, and teacher"
(Hayes 16), Instead, she is a complicated woman who enacts a number of gendered
behaviors as she negotiates her way through the social and cultural circumstances in which she finds herself. As in my encounter with Lucy Gayheart, my experience in moving
through A Farewell to Arms is one in which gender is continually constructed and reconstructed, but by turning to Hemingway’s novel, I hope to discover whether
accounting for the particulars of my reading experience will be an appropriate strategy
when dealing with the text of a canonical male writer. Will offering a local and
particularized account of my reading experience only serve to mask the immasculation Fetterley has cautioned me against? Will A Farewell to Arms-a novel often cited as
representative of the misogyny that surfaces in the canon of American literature-lead me to see an efficacy in oppositionality that I have overlooked so far? Or can sexual difference and alterity emerge as a wondrous, unbridgeable lacuna that evokes respect rather than
resistance?
The Complex Construction of Frederic Henry In the often cited opening of the novel, Frederic Henry, as an initially nameless narrator, offers me a seemingly detailed and objective description of the physical landscape, but in doing so, he sends me confusing signals about the world in which he finds himself. The first sentence of the novel, “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains," emphasizes community (“we”) and domesticity (living in a house with a lovely view). By the end of the first paragraph, though, the tranquil scene is disrupted by the marching troops, and the natural world is disfigured by the dust they raise. The second paragraph repeats the pattern. The first sentence, ‘The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare," emphasizes the fecundity of the natural world, but the “flashes from the artillery" disrupt the image. By the opening of the third paragraph, though, there is more of an integration: “Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors" (3). 158
Frederic is clearly positioned in the house with the lovely view, but the war noises have now penetrated the house. (In the previous paragraphs Frederic was positioned in the
house, but saw at a distance the effects of the war.) Regardless of whether I attribute these
opening shifts to Frederic as a self-conscious and very crafty first person narrator capable
of constructing a self in the time of the story who is very different from the self at the time
of narration or to an implied Ernest Hemingway, the result is the same for me." The
opening description gives me a sense of the complicated space in which Frederic exists. He finds himself in a world where the fertility and beauty of the natural world co-exists with
artillery bombardments, where “gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin,
long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child” (4).
The first chapter ends with the statement that “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army” (4). While James Phelan argues that in an unthinking acceptance of military values Frederic is “mouthing here the party line, the official account of what happened” (Reading People 171), Sandra Whipple Spanier notes that the first World War gave rise to a black humor based on ironic understatement and that
“Frederic’s comment about the cholera. . . is prototypical of this ironic mode, rather than evidence of stunted emotional development” (87). Having followed the movements in the opening paragraphs between the natural, generative world and the destructive consequences of war with aU its mechanized weapons and the ways in which the two ultimately become interanimated, I am unwilling to move in lock-step with either Phelan or Spanier. Rather
There has been much productive and enlightening critical discussion about the gap between Frederic as a character and Frederic as first-person, retrospective narrator. See among others, Weimann, Stoltzfus, Prescott, Lewis, and Nagel. In his discussion, though, of the Hemingway short story “My Old Man,” James Phelan demonstrates that strict definitions of mimesis may unnecessarily limit the way questions are framed about the relationship between a character acting in story-time and that same character functioning as retrospective narrator who is positioned differently at the time of narration. Even, however, if I set aside strict definitions of mimesis, meticulously pinpointing the nuances of the multi-layered interactions between Frederic-character and Frederic-narrator would lead me too far afield from my interest in how accounting for the particulars of my reading experiences might allow me to avoid a strictly oppositional stance toward Hemingway’s novel. 159
than reading Lt. Henry’s comment about the cholera killing “only seven thousand in the
army” and his apparent lack of concern about anyone outside the army as a sign of his
unreflective acquiescence to the military version of events, I hear him mimicking (in a perhaps not entirely controlled way) the humor engendered by the horrors of the war that
Spanier describes. For me, he is attempting to appropriate a discursive strategy that will
allow him to deal with his incongruous experiences.'® And his experiences are
incongruous indeed.
As Frederic goes on to describe in chapter two, the Austrians did not bomb [Gorizia] to destroy it but only a little in a military way. People lived on in it and there were hospitals and cafés and artillery up side streets and two bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers, and with the end of the summer, the cool nights, the fighting in the mountains beyond the town, the shell- marked iron of the railway bridge, the smashed tunnel by the river where the fighting had been, the trees around the square and the long avenue of trees that led to the square; these with there being girls in the town, the King passing in his motor car, sometimes now seeing his face and little long necked body and gay beard like a goats chin tuft; all these with the sudden interiors of houses that had lost a wall dirough shelling, with plaster and rubble in their gardens and sometimes in the street. (5-6)
Positioned just a few miles from the front lines where the flashes of enemy artillery disrupt the tranquility of the cool evenings while civilians come and go from cafés, Gorizia is, to use Krupat’s term once again, a “frontier” town where highly divergent value systems come in contact with another. The incongruity of the situation is furthered by the juxtapositioning of odd details-the details of the spaghetti dinner Frederic enjoys where
“the wine, clear red, tannic and lovely” is poured from a “grass-covered gallon flask” (7) collide with the image of a “gas mask in an oblong tin can” and an “Austrian sniper’s rifle
At other moments throughout the text, Henry uses this sort of dead-pan, ironic humor when he is in a difficult spot. When he first meets Catherine and she asks him why he is in the Italian army, he responds: “There isn’t always an explanation for everything” (18). This comment certainly doesn’t reflect Frederic’s unthinWng commitment to existential angst, but is instead a flip way to deflect Catherine’s close interrogation. And Spanier notes that later in the novel Frederic quips, “We’ll have to get some for home” when Catherine marvels at the “wonderful” gas that eases her labor pains (317). One might also note that even in the early pages of the novel, Frederic is capable of dissenting from the military’s party line. As Henry takes off his cap while waiting for Catherine, he reports: “We were supposed to wear steel helmets in Gorizia but they were imcomfortable and too bloody theatrical in a town where the civilian inhabitants had not been evacuated” (28). Later, Frederic reveals that he is willing to manipulate military rules in order to help the man from Pittsburgh with a hernia. 160
with its blued octagon barrel” hanging over Frederic’s neatly made bed (11). Frederic is operating in a world where prostitutes lose their status as “girls” and become instead “old
war comrades” and where a priest is both a “boy” and a “fathei" (65; 72). Along this frontier where artifacts from disparate worlds (wine bottles and
snipers’ rifles) are intermingled in a common tableau and where people have their positions and identities stretched and overturned, it is not surprising that narrow and traditional
gender identities becomes less stable and more fluid. After the expository first chapter,
Frederic places himself in the second chapter at “the window of the bawdy house, the house for officers” where he is sharing a bottle of Asti with a friend (6). While Frederic
and his friend are ensconced in the traditionally masculine preserve of a “bawdy house,” the priest, whose celibacy challenges the narrow definition of masculinity encoded in such an establishment, passes by on the street Frederic’s friend waves, motioning the priest to come in and join them, but Frederic does not endorse the gesture or the way in which it aggressively consolidates the power of the masculine code of the bawdy house by mocking the priest’s detachment from that world. At dinner that night in the officers’ mess, Frederic’s behavior further foregrounds for me that a singular definition of masculine behavior rooted in the heterosexual dyad is inadequate for capturing the complexity of
Frederic’s life. Frederic does not participate as his fellow officers aggressively mount a raucous debate on religion, atheism, and Free Masonry in attempt to antagonize the priest. Instead of joining in the baiting of the priest, Frederic establishes a silent alliance with the man; “I smiled at the priest and he smiled back across the candle-light” (8). In fact, Frederic seems to be trying to rescue the priest by deliberately changing the subject with his only comment that “There will be no more offensive now that the snow has come” (8). This provides the priest with a brief respite as the officers turn their attention to Frederic and begin arguing about how he should spend his leave. Thirty pages later a similar scene occurs once again in the officer’s mess. At this point in the narrative, though, I have greater access to Frederic’s thoughts, and he reveals that he is making conscious decisions about engaging in ±e sorts of performative acts that reiterate norms of masculinity: “I drank wine because to-night we were not all brothers 161
unless I drank a little” (38). However when the camaraderie and drinking impinge on his personal desires, he does not hesitate to opt out Remembering his date with Catherine,
Frederic declares: “Bassi w ins. . . He’s a better man than I am” (40). Some readers might
argue that this scene merely represents Frederic’s decision to turn from one traditionally
masculine pursuit-the drinking game-to another-a date with Catherine for which he is inconsiderately late. The scene is, I think, more complicated though. Frederic not only
decides to drink so that he will be “brothers” with his fellow officers, but also he also feigns knowledge of the injustices visited upon Father Ireland in order to make a connection and establish a bond with the often isolated and lonely priest. Functioning on all these levels, the scene furthers my awareness of the ways in which Frederic is working
both with and against the constrictions of gendered behaviors and is undermining any narrow definition of masculinity. Although he visits the W la Rossa, Frederic is also
capable of being thoughtful, sensitive, and solicitous. He recognizes the necessity of his
participation in masculine rituals that bind together the officers, yet he is also capable of enacting different kinds of behaviors in order to make a connection with the lonely priest. Accounting for the particulars of my reading experience allows Frederic to emerge as a
complex conflation of characteristics. I do not find myself wanting to condemn Frederic or to position myself as ethically superior to him. Instead, I find myself challenged by
Frederic to construct more fluid definitions of male behavior, a position in sharp contrast
with other critics who take a rather dim view of Frederic. Carlos Baker connects Frederic in these early chapters to “obscenity, indignity. . . nervousness. . . irréligion” (102); Peter Messent posits that “until chapter 30, Frederic is dependent on his uniform for his identity”
(58); and Roger Whitlow argues that Frederic has “no real understanding of what he is doing on the front” and that he “does not realize how silly the whole military status-and- trappings syndrome is” (22; 23). As I progress through novel, articulating the details of my experience continues to destabilize the boundaries of gendered behavior. Even when Frederic is called upon most explicitly to play the traditionally masculine role of soldier, his behavior pushes me to problematize narrow conceptions of male behavior. When Frederic takes his ambulances 162
and drivers to the front lines, he looks after his men: “I asked him [a major] if there was a big dugout where the drivers could stay and he sent a soldier to show me. I went with him
and found the dugout, which was very good. The drivers were pleased with it and I left them there” (47). When he returns to the dugout, Frederic gives each driver “a package of
cigarettes,” and then goes in search of food for his men, returning with a “metal basin of
cold cooked macaroni” and “a quarter of a white cheese” (52).
I also note Frederic’s protective, nurturing stance toward his men during the retreat
from Caporetto. After helping to empty the various field hospitals, Frederic and his
drivers return to the villa at Gorizia, and Frederic advises the drivers to “Make a fire in the
kitchen and dry your things,” and he delays departing until after everyone has eaten and had a few hours of sleep. And as James Phelan notes, during the retreat itself, Frederic
insists that his drivers “share the food they find,... help each other out, . . . not harm the girls,... help the sergeants, and... not plunder the farmhouse where they stop for food” (“Distance, Voice, and Temporal Perspective” 63). For Phelan, even the shooting of
the sergeant, who has violated many of these group norms, can be read as a reflection of
Frederic’s commitment to the values of sharing and respect that undergird the group
Frederic leads.'®
While Frederic emerges in the details of my reading experience as someone who is capable of caring for others, he is also capable of allowing himself to be cared for when he is wounded. Although critics have faulted Frederic for his “regressive needs” (Solotaroff) and for becoming passive “like a baby in its bassinette” (Bell), I rather admire his ability to
” Robert Solotaroff views this incident somewhat differently. He suggests that while “in one way Henry is a generous comrade to his men; in another he is the commanding officer anxious to assert his place in military hierarchy” (6). " Phelan argues that this scene is a significant marker in the progression of the novel signaling a change in Frederic resulting from his relationship with Catherine, but for me, Frederic’s commitment to communal values, to sharing food, helping those in need, have already emerged in the details of my reading of earlier narrative episodes. Phelan goes on to suggest that in shooting the sergeant Frederic reveals that he still has some investment in the ideology of war. While I would not deny that shooting the sergeant implicates Frederic in a militaristic value system, because I am less committed to a view of the novel as centered on Frederic’s growth and development, I am less concerned with measuring the shifts in Frederic’s attitudes toward the military. For me, Frederic’s dual commitments coexist in ways that seem inevitable. 163
allow others to help him. He is respectful of the way Miss Gage bathes him “gently and
smoothly,” and he admits “The washing felt very good” (84). He is even gracious and
imcomplaining as the hospital nurses attend to his basic needs by helping him on to a bedpan, and he does not grouse as Catherine prepares him for surgery by administering a
preoperative enema. Even once Frederic has fully recovered and is no longer confined to a hospital where patients have little choice but to accept a passive role, he is still capable of
allowing others to help him. After having exhausted himself in rowing dirough the night across Lake Maggiore, Frederic allows Catherine to take the oar while he refreshes himself
with a few shots of brandy and some sandwiches. Frederic’s position as one-who-is- cared-for prevents me from easily transmuting his willingness to help others into a desire
for control or mastery or an overtly paternalistic gesture. Further complicating my understanding of Frederic as a gendered being are the
ways in which his relationship with Rinaldi challenges the heterosexual imperative. The Italian physician continually refers to Frederic as “baby,” and in his visit to see the
wounded Frederic at the field hospital, Rinaldi “came in very fast and bent down over the
bed and kissed” Frederic (63). During their conversation, Rinaldi queries ‘Tell me, baby, when you lie here all the time in the hot don’t you get excited?” (65). And since Catherine’s nursing of Frederic in Milan carries with it an erotic charge, it is not
unreasonable to find a similar eroticism in Rinaldi’s attention to Frederic’s knee after he returns to the front. Rinaldi orders Frederic to ‘Take off your pants, baby” (166), and while Rinaldi runs “his finger along the scar,” Frederic “looked down at the top of his head, his hair shiny and parted smoothly” (167). I do not wish to oversimplify the complexities of homoeroticism by merely attributing latent homosexual desires to either Rinaldi or Frederic. Instead, I wish merely to point out that the homosocial relationship between these two men emerges in the details of my reading experience as part of the larger challenge to easy conceptions of masculinity.
Documenting the ways in which Frederic is enacting domestic and nurturing behaviors within the context of male camaraderie and war, the ways in which he allows others to care for him, and the ways in which his relationship with Rinaldi seems to have 164
the potential to challenge the heterosexual imperative, does not mean, however, that I completely overlook the ways in which Frederic is also capable of performing in
accordance with masculine codes that are predicated on the subservience of women. The ways in which Frederic’s gender blending tendencies emerges as I recount the particulars of my textual encounter does, however, color my reaction to such behavior on Frederic’s part.
When Frederic unsuccessfully tries to kiss Catherine for the first time, he is not at all above
using the tears that spring to his eyes when she slaps him as a way to gain her sympathy. Later, Frederic acknowledges “I lied” when he tells Catherine he loves her (30). These are
just two examples of the ways in which Frederic plays the part that is typically and unfortunately scripted for young men as they pursue sexual gratification, but while I am
more than a little disenchanted with Frederic’s participation in such sexual dramas, my
discomfort is localized and specific. Furthermore, the ways in which Frederic holds
himself apart from his sexually predatory fellow officers gives me the sense that Frederic is perhaps a bit confused by his own behavior. Frederic describes his leave: “I had gone...
to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and now knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and uncaring in
the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring” (13). I find further evidence that Frederic is somewhat mystified by his own sexual behavior in his admission that “I
had wanted to go to the Abruzzi” (14) and in his guilt that he disappointed the priest in not visiting with his family. Readers who wish to establish their own sexual sensitivity and considerateness may take the opportunity to condemn Frederic’s sexual ethics, but while I do not applaud his actions, his descriptions are nothing like the '''down on your knees and suck, bitch,” command that Markita fears she will hear from Ty in Jess Mowry’s Way Past
Cool—di novel I will discuss in the next chapter. " Positioned as I am 60 years and a sexual revolution after the publication of A Farewell to Arms, I am perhaps more tolerant of
I also recognize that as a female reader, it is perhaps easier for me to offer a reading that defends Frederic than it might be for a male reader to offer a similarly generous reading of him. 165
Frederic’s “all and all and all and not caring” than I might be otherwise, but even judged by the contemporary norms that seem to govern Italy during World War I, Frederic is far less objectionable than Rinaldi. Frederic never resorts to the low and calculating rhetoric of his friend who glibly remarks that “I will probably marry Miss Barkley” even though he was known her for only a short time. Rinaldi also attempts to borrow fifty lire from Frederic so that he can “make on Miss Barkley the impression of a man of sufficient wealth” (12).
While I make very negative judgments of Frederic at local and specific moments, these judgments do my destroy my overall engagement with him.“
The Complex Construction of Catherine Barkeley If Frederic is a complicated character whose behaviors challenge simplistic and narrow understandings of masculine behavior, Catherine is perhaps his ideal partner in the sense that she too is a complicated conflation of gendered characteristics. Almost immediately she discloses that her traditional notions of gender identity based on romantic idealizations were blown to bits along with her fiancé. She mocks her own naïveté at having imagined that her fiancé might have “come to the hospital where I was. With a sabre cut, I suppose, and a bandage around his head. Or shot through the shoulder. Something picturesque” (20). And Catherine deeply regrets that her own participation in romantic myths caused her to delay physically consummating her relationship with her fiancé until such a consummation was no longer possible. Having had her romantic notions shattered
Other readers have pointed to larger patterns in Frederic’s treatment of women. In dealing with other women, from the helpless and fluttering Mrs. Walker to the cold and official Miss Van Campen, Frederic is perfectly capable of asserting the kind of authority that is founded on masculine privilege. When Miss Van Campen accuses Frederic of intentionally coming down with jaundice, Frederic challenges her: “Miss Van Campen . . . did you ever know a man who tried to disable himself by kicking himself in the scrotum?. .. Because that is the nearest sensation to jaundice and it is a sensation that I believe few women have ever experienced” (144). Frederic merely ignores Mrs. Walker’s presence, directing his comments instead to the male porters. While Judith Fetterley regards Frederic’s treatment of these women as evidence of his status as “The perfect chauvinist.. . [who] uses his penis as the ultimate weapon” (55), I am more lenient in my judgment of him. My feminist sensibilities do not lead me to read in alliance with all women, and I am more critical of Mrs. Walker inability to meet Frederic’s basic need for a clean bed when he arrives at the hospital and Miss Van Campen’s outrageous accusation that Frederic’s jaundice is self-inflicted than I am of Frederic’s attempts to defend himself. 166
along with the gendered roles made possible by such notions, Catherine now seeks to establish a relationship with Frederic in which she defines a number of different roles for
herself and accounting for the particulars of my reading experience enables me to recognize this. She moves among traditionally female roles (wife, mother, whore), but also at times
she engages in performative behaviors that might be perceived as masculine.
During even her first encounters with Frederic in Gorizia, Catherine is capable of
demanding that her own needs be meet by her prospective lover. She cuts off Frederic’s attempt at witty but idle chit chat with her curt, “Do we have to go and talk this way?”, and then she proceeds to disclose the story of her dead fiancé and of her own grief and regret By divulging such personal information, Catherine sets Frederic back on his heels and claims a sort of power for herself in their relationship.^' When they meet next in the evening, Catherine once again sets the parameters for her interaction with Frederic, demanding that he play the role of her dead fiancé by saying “I’ve come back to Catherine in the night” (30). Later, when Catherine finds herself nursing the wounded Frederic in
Milan, she is quite blunt in claiming ownership of Frederic’s body just as she owned their early courtship conversations. She tells Frederic: “I don’t want any one else to touch you. I’m siUy. I get furious if they touch you” (103). Although the interruptive “I’m silly” infuses a girlish giddiness into Catherine’s statement, I still recognize her use of the proprietary language men sometimes use in claiming the bodies of women. Despite
Catherine’s “I’m silly,” the power move of bodily ownership remains intact. When Frederic does attempt to claim authority in their relationship, I often see
Catherine outmaneuvering him. In the hospital at Milan, Frederic orders Catherine to
“come to bed,” and she agrees, “All right,” but then adds “I’ll go and see the patients first”
(116), and she slips off to attend to her responsibilities. Similarly, she refuses to acquiesce to Frederic’s compliments. Frederic tells Catherine that the skin of her face and throat are
See Amy Shuman’s Storytelling Rights for an analysis of issues of entitlement, propriety, and the rules of privacy in relation to the storyability and tellability of oral, personal experience narratives. Although Shuman’s research involved the storytelling of students in an urban, racially diverse junior high school, her theoretical framework can be used productively to illuminate other storytelling situations, such as occurs between Catherine and Frederic. I am indebted to Pamela Ensinger-Antos for calling my attention to Shuman’s work. 167
“smooth as piano keys,” but rather than being overcome by her lover’s appreciation of her physical attractiveness and just melting into a puddle of gratitude, Catherine reciprocates by stroking his chin and noting “Smooth as emery paper and very hard on piano keys” (114).
Frederic registers a certain insecurity with his own physical attractiveness by querying, ‘Too rough?”, but Catherine reassures him: “No, darling. I was just making fun of you” (114).
By controlling the terms of her interactions with Frederic, Catherine is not playing the usually submissive feminine role. But, for me, her greatest act of strength and independence for me is in her handling of her pregnancy. As Frederic prepares to return to the front, she tells Frederic that she doesn’t know where she will go to have the child, but she assures him it will be “somewhere splendid. I’ll look after all that” (139). And when Fergy verbally attacks Frederic by saying “I know the mess you’ve gotten this girl into,”
Catherine calmly corrects her, “No one got me in a mess, Fergy. I get in my own messes” (246). Catherine has, though, no romantic idealizations about the difficulties of giving birth to and raising a child. As they cross Lake Maggiore Frederic cautions “Watch out the oar doesn’t pop you in the tummy,” but Catherine responds, “If it did... life might be much simpleri’ (275). In addition to recognizing and admiring the ways in which Catherine is capable of co-opting the performative behaviors more typically associated with independent, assertive masculine norms, I also recognize that Catherine moves among a number of different female roles. While nursing Frederic in Milan, Catherine often positions herself as a maternal figure. In preparing Frederic for his surgery, she warns him about getting
“blabby under an anaesthetic,” and she advises him to “Just start your prayers or poetry or something when they tell you to breathe deeply. You’ll be lovely that way and I’ll be so proud of you. I’m very proud of you anyway. You have such a lovely temperature and you sleep like a little boy with your arm around the pillow and think it’s me” (104). Later, when Frederic leaves for the front, Catherine inquires if he is carrying anything to eat with him on the journey, and as her carriage pulls away from the train station, Catherine points 168
in toward the archway and Frederic tealizes “she meant for me to get in out of the rain" (158).
Just as she is capable of fulfilling a maternal role, Catherine also positions herself at times as a sexual plaything eager to place herself at Frederic’s disposal. After Frederic tells
Catherine that prostitutes will say whatever a man wants, Catherine seems to be deliberately inviting Frederic to compare to her to such women by pointing out to him “You see . . . I do anything you want” (106). Such a desire for self-effacement and a willingness to please are also evident when Catherine later says to Frederic “Is there anything I do you don’t hke? Can I do anything to please you?” (116). But Catherine interanimates the concept of the whore with the concept of the nun. When Catherine teUs Frederic “You’re my religion.
You’re all I’ve got” (116), I hear echoes of the devotion of a woman who has chosen to become a bride of Christ The last female role I see Catherine claiming for herself is wife.
She signs herself into the Lausanne hospital as “Catherine Henry” (313), and while in labor she refers to Frederic as her husband.
For all Catherine’s attempts, though, to define herself in multiple ways, I still witness the ways in which she bumps up against prescribed roles for women. Her freedom is impinged upon by the Italians who “don’t want women so near the front,” and consequently, Catherine reports “So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out”
(25). George, the waiter at the Gran Italia, tries to circumvent Catherine in her attempt to order wine, and Catherine is perfectly aware that marriage would end her career as a
VA.D. nurse on the front (113; 114). Although Catherine must negotiate her way through these societal prescriptions, often acquiescing when resistance seems futile, she refuses to allow her relationship with Frederic to be cast into a traditional script In turning back Frederic’s initial gestures of physical intimacy in the garden at the hospital in Gorizia,
Catherine explains “I just couldn’t stand the nurses’s-evening-off aspect of it” (26). Later in the novel, Catherine rebels against traditional characterizations that divide up women according to the propriety of their sexual conduct She tells Frederic: “Don’t talk as though you had to make an honest woman of me, darling. I’m a very honest woman. You can’t be ashamed of something if you’re only happy and proud of it” (116). 169
I respect and admire Catherine and the way in which she refuses to allow her most intimate desires and actions to be scripted by cultural codes which catalogue women
according to their sexual behavior, but Catherine’s character is, as James Phelan notes,
“almost dizzying in its complexity and contradictions” (Reading People 182). While she at
times rises above the cultural codes that impinge upon her freedom to construct herself as a gendered being, she is also at times strangely vulnerable to these codes. When Emilio, the
barman at the Grand-Hôtel & Isles Borromées, wakes Frederic and warns him of his impending arrest, Catherine asks Henry to “Please look away” while she dresses in preparation for their flight to Switzerland (266). Frederic recognizes that “She was beginning to be a little big with the chUd and she did not want me to see her” (266). In
Switzerland, Catherine puts off Frederic’s desire to “get married now,” telling him “I know one thing. I’m not going to be married in this splendid matronly state” (293). When
Frederic asks “When will we be married?”, Catherine replies “Any time after I’m thin again. We want to have a splendid wedding with every one thinking what a handsome young couple” (293-94). Catherine’s insecurity about the changes the pregnancy brings to her body, and her desire to be “thin again” before she marries Frederic suggests to me that in spite of Catherine’s bravery and independence she is still vulnerable to societal prescriptions about what a woman’s body should look like.
Critics wishing to recuperate Hemingway and his novel have made cogent cases for viewing Catherine as the “unknown soldier” (Spanier) of the novel or as Hemingway’s
“code-hero” (Hays) or even as “an intelligent, insightful woman with an ear for empty posturing, and a sharp, economical way of putting Hemingway’s narrator in his place”
(Lockridge), but they have often overlooked these complications in Catherine’s character and the ways in which she is constrained by societal prescriptions. By justifiably emphasizing Catherine’s strength, wit, kindness, and maturity, such critics have perhaps only created a politically correct version of the “divine lollipop” that Frances Hacked censoriously charges Hemingway with creating. This apotheosis of Catherine into the ideal teacher who leads Frederic toward a mature, enlightened understanding of love and human relationships merely inverts the power in the masculine/feminine binary. Viewing Catherine 170
as responsible for the change in Frederic, “for his growth in knowledge about the world and for his corresponding growth in unselfish love” (Phelan, “Discourse, Character,
Ideology” 140), both denies the complexity of my experience with her and is predicated on an equally simplistic view of Frederic which I hope I have undermined. By focusing on
the various performative behaviors enacted by both Catherine and Frederic as they tenuously constitute themselves as gendered beings at specific moments and in social spaces, I hope I have destabilized the strict binary between masculine and feminine behaviors-a destabilization that plays a part in undermining the efficacy of oppositionalily.
I do not, however, wish to embrace the concept of androgyny as a model for describing my experiences in moving through Hemingway’s novel.
Confronting Sexual Difference In “Reconstructing Hemingway’s Identity,” Debra Moddelmog makes a powerful case against the concept of androgyny. Citing the work of Adrienne Rich and Daniel
Harris, Moddelmog notes that “although androgyny seems to promise a way out of the masculine-feminine binarism, it simply moves that binarism from the external to the internal world” (190), and drawing upon Catharine Stimpson’s work, Moddelmog argues that androgyny is merely a myth whose very insubstantiation makes people comfortable with sexual difference while at the same time diffusing the “a truly political reading in which the critic exposes the binarisms that readers hold in place while they read” (190). My experience in moving through the final book of A Farewell to Arms adds weight to Moddelmog’s charges against androgyny. In their Swiss idyll, Catherine and Frederic retreat from the social world into an almost infantile, presocial state of genderlessness. Watching Frederic and Catharine move toward androgynous constructions of themselves while seeming to have transcended above (quite literally above in their mountainside chalet) the cultural milieu which both constrains and enables gendered behaviors and 171 identifications makes me aware of the inadequacy of androgyny as a paradigm for understanding the behavior of men and women.“
The opening paragraph of Chapter 27, the first chapter of the final, fifth book of A
Farewell to Arms, creates a portrait of Frederic and Catherine that emphasizes their new infantile state: Mrs. Guttingen came into the room early in the morning to shut the windows and started in the tall porcelain stove. The pine wood crackled and sparked and then the fire roared in the stove and the second time Mrs. Guttingen came into the room she brought big chunks of wood for the fire and a pitcher of hot water. When the room was warm she brought in breakfast Sitting up in bed eating breakfast we could see the l^ e and the mountains across the lake on the French side. There was snow on the tops of the mountains and the lake was a gray steel-blue. (289)
Tucked safely and snugly in their bed like two little children, Catherine and Frederic find that the motherly Mrs. Guttingen meets all their needs for warmth and food. Without the concerns of the world pressing in on them, Frederic and Catherine take walks in the woods and play chess to pass the time. On one of their forest strolls, they even pause to imagine themselves as little foxes. Catherine begins: “It was fun seeing the fox.” “When he sleeps he wraps that tail around him to keep warm.” “It must be a lovely feeling. “I always wanted to have have a tail like that Wouldn’t it be fun if we had brushes like a fox?” “It might be very difficult dressing.” “We’d have clothes made, or live in a country where it wouldn’t make any difference.” “We live in a country where nothing makes any difference. Isn’t it grand how we never see anyone?” (303)
As they regress further and further from the social world and their own histories as social beings (and hence gendered beings), Catherine and Henry become more childlike in their behaviors. For Frederic, “The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one else’s college” (291), and he uses the diminutive nickname “Cat” to address Catherine more
In “Distance, Voice, and Temporal Perspective,” James Phelan offers a different perspective on the problematic nature of the Frederic and Catherine’s life in Switzerland. For Phelan, the techniques of first-person, retrospective narration “cannot full bear the burden placed upon them” (53) in die Switzerland section. Frederic’s “tight-lipped narration” and what Phelan perceives to be Hemingway’s sexist conception of (Catherine interact to create the impression that Catherine’s death is “a convenient way for Frederic to escape from this sterile, constricted relationship” (68). 172
in this section of the novel than anywhere else in the text And Catherine, the woman who has not flinched at the thought of giving birth to a child by herself in a war tom country, comes to echo the pleas of a small child when she asks “Could I eat a chocolate bar?. . . Or is it too close to lunch?” (297). Not only do Catherine and Frederic become almost child like in their behavior and speech, they seem to seek to return to a preadolescent state in which the differences between little boys and little girls are more easily blurred. Catherine encourages Frederic to let his hair “grow a little longer,” and she says “I could cut mine and be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark” (299). Catherine also proposes “Let’s go to sleep at exactly the same moment” (301). In this Swiss idyll, as Peter Messent notes, “the desire for a form of presocial sexual wholeness and for a step outside history is denied by the knowledge of the actual impossibility of such a step-that to merge the self in a completely discrete but undifferentiated unit of two is a form of psychic and social suicide” (88).“ In their Swiss idyll, Frederic and Catherine are at least temporarily freed from the struggles to create themselves as gendered beings, and in doing so they deny the complexity of that process. In many ways Frederic’s separate peace is a rejection of a world that is incapable of acknowledging complexity. Frederic is pulled out of line by the carabinieri as he crosses the bridge over the Tagliamento in part because he “speaks Italian with an accent” (222). The carabinieri act out of a iron-clad commitment to the principle that “Italy should never retreat” (223), refusing to acknowledge the inadequacy of such monolithic prescriptions for national (or personal) behavior. As he stands listening to the carabinieri questioning a lieutenant-colonel and waiting his turn to be questioned, Frederic realizes that the carabinieri are summarily executing all officers above the arbitrarily selected rank of major, ignoring the various positions and complexities of individuals within that broad class. Frederic has rejected the war when it closes down the possibility that he could have a complicated identity as a soldier.
Messent recognizes that Hemingway turned “toward a new fluidity as far as categories of masculinity and femininity go, but a fluidity that is often viewed (at least in terms of the structure of male-female relationships) fearfully” (87). However, Messent goes on to argue that this fear of fluidity arises out of the fact that “androgyny, and the féminisation of the male protagonist that goes with it, operate to the diminishment of the masculine authority” (88). From my perspective, this asocial fluidity is a threatening to women as well as to men. 173
The appearance of Count Greffi late in the novel further indicates to me the
importance of recognizing the multiplicitous and ever-shifting dimensions of one’s multiple
positions (including one’s status as a gendered being) within social and political contexts. Count Greffi serves as a model of what it means to be a lifetime translator among disparate discourses: Count Greffi was ninety-four years old. He had been a contemporary of Mettemich and was an old man with white hair and a mustache and beautiful manners. He had been in the diplomatic service of both Austria and Italy and his birthday parties were the great social event of Milan. He was living to be one hundred years and played a smoothly fluent game of billiards that contrasted with his own ninety-four-year-old brittleness. (254)
Not only has Count Greffi managed to serve in the diplomatic corps of the two countries that attempt to blow each other to bits in the Dolomite mountains above Gorizia, but he furthers his status as a translator when he inquiries into Frederic’s reading habits, suggesting “There is ‘Le Feu’ by a Frenchman, Barbusse. There is ‘Mr. Britling Sees
Through it.’ ... a very good study of the English middle-class soul” (261). As James
Phelan notes. Count Greffi is a very positive character: “he is gentle, kind, and solicitous with Frederic; he doesn’t take himself too seriously yet he is content with who he is. In the face of his coming death, he goes on much as he always has, giving his birthday parties, playing billiards, drinking champagne, wondering if he will become religious” {Reading
People 185-86). Count Greffi’s status as a translator coupled with Frederic’s rejection of the military world when it denies the complexity of an individual’s particular experience help me to recognize the importance of acknowledging the multiplicitous ways in which social and cultural circumstances both constrain and enable the ways in which individuals are able to construct themselves. For Catherine and Frederic to attempt to live in a Swiss dream world where complexity and social histories are all dissolved and where translation among the disparate social discourses that affect how individuals construct themselves as gendered beings is no longer necessary is decidedly unsatisfying to me as a reader. I need the idyllic Swiss section to be disrupted. Having witnessed the ways in which both Frederic and Catherine have faced limits on their ability to construct themselves as gendered beings (e.g., Frederic 174
realizes he must drink with his fellow officers in order to establish his brotherhood with them and Catherine finds her attempt to order wine at Gran Italia is invalidated by the waiter), I am unprepared to accept the dream world of Montreux. The final chapters of the novel do return Catherine and Frederic to a social world, and they function as a corrective to the fantasy of Montreux where the lovers could seek to establish themselves as undifferentiated, asocial beings. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the final chapter places me in a position to interrogate not just how individuals like Frederic and Catherine negotiate their status as man and woman in social and cultural circumstances that delimit their actions according to gender, but also how the corporeal reality of differently sexed bodies resists being completely superseded and made irrelevant, even when gender traits of masculinity and femininity are transformed and/or equalized. ^
As I watched Frederic in Lausanne, I recognize that he is once again moving among a number of roles. I am touched at the way he plays the deferential, expectant father, calling for a taxi-cab, enduring a seemingly interminable wait for someone to answer the phone, bringing the elevator up for Catherine himself because no attendant is on duty. Waiting nervously in the hall while the doctor examines Catherine, Frederic moves through a number of different languages as he expresses and tries to deal with his anxiety. He thinks to himself “People don’t die in childbirth nowadays,” but then he recognizes “That
In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz points out that the social constmctionist project of transforming and equalizing the associated gender traits of masculinity and femininity is predicated on a “base/superstmcture model in which biology provides a self-contained ‘natural’ base and ideology provides a dependent parasitic ‘second story’ which can be added-or not-leaving the base more or less as it is. For constructionists, the sex/gender opposition, which is a recasting of the distinction between the body... and the mind... is still operative” (17). Grosz goes on to argue that such a social constructionist project is incompatible with understanding sexual difference. In the works of critics like Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Spivak, Jane Gallop, Monique Wittig, and others, Grosz discerns an ac^owledgment that “The body cannot be understood as a neutral screen, a biological tabula rasa onto which masculine or feminine could be indifferently projected,” and, according to Grosz, “These feminists thus do not evoke a precultural, presocial, or prelinguistic pure body, but a body as social and discursive object, a body bound up in the order of desire, signification, and power” (18-19). While Grosz advocates the projects undertaken by this second group of critics, arguing that feminist philosophy must avoid the impasse created by the mutually exclusive categories of mind and body, I think it is both possible and even productive for feminists to engage simultaneously in both projects. Detaching social behaviors and traits from their moorings in masculine and feminine fields of reference can be, I think, compatible with the project of recognizing sexual difference with awe, surprise, and wonder. 175
was what all husbands thought” (320). A few sentences later, he co-opts the language of the first nurse who attended Catherine, “It’s only her first labor, which is almost always
protracted” (320). While he stands by Catherine and she cries out that the gas is no longer
effective in relieving her pain, Frederic begins to cry, and he weeps again later as he leans
over Catherine’s bed after she has hemorrhaged. (322; 330). At this emotional moment Frederic is perfectly comfortable expressing himself though the traditionally female
language of tears.
While Frederic once again moves among a number of roles and evidences his talents as translator who can express his own thoughts in a number of divergent
discourses, a different fate awaits Catherine. As I articulate the details of my reading experience, I realize that she plays a single role in this final chapter-that of a woman in labor. Early in her labor, she describes her “fine pains” to Frederic, and she is
“disappointed and ashamed” when her labor temporarily subsides (314). Catherine goes on to tell Frederic she wants to have the baby “without any foolishness” (315). As
Catherine’s medical ordeal becomes more and more protracted, her status as a woman laboring in child birth eclipses any other positions she might occupy, gendered or otherwise. She is confined to a hospital bed, and everything revolves around the physicality of labor. This particular role is structured and defined by the corporeal reality of
Catherine’s body, and more particularly by the parts of her body that emphasize her difference from and otherness to Frederic. As Catherine’s body labors in childbirth, she becomes inaccessible and unknowable from Frederic’s perspective, and he loses his ability to give me access to her experience. In this final chapter, Frederic continually reminds me that Catherine’s body is hidden under a sheet (316; 322; 328), and he is repeatedly ushered into the hall when Catherine is undraped for an examination or procedure. But Frederic is not merely excluded from these examinations of Catherine’s body-he himself refuses to pass them along. Frederic censors the doctor’s explanation of his examination of 176
Catherine, merely noting that “He detailed the result of the examination” (321).“ Catherine’s physical, bodily experiences become unrepresentable from the mimetic
perspective of Frederic as narrator.
While numerous feminist critics have taken sharp exception to Catherine’s fate in
these final pages of A Farewell to Arms,^ I would like to suggest that by respecting the
enigma of Catherine’s bodily experiences Frederic leaves intact Catherine’s alterity, and he
acknowledges her sexual difference. Elizabeth Grosz offers a persuasive articulation of
what it means to acknowledge the corporeal reality of sexed bodies and to live with sexual difference. Grosz writes that
The problematic of sexual difference entails a certain failure of knowledge to bridge the gap, the interval between the sexes. There remains something ungraspable, something outside, unpredictable, and uncontainable, about the other sex for each sex. The irreducible difference under the best conditions evokes awe and surprise. .. When respected, this difference implies distance, division, an interval: it involves each relating to the other without being engulfed or overwhelmed. In other words, it involves a remainder, an indigestible residue, which remains unconsumed in any relation between them. (208)
Grosz is careful, though, to point out that sexual difference
admits of no outside position. The proclamation of a position, outside, beyond, sexual difference is a luxury that only male arrogance allows. It is only men who can afford the belief that their perspective is an outside, disinterested, or objective position. The enigma that Woman has posed for men is an enigma only because the male subject has construed itself as the subject par excellence But if one takes seriously the problematic of sexual difference, then as mysterious as Woman must be for men, so too must men be for women (and indeed so too must Woman be for women, and Man for men. (191)
Because my access to the narrative is limited to Frederic’s homodiegetic perspective, and I
am, thus, afforded no interior views of Catherine’s consciousness, it is impossible for me
to argue for the sort of reciprocity Grosz sees as so essential to working within a paradigm of sexual difference. It is, however, possible for me to explore the quality of Frederic’s
“ The only moment in which Frederic does describe Catherine’s body is after the child has been removed from her womb. Frederic then watches the doctor close the wound to Catherine’s abdomen “into a high welted ridge with quick skilful-looking stitches like a cobbler’s” (325). As an ambulance driver, the stitching of a wound is something Frederic can relate to. See Barlowe-Kayes, Messent, Pullin, Solotaroff, Spilka, and, of course, Fetterley. 177
recognition of the irreducible difference between himself and the woman he loves. As I follow Frederic through these final pages, I notes that when he is first dismissed to the
hospital corridor, he prays for Catherine (314). Even when Frederic briefly leaves the hospital to takes his meals at a nearby café, Catherine is still very much on his mind.
Grappling with the otherness of her female corporeality as it manifests itself in childbirth, Frederic looks at the woman behind the bar and wonders “how many children the woman
had and what it had been like” (318). Unable to concentrate, Frederic remains at the café only because “It was too soon to go back to the hospital” (329).
When Frederic is in the delivery room with Catherine, he is pleased to help her by
administering the gas, noting that “It was vei^ good of the doctor to let me do something”
(317). As Catherine’s pains intensify and the gas becomes less effective, Frederic acknowledges not only the distance between his experience and what Catherine is going
through but also the fact that such a gap can prompt fear. As Catherine cries out that the gas no longer works, Frederic admits he “was afraid of the numbers [on the gas dial] over two” (317). Because he does not understand and is not having the same experience as
Catherine, he fears what results his actions might have for her. Frederic’s prayers, his ceaseless wondering about the female experience of childbirth, his distracted state of mind, and his fear all seem to me to be reasonable and appropriate responses on Frederic’s part to his difference from and otherness to Catherine. Frederic’s reactions contrast sharply with the giddy nurses for whom Catherine’s experiences are but a spectacle. As they hurry toward the gallery overlooking the operating room, one nurse announces “They’re going to do a Caesarean,” and the other one laughs, “We’re just in time. Aren’t we lucky?”
(324). The juxtaposition between Frederic’s responses to Catherine’s bodily experiences and the reactions of the nurses suggests to me that Frederic is enacting an ethics of sexual difference predicated on “ongoing negotiations between beings whose differences, whose alterities, are left intact but with whom some kind of exchange is nonetheless possible”
(Grosz 192). Once Catherine dies “ongoing negotiations” and “exchange” become impossible, and Frederic’s final moments with Catherine’s body are not “any good. It was like saying 178
good-by to a statue” (332), Such statues appeared much earlier in the novel when Frederic waited in the hospital office at Gorizia for Catherine. In looking around him, Frederic had
noted “marble busts all looked like a cemetery” (28). And such busts are not differentiated by gender or family affiliation; Frederic notes: “1 tried to make out whether they were
members of the family or what; but they were all uniformly classic. You could not tell
anything about them” (28).^’ Such lifeless, unanimated bodies—both Catherine’s and the
statues-are unable to function interactively and productively, to act and react, and rather than appropriate or assert his domination over such bodies, Frederic turns away from them, respecting their alterity and refusing to engulf or subsume them into his own interiority.
Just as Frederic Henry emerges in the details of my reading experience as a man who respects sexual difference, so too do 1 come to the realization that as a gendered reader, I must respect the “remainder,” the “indigestible residue,” of sexual difference that will remain unconsumed whenever 1 place myself in relation to male characters and male authors. As 1 move throughA Farewell to Arms, I am mystified by such instances as
Frederic’s reference to “the masculine difficulty of making love very long standing up” (31) and, like Catherine, I need Frederic to enlighten me about the details of the transaction between a man and a prostitute. To acknowledge, though, that such remainders will exist between me as a female reader and textual representations of male experience is not to return to essentialism. For as Grosz notes, a “wholehearted acknowledgment, even valorization of differences between members of the same sex” can coexist with a recognition of irreducible and fundamental differences between the sexes (18). By eclipsing the vast differences that can exist members of the same sex, broad categories like
“male reader” or “female reader” are too general to be of any critical usefulness.
Articulating the particulars of the personal and political dimensions of one’s reading experience seems like a productive way to map at local and specific sites the differences among members of the same sex as well as to help locate the boundaries of the alterities that exist between men and women.
” Eugene B. Cantelupe has noted that Frederic’s earlier reflections on the marble busts in the hospital at Gorizia have loaded the simile with great force. 1 find the force less in the connection with the graveyard and more interesting in terms of their lack of social and sexual specificities. 179
Furthermore, by acknowledging and even embracing sexual difference with, in Grosz’s terms, “awe and surprise,” and by not admitting a position beyond sexual difference, I can, as a reader, go beyond oppositionality. Both patriarchal regimes and oppositional agendas which seek to replace the patriarchy with a matriarchy disavow difference, situating the Other as deficient because it is different. Both moves are available for examination in Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader. As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, Fetterley persuasively articulates how the androcentric canon of American literature emasculates women, teaching them to “think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny” (xx). Yet Fetterley’s “resistant reading” of A Farewell to Arms proceeds on the basis of an unarticulated conception of Woman as, among other things, non-egocentric, self-actualized, independent, and sexually self-defined. Frederic, Rinaldi, the doctor at the Lausanne hospital all are judged inferior in Fetterley’s reading because they fail to adhere to these standards. Acknowledging sexual difference transcends oppositionality by proceeding not from a “a comparison and contrast between two types of sexual identity independently formed and formulated” (Grosz 208). Instead acknowledging sexual difference problematizes universalizing assumptions by leaving intact the specificities and particular positions of both women and men. As Grosz notes
While sexual difference entails its own forms of violence (the violence of differentiation), the insistence on sameness, identity, equivalence, formalized exchange, exerts a different kind of violence, a violence that occurs to a group... whose difference is effaced. The former is a constitutive, formative, ineliminable violence, the violence of existence and becoming; the latter is wanton, gratuitous violence. (208)
Enlisting the power of the particular in an interrogation of both gendered behaviors and sexual difference can serve to root such conversations in the concreteness of specific and local situations-and it is at local and specific sites where various perspectives and interests are made tangible and where no single perspective can assume the coercive role of functioning as a generalized norm or ideal. It was through the particulars of my experience in reading Lucy Gayheart that I was able to detach the social behaviors and traits of Lucy and Harry Gordon from their moorings in masculine and feminine fields of reference and to 180 interrogate my respose to the novel’s trajectory. Similarly, the details of my encounters with Frederic and Catherine complicate easy assumptions about either of them as traditional gendered without denying the corporeal reality of their differently sexed bodies. As a final move in this chaper, let me briefly turn to another local and specific site- the university classroom. Earlier in this chapter, I critiqued psychoanalytically-based pedagogies, noting that scholars like Jacobus, Chodorow, and Felman who embrace psychoanalytic models have not yet acknowledged the political and cultural functions of educational institutions. Thus, it is perhaps only fair that I conclude with a gesture toward outlining my own pedagogy. How would emphasizing the power of the particular as people interrogate the ways in which they perform gendered behaviors and encounter sexual difference take form in the classroom?
Krista Ratcliffe’s recent “Reconsidering Essentialism for Feminist Composition
Pedagogy” provides me with a starting place for answering this question. Ratcliffe’s project is to reconsider the definitions and political expediences of essentialism in feminist debates and in the writing classroom, and she makes a cogent case for going beyond Aristotle’s functional essentialism and Locke’s nominal essentialism to an understanding of essence as process. According to Ratcliffe,
When posited not as original, pure, or fixed, but as process essence loses its status as a privileged signifier. As a result, essentialism need not be considered either a static biological determinism that traps women or a totalizing linguistic game that constructs them; instead it may be defined as a subject-in-process. This definition empowers both women and men while recognizing the differences both between and among them. (58)
Ratcliffe goes on to take Adrienne Rich’s “politics of location” as an exemplum of essence- as-process and to suggest how such a politics of location can inform classroom practice. She offers a list of possibilities for classroom practice suggesting that teachers challenge their students to, among other things, “identify and analyze the positions from which we have spoken, are speaking, and are spoken;. .. to play with re-visioning these positions;. .. to analyze academic discourse, recognizing how it silences and is sustained by particular voices;. . . to analyze textual strategies used by women and men in particular 181 positions;. . . to listen simultaneously to the many voices that inform an issue and critique the ‘happy pluralism’ that attempts to accept all these voices” (63).
What is most interesting to me, though, is the recurrence of words and phrases like “specific,” “particular,” and “peculiar” in both Ratcliffe’s summaries of Rich and in the ways in which Ratcliffe would have teachers challenge students. Although Ratcliffe is not explicit about the importance of looking at local, concrete situations in order to understand gender and sexual difference, such a privileging of the particular is an implicit foundation of her argument. Thus, if we are to “identify and analyze the positions from which we have spoken, are speaking, and are spoken,” the local particularities of those positions must be acknowledged: What does it mean for a specific female student to speak in an
English classroom at a small, private, liberal arts college that employs few female professors? How might this particular student’s speaking position be delimited by the gender dynamics in that specific classroom with a specific professor and specific classmates? How might this woman’s act of speaking change (or not change) her own local position and the positions of those around her? Similarly, if students are to “analyze discourse, recognizing how it silences and is sustained by particular voices,” they would need to begin with concrete, specific examples of academic discourse, perhaps journal articles, chapters of textbooks, or fieldnotes from observations of local university classrooms. In either of these situations eschewing broad generalizations (about female students, about academic discourse) can help students and teachers avoid totalizations that limit the role of the woman-student, woman-teacher, woman-wiiter, woman-reader as well as the man-student, man-teacher, man-writer, man-reader. Working instead at the level of local and concrete can expose students and teachers to the range of positions both women and men can occupy as well as to differences between the sexes as they are instantiated at the most immediate level. CHAPTER V
READING ACROSS RACE
In the previous two chapters, I have used class and gender as anchors for my discussions of texts as diverse as The Age of Innocence and The Girl, Lucy Gayheart and A Farewell to Arms. I hope my readings have also demonstrated that accounting for the
particulars of one’s reading experience is a strategy that can enable dialogue. Strictly
dualistic contrasts between self and other, between “us” and “them,” break down and give
way to more multidimensional understandings of both sameness and difference. In this final chapter, I will use race as an anchor, and I will investigate how offering a thick description of one’s reading experiences might be a way to begin considering how literacies
converge when readers read across race. Reading across race has become a vexed issue. In “Race, Gender, and the Politics of Reading,” Michael Awkward takes up the question of “what constitutes ‘acceptable’ readings of class texts such as Afro-American literature” (9). Awkward asks “Does the black face of the Afro-American critic actually lead to qualitatively superior or perceptively different readings of the black text than ones offered by a ‘paler’ face?” (9). After comparing appeals to the authority of shared racial experience (such as Joyce A. Joyce’s
“The Black Canon”) and similar feminist appeals to the authority of experiences shared only by women (such as Elaine Showalter’s “Critical Cross-Dressing”), Awkward condemns the “delimiting nature of an experientially based politics of interpretation” (9).
Awkward goes on to cite Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, and Mary Jacobus as positive examples of the ways in which scholars whose work has been informed by
182 183
contemporary critical theory and poststructuralism can enhance readers’ understanding and appreciation of texts by African American writers and women writers.
More recently, Elizabeth Abel has undertaken “case studies” which explore the consequences of three of the contemporary post-stractualist theories Awkward finds fruitful
for reading across race: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and cultural criticism. In Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Abel finds that “In
the course of Johnson’s essay, a discourse on positionality comes to displace, as well as to produce, a discourse on race. As the frame slides into the interior, the questions it raises
disappear. There is no further problem about a white deconstructor writing about, or writing as, a black novelist and anthropologist, since position has come to stand for race”
(482). While deconstructive critiques like Johnson’s are founded on the assumption that the figurativeness of race is enabling for people of aU races, Abel turns in her next case study to psychoanalytic critics who argue that “figuration enacts a masculine displacement of the specifically female (maternal) body whose exclusion founds the symbolic registef ’
(484). Using an essay by Margaret Homans as her example, Abel concludes that “By implying that the embodiment black and white women share is weightier than differences of color, Homans proposes a commonality often called into question by black women’s texts”
(488). Summarizing the ways in which deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism intersect with reading and race, Abel argues that “privileging the figurative [the deconstructive move] enables the white reader to achieve figurative blackness; privileging the literal [the psychoanalytic move] enables the white woman reader to forge a gender alliance that outweighs (without negating) both racial differences within gender and racial alliances across gender” (484-85). Moving outside what she describes as the “subjectivist critical ideologies” of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, Abel examines, as her final case study, material feminism. Abel argues that critics like Susan Willis have too often romanticized “‘the’ black cultural heritage, whose trath resides in an uncontaminated past,” and she finds “The representation of black social relations as utopian alternatives to industrial capitalism or to patriarchal nationalism has appealed more to white than to black materialist feminists” (491). Abel charges that “White feminists, like the frozen or 184
mummified white women represented in some black women’s texts, seem in Willis’s
discourse to be corpses finding political energy through the corpus of black women” (494).
Abel concludes that all three of these “high” theories fail to “secure some unproblematic grounding for white feminists by either resolving or displacing the politics of reading and
race” (498). Calling for a shift in critical agenda, Abel would have us turn our attention
away from interpreting “blackness” and instead interrogate “the racialization of whiteness”
(497). This important suggestion (which, as Ahel notes, is aligned with Toni Morrison’s work in Playing in the Dark) is, however, enervated by the lack of concrete discussion
about how this “racialization of whiteness” might proceed under more productive terms than those under which reading for “blackness” has been carried out The force of Abel’s
critiques of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and material feminism convinces me that they are unsatisfactory for investigating reading across race. So on what grounds might an
investigation of “whiteness” proceed that would make it more productive than investigations of “blackness” have been? How might we productively investigate the intersection of reading and race?
bell hooks may provide an answer-an answer that is not far removed from my advocacy of local and particular descriptions of what happens when literacies converge in textual encounters. In “Culture to Culture; Ethnography and Cultural Studies as Critical Intervention,” hooks begins by stating candidly that “It should be possible for scholars, especially those who are members of groups who dominate, exploit, and oppress others, to explore the political implications of their work without fear or guilt,” and she notes that “Cultural studies has emerged as that contemporary location in the academy that most invites and encourages such analysis” (124). Although hooks acknowledges that cultural studies “can serve as an intervention, making a space for forms of intellectual discourse to emerge that have not been traditionally welcomed in the academy” (125), she is also wary of its potential to re-inscribe “patterns of colonial domination, where the ‘Other’ is always made object, appropriated, interpreted, taken over by those in power, by those who dominate” (125). (This is the same problem Abel points to in Willis’s work.) To forestall such a possibility, hooks suggests that we “make of this potentially radical discipline a new 185
ethnographie terrain, a field of study where old practices are simultaneously critiqued, re enacted, and sustained” (125). Turning to Writing Culture, a volume on the “poetics and
politics of ethnography” edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, hooks enacts the sort of positioned, self-reflexive, thickly descriptive reading which she hopes will ensure
that culture studies fulfills its potential for “meaningful contestation and confrontation” (133). Describing her encounter with Writing Culture, hooks writes
I was drawn again and again to the cover of this book. It is a reproduction of a photograph (Stephen Tyler doing field work in India). One sees in this image a white male sitting at a distance from darker-skinned people, located behind him; he is writing. Initially fascinated by the entire picture, I begin to focus my attention on specific details. Ultimately I fix my attention on the piece of cloth that is attached to the writer’s glasses, presumably to block out the sun; it also blocks out a particular field of vision. This “blindspot,” artificially created, is a powerful visual metaphor for the ethnographic enterprise as it has been in the past and as it is being rewritten. As a script, this cover does not present any radical challenge to past constructions ----- As an onlooker, conscious of the politics of race and imperialism, looking at this frontispiece I am most conscious of the concrete whiteness and maleness. (127)
In even this brief sample from hooks’s more fully developed reading of the photograph, one can see that she focuses on the specific details of the photograph and then articulates how her own position as a narratee of cultural myths about racism and imperialism affects her reading of the photograph.' For hooks, the gaze of the brown man in the photograph
“can be read as consensual look of homosexual bonding and longing,” and she suggests “this brown man may indeed desire the authorial ‘phallocentiic’ power of the white man” (127). hooks is even more disconcerted by the brown/black woman who “is covered up, written over, by the graphics which tell readers the title of the book and its author” (128).
Using this detailed reading of the photograph as a springboard, hooks raises serious questions about the absence of essays by female and non-white authors in Writing Culture.
' hooks uses a similar reading strategy in “Essentialism and Experience,” a review essay in which she examines Diana Fuss’s Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. Drawing on her own experiences as a student and teacher, hooks engages and challenges Fuss’s discussions of the complex interactions between essentialism and privilege in the classroom. And in a recent JAC interview with Gary Olson, hooks explains that she sees personal stories as teaching tools and that personal “details often [seem] to be what grabs people, and it’s what makes theory seem (as it does for me) to have concrete application” (4). 186
If the photograph stands as a representation of the field of cultural studies, hooks asks “who are the subjects this addresses its discourse and practice” (129). And hooks goes on
to note that conventional academic standards of judgment are often used to exclude the experimental, radical, and self-reflexive texts of writers from traditionally marginalized
groups that have the potential to challenge the academic status quo. An obvious parallel exists between hooks’s strategies in reading the cover of Writing Culture and the ways in
which I have been attempting to account for my own textual encounters, but the ways in
which hooks simultaneously supports and challenges ethnographic methods and cultural studies pushes me to make a final but critical move in my argument for the value of particular accounts of the interaction that occurs when literacies converge, hooks forces me
to interrogate how my own ethnographically-derived critical practices might allow me to hold on to power and authority while I seemingly support and encourage the dismantling of structures of domination based on academic privilege, class, gender, and in this final chapter, race. In what ways do the strategies I advocate for examining one’s reading experiences merely disguise without disarming the forces of colonialism and domination? Before I take up these questions by turning to two novels by African American writers, though, I would like to pause a moment longer with hooks. While hooks’s readings of Writing Culture powerfully demonstrate the value of reading strategies based on acknowledging one’s own personal position and thickly describing the details of own’s textual encounter, hooks’s literary criticism seems oddly askew with these principles. “Writing the Subject: A Reading of The Cobr Purple" (published along with “Culture to
Culture” in 1990) opens with the statement that
To say even as some critics do that it [Walker’s novel] is a modem day “slave narrative” or to simply place the work within the literary tradition or epistolary sentimental novels is also a way to contain, restrict, control. Categorizing in this way implies that the text neither demands nor challenges, rather, that it can be adequately and fully discussed within an accepted critical discourse, one that remains firmly within the boundaries of conservative academic aesthetic intentionality. (454)
Butin developing her own reading of the novel (i.e., “Radical didactic messages add depth and complexity to The Color Purple without resolving the contradictions between radicalism-the vision of revolutionary transformation, and conservatism-the perpetuation 187
of bourgeois ideology” [468]), hooks continually refers to Walker’s narrative strategies and authorial decisions, and she describes how a generalized “reader” or “we as readers” might
respond to those strategies or decisions. By positioning Walker as someone who
“constructs an ideal world of true love and commitment” (458), who “inverts” the traditional voyeuristic paradigm of pornography (460), and who “appropriates” various literary forms (465) and by positing a more or less ideal reader who would recognize these
moves on Walker’s part, hooks, in her reading of this literary text, foregoes the “ethnographic” reading strategies which were so powerful when applied to the texts of
cultural studies scholars like Clifford and Marcus. In fact, it is difficult to see how hooks
has herself moved beyond the “boundaries of conservative academic aesthetic intentionality” which she began by critiquing.
Critics like Mae Gwendolyn Henderson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. might argue that hooks turns away from powerful reading strategies at the very site where they might be most useful-literary texts by African American authors. In “Speaking in Tongues,”
Henderson suggests that the texts of black women writers would be especially amenable to
the detailed, positioned reading that hooks offers of the cover of Writing Culture. Henderson writes that “Through the multiple voices that enunciate her complex subjectivity, the black woman writer not only speaks familiarly in the discourse of the other(s), but as
Other she is in contestorial dialogue with the hegemonic dominant and subdominant or ‘ambiguously (non)hegemonic’ discourses. These writers enter simultaneously into familial, or testimonial and public, or competitive discourses-discourses that both affirm and challenge the values and expectations of the reader” (120-21).^ Articulating the details of one’s experience in moving through such dialogic texts should create opportunities for readers to acknowledge their relationships to the “hegemonic” and “ambiguously (non)hegemonic” discourses in texts by African American writers. Furthermore, sharing such readings in our classrooms, at our professional conferences, and in our academic
® Although Henderson’s synthesis of Bakhtin and Gadamer is powerful way to approach texts like Williams’ Dessa Rose and Morrison’s Sula, I am a bit uncomfortable with the totalizing nature of her statements about black women’s writing and about whether other writers who are not African American women might not find themselves in similar positions between hegemonic and nonhegemonic discourses and might not produce equally dialogic texts. Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl might be a case in point 188
journals might serve as a starting point for conversations about the multiple literacies
variously positioned readers enact during textual encounters. Local and particular accounts of readers’ textual experiences would also seem to address Henry Louis Gates Jr. ’s concerns that “in the received tradition of Afro-American
criticism, [what] has been most repressed. . . [are] close readings of the text itself’ (xix). Articulating the details of one’s textual encounter is one kind of close reading that seeks to forestall the arrogant claims of universality implicit in the formalism of the mid-twentieth
century without allowing easy essentialisms and monolithic conceptions of what it means to be a white reader, a Chicano reader, a female reader, a gay reader, or a working class reader to remain unchallenged. Although Molly Abel Travis characterizes the relationship
between such reader-response theory and racial essentialism as a “dialectic without
resolution” {^'Beloved and Middle Passage” 179), I hope in this chapter to demonstrate that
we cannot forego attempts to create space for readers to articulate their multiplicitous responses to texts if we are to have a continually productive, even if unending, dialogue
about race.^ But also I hope to explore whether the particular strategies I am advocating for creating such a space tmly help produce “a site of meaningful contestation and constructive confrontation” (hooks, “Culture to Culture” 133) or whether these strategies
' Travis intends, I think, the characterization “dialectic without resolution” to be a positive one. However, by concluding her essay with the unfulfilled suggestion that “the time has come for us to uncover the complexities and protean functions of race as they lie hidden behind the ‘whiteness’ of even the most liberal gestures. And we critics dressed in Kente cloths, like members of an academic Franciscan order ministering to the needs of the marginalized, could begin by uncovering the underlayers of our own needs,” Travis reveals that “a dialectic without resolution” can be a neat way to sidestep truly difficult and uncomfortable questions. James Phelan’s ‘Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism” is one of the few attempts by critics to use reader-response theory to engage issues of reading across race. His essay begins with a provocative and very lyrical description of what it is like for him to read Beloved. Phelan then goes on to weave his responses to the narrative into a compelling argument about the novel’s conclusion and the significance of the way it denies the reader’s attempts to reach interpretive closure, especially in his own instance as a white, male reader. Sue Park also offers “One Reader’s Response to Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” While Phelan uses a more lyrical style and contrasting typefaces as he articulates his response as a reader. Park lays out her reading in a much more conventional essay. She focuses on the tripartite structure of novel, including the black and white rubbings suggestive of stone carvings that appear between the parts of the novel. 189
merely allow those who are in positions of power and authority to continue their domination.
In this chapter, I will use the strategies I have used in the previous chapters to offer close, ethnographic readings of two texts by African American writers--Toni Morrison’s
Beloved and Jess Mowry’s Way Past Cool. Just as hooks reads Writing Culture by
contextualizing the details of her reading experiences within a matrix of her own personal
and political positions, I will explore the details of my own encounters with these two
novels. I have decided to position Morrison’s and Mowry’s narratives next to each other (rather than pairing a novel by an African American writer with a novel by a white writer)
because Beloved has been so quickly and widely accepted in the academic community.^ If
the Ohio State University is typical of most large universities. Beloved is rapidly becoming one of the most often taught novels in the academy today. Beloved has appeared on the
syllabi of classes as diverse as a first-year writing course which links literature and
composition, survey courses entitled “Introduction to Fiction” and “Selected Works of
American Literature since 1865,” graduate seminars on narrative theory, and on the syllabi of courses in Black Studies and in Women’s Studies. While the prevalence of Beloved on the reading lists of various university courses is
one kind of evidence of the academic status of Morrison’s novel, the growing critical conversation surrounding Beloved is another kind of testimony. Essays on Beloved have
appeared in volumes alongside essays about the works of Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton- Bumett, Tillie Olsen, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Sarah Ome Jewett, Edith
Wharton, and Maxine Hong Kingston; scholars have compared Morrison to Faulkner, Proust, and Euripides; and a special, double issue of Modem Fiction Studies has been
devoted to Morrison’s work. Roger Sales is perhaps most succinct in his claim that "'Beloved was written in the palace of Art” (81), and as the newest Nobel laureate,
Morrison’s status within the academy’s canon of American literature seems assured.
‘ This is surely much to the chagrin of Stanley Crouch who, in an early review of Beloved, charged that Morrison “almost always loses control. . . [and] can’t resist the temptation of the trite or sentimental” (209). According to Crouch, Morrison lacks “the courage to face the ambiguities of the human soul, which transcend race,” and he concludes his review by comparing Morrison not to icons of American literature but to P.T. Bamum. 190
Because of Beloved’s complex narrative structure and its concern with storytelling,
historiography, subjectivity, and perspective, academic readers seem to have found ways to
make themselves comfortable when talking about Morrison’s work. And considering
Morrison’s background as a student at Howard University and at Cornell, as an editor at
Random House, and as a professor in the SUNY system and at Princeton, this is perhaps
not surprising. As I articulate how my own literacies are called into play when I read Beloved, I will have to investigate the ways in which my experiences as a white woman and as an academic reader position me in relationship to Morrison and her characters. Do
Morrison’s narrative strategies allow me to sidestep issues of race? How is my engagement with academic traditions of modernism and postmodernism implicated in my
relation to the racial issues of Beloved! How can I draw upon my literacies, literacies that are in part a function of my whiteness, to contribute to conversations about Morrison’s
novel? In offering my reading will I be, as hooks says, “furthering a discourse on
difference and otherness that not only marginalizes people of color but actively eliminates
the need for . . . [their] presence” (“Culture to Culture” 132)? While Morrison has secured a place for herself and her novel within the academy’s
literary circles, Jess Mowiy by all accounts moves through a different world. The book jacket of Way Past Cool offers this brief biography; “Jess Mowry was bom in Mississippi
in 1960 and raised in Oakland, where he was educated through the eighth grade. In 1988 he bought a used typewriter for ten dollars and started typing.” In contrast to Beloved,
Mowry’s Way Past Cool has (as of yet) received little attention from academic readers. Perhaps it is because the academic audience shares Nelson George’s perceptions of the novel. George, a writer for the New York Times Book Review, has described Way Past Cool as “the literary equivalent of ‘Juice’ or of Ice Cube’s latest single” (21). However for
George, Mowry’s work “has neither the consistency nor the overall perspective to be as powerful as the films and music with which it competes,” and this “maddeningly uneven” 191
novel “too often. .. chokes on clichés” (21)/ By accounting for the particulars of ray encounter with Way Past Cool, I hope to go beyond George’s analysis and question the
ways in which the university has raade space for certain African American literacy
strategies and excluded others. What is it about Mowiy’s narrative that seems to create a distance between Way Past Cool and academic readers like me? Why do academic literacy
strategies exclude works like Way Past Cool but not Belovedl How can academic readers like me learn to develop new literacies that would make us better readers of stories like Mowry’s straight-forward account of the lives of thirteen-year-old gang members? What
happens when readers encounter worlds that are completely strange to them, and what are
appropriate responses to the disorientation such encounters can create? These are the questions that I will be engaged with in this chapter, and as hooks says about her similar
questions, they will not admit easy answers, hooks concludes her discussion of ethnographic ways of reading with the acknowledgment that “Of course, we must enter this new discursive field recognizing from the onset that our speech will be ‘troubled,’ that there exists no ready-made ‘common language.’ Drawing from a new ethnography, we are challenged to celebrate the polyphonic nature of critical discourse, to-as it happens in the
® Of course the fact that Way Past Cool was reviewed in the New York Times does imply a certain mainstream acceptance of Mowry and his work. The reception of Way Past Cool has, though, been rather peculiar. Cataloged by the Library of Congress as general fiction. Way Past Cool is typically shelved in libraries and book stores with other novels or occasiondly in Black or African American sections. However, the American Libraiy Association awarded it a prize for young adult fiction in 1993, although none of the libraries in the Columbus metropolitan area carry Mowry’s novel in their young adult catalogues. As I will detail in my reading of the novel, it is not surprising that Way Past Cool defies easy categorizations. 192
traditional African American religious experience--hear one another ‘speak in tongues,’
bear witness, and patiently wait for revelation” (133)/
E-RACE-ING READERLY ANXIETY?: MODERN/POSTMODERN LITERACIES AND READING BELOVED
In her often quoted “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Morrison describes what it is
like to plunge into Beloved:
the in médias res opening... is here excessively demanding. It is abrupt, and should appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible between the reader and the novel’s population. Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance-a gangplai&, perhaps (but a very short one). And the house into which this snatching-this kidnapping-propels one, changes from spiteful to loud to quiet, as the sounds in the body of the ship itself may have changed Here I wanted the compelling confusion of being there as they (the characters) are; suddenly, without comfort or succor from the “author,” with only imagination, intelhgence, and necessity available for the journey. (228-29)
With spiteful numbers, a venomous infant, young boys creeping away from home before
they are thirteen years old, and a grandmother named “Baby” who chooses to use “the little energy left her for pondering color” (4), the opening of Beloved, certainly makes me feel
“snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign.” Although I am able
® Karla EC. Holloway and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos’ bravely unconventional New Dimensions of Spirituality is in many ways compatible with hooks’ agenda. In alternating chapters Holloway and Demetrakopoulos offer their individual contrasting and complementary readings of Morrison’s novels from The Bluest Eye through Tar Baby, and they each work to acknowledge in their readings how the social/cultural narratives of which they have been narratees influence their readings and how their own personal positions and their dialogues with each other enter into their interpretive acts. In “Theories of Africans: The Question of Litermy Anthropology,” Christopher L. Miller takes a similar stance and advocates such strategies for the reader of black African literature in French. Recognizing that the “The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of reading African literature in a nonethnic, nonprojective fashion will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately unattainable” (282), Miller suggests that “the most fruitful path for the Western critic of African literature-the Iheor-is not to play it safe and ‘stay home,’ nor to ‘leave home without it’ and pretend to approach African literature witii a virgin mind, but to balance one against the other, by reconsidering the applicability of all our critical terms and by looking to traditional African cultures for terms they might offer” (300). 193
by the end of the first paragraph to figure out that 124 is a house and one that is evidently
haunted, the notion of a baby being venomous jars me. ( I usually associate babies with
fuzzy blankets, endearing gurgles, and sweet, new-skin smells.) And I find myself struggling to imagine the precise nature of Baby Suggs’ “intolerable” past and present that
would make her so uninterested in “leaving life or living it” that she would be content to contemplate “a little lavender” (4).
While I am disoriented and confused by shattered mirrors and tiny hand prints appearing in a cake as well as by the way Howard, Buglar and Baby Suggs respond to “the lively spite” of the house (4), Sethe and Denver “understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light” (4). My ignorance of the knowledge Sethe and
Denver share reinforces ray sense of alienation; however, I am not inclined to foUov/ the lead of the driver passing by “who whipped his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed 124” (4). No, instead of speeding up, I find myself wanting to slow down, to take in this strange story, to find out more about Sethe and Denver and the peculiar world of 124.
Temporary Alliances Despite my disorientation and confusion in these opening pages, I am mesmerized by the concrete images of “a kettle of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor” and the linguistic playfulness of phrases like “creeping-off boys” (3; 4). Not only do my ears thrill at the way the language of these opening paragraphs reverberate with intensity, I am also able to slide past some of the more confusing aspects of the text by connecting some of the domestic details of 124 with my own memories of my grandparents’ farmhouse in the mountains of West Virginia. Kettles of chickpeas, although not usually spilled on the floor, were common in my grandma’s kitchen. It is easy for me to merge the image of Sethe when she “took a little spit from the tip of her tongue with forefinger.. . . [and] Quickly, lightly ... touched the stove” with my memories of my grandma standing in front of her large, wood-fired cooking stove. When Sethe proceeds to make biscuits by measuring “soda and salt into the crease of her folded hand” and then squeezing “half a handful of 194
lard" through the flour while “with her left hand sprinkling water” (16), I can recall my grandmother going through the same motions. And like Denver at the conclusion of the
chapter, I have myself peeled the “thin cake of wax” from the top of a new jar of homemade jelly. Although male readers like James Phelan have registered a temporary sense of alienation caused by the potentially negative portrayal of Howard and Buglar who flee 124 abandoning their mother and baby sister (“I Have Never Seen Anything Like It”),
I am able to establish an alliance with Sethe and Denver along a gendered axis of
domesticity. Sethe’s first rememory, though, destabilizes this alliance. In this first of many “rememories,” Sethe recalls “rutting among the headstones with the engraver,” exchanging her body for the word “Beloved” carved on a “dawn-
colored stone studded with star chips” (5). This first rememory makes me sympathize greatly with Sethe who has felt “baby blood” soak “her fingers like oil” and who, in spite
of having opened her knees “wide... as any grave” for the engraver, can still count “on the stillness of her own soul” (5). While I sympathize with Sethe, I become aware of a
great gulf between us. Harryette Mullens’ work on nineteenth-century slave narratives
calls my attention to the ways in which I have benefited from “a racial division of labor in
which white women bore the burden of trying to embody pure womanhood, while black
women suffered the harsher materiality of female experience unsoftened by ideology”
(247).’ I recognize that the contemporary portrait of the “Super Woman” who successfully satisfies the demands of career, children, husband, and household is in many ways only a modulation of the nineteenth century “cult of true womanhood” whose basic tenets of purity, domesticity, and submissiveness were predicated on the presence of African American women as the overtly sexualized Other. This distinction between white women and African American women erupts prominently later in Beloved's progression when Amy Denver finds Sethe on the banks of the Ohio River. Although Amy is, as an indentured
’’ In her reading of Willa Gather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Morrison delineates just this dynamic. The invalid Sapphira Colbert “escapes the necessity of inhabiting her own body by dwelling on the young, healthy,and sexually appetizing Nancy” (Playing in the Dark 26), and similarly Gather has on an authorial level “employed [surrogate, serviceable black bodies] in behalf of her own desire for a safe participation in loss, in love, in chaos, injustice” (Playing in the Dark 28). See also Chapter Two, “Slave and Mistress,” in Hazel Garby’s Reconstructing Womanhood. 195
servant, not much better off than Sethe and the men at Sweet Home, her reproductive capacities have not been exploited to perpetuate a system in which her children would be
merely human capital. In contrast to Sethe, Amy is able to report that “I been bleeding for
four years but I ain’t having nobody’s baby. Won’t catch me sweating milk” (83). And while Sethe is struggling to get the milk that schoolteacher’s nephews with their mossy teeth tried to steal from her to her child, Amy is able to pursue a more materialistic quest.
She is headed to Boston in search of velvet That Sethe continually refers to Amy, “the raggediest-looking piece of trash. .. [with] Arms like cane stalks and enough hair or four
or five heads” (31-32), as “miss” only reinforces the power of the distinct roles white and African American play within a larger ideological system. Despite my ability to share in a
really quite visceral way the domestic chores of 124,1 realize that I am participating in only a small part of Sethe and Denver’s world.
Following Sethe’s rememory of submitting to the terms of the gravestone engraver who demands her body in exchange for seven letters and then lets his son wimess his
depravity, another rememory unfolds in Sethe’s unwilling mind. suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her- remembeiing the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that. (6)
As the horrors of Sethe’s experiences at Sweet Home continue to unfold in these rememories and as the excruciating rememories of both Sethe and Paul D gather cumulative force, I have a harder and harder time knowing where to be. As I leam more about Sethe, her life, and lives of those around her, my respect for their ability to survive grows exponentially, but so does the gap between us. While Barbara Christian describes her first reading of a novel by an African American woman, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, as a situation in which “I as subject encountered myself as object ___
Marshall provided me with a guide, a way to contemplate my own situation and gave me 196
back the memory, the embodied history of women like myself who had preceded me” (197), there is no image of myself I want to identify with in Beloved. I certainly do not want to be Mrs. Gamer with a metaphoric lump in my throat that matches the “lump in her neck the size of a sweet potato” and makes her “unable to speak to anyone” (9).* Mrs. Gamer’s silence makes her complicit in her husband’s brand of slavery which allows him to feel “tough enough and smart enough to make and call his own niggers men” (11).’ Paul D, his brothers, Halle, and Sixo are far more admirable. In agreeing to let the thirteen- year-old Sethe choose a husband for herself even though they were “All in their twenties, minus women, fucking cows, dreaming of rape, thrashing on pallets, rubbing their thighs,” Mr. Gamer’s male slaves demonstrate that they are men in ways far beyond what
Mr. Gamer recognizes and attempts to authorize. And, of course, Sethe chooses the most gentle of the Sweet Home men, Halle, who was “so in love with his mother he gave up five years of Sabbaths just to see her sit down for a change” (11). Despite the degradations and injustices inflicted upon them, it is the oppressed who enact the sort of ethical and moral behavior with which I would want to align myself. Even as ethics serves as a
® Other white people who appear as the narrative progresses are no less problematic. The Bodwins, despite their abolitionist fervor, have sitting on a shelf by the back door, a blackboy’s mouth full of money. His head was thrown back farther than a head could go, his hands were shoved in his pockets. Bulging like moons, two eyes were all the face he had above the gaping red mouth. His hair was a cluster of raised, widely spaced dots made of nail heads. And he was on his knees. His mouth, wide as a cup, held the coins needed to pay for a delivery or some small service, but could just have well have held buttons, pins, or crab-apple jelly. Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words ‘At Yo Service.”’ (255) And Sawyer, the man who owns the restaurant where Sethe works, “used to be a sweet man. Patient, tender in his dealings with his help. But each year, following the death of his son in the War, he grew more and more crotchety. As though Sethe’s dark face was to blame” (191). By looking toward white people like the Gamers, the Bodwins, and Sawyer, I do not mean to imply that a white reader like myself can identify only with other white people. My “temporary alliances” with Sethe and Denver based on gender and social class suggest ways readers might identify on any number of other bases with fictional characters; however, the specificities of Sethe’s and Denver’s experiences as African Americans make me all too aware that in this case there is a gap between them and me, a gap based on race. “ Karen E. Fields’ “To Embrace Dead Strangers” offers a very different reading of Mrs. Gamer and Sethe’s relation to her mistress. According to Fields, Sethe and Mrs. Gamer’s mother/daughter relationship allows us to see “an infinitely delicate imagining of love on its own, without the authority of conventionalities that could make it coherent and durable” (165). 197
possible bridge, though, the particular experiences of the Sweet Home men remind me of the difference race makes.
The novel’s rich language, my own roots in the rural lower class, gender, and ethics all help me find ray way into the textual world that is Beloved and foreground for me
the need to recognize that, as Henry Giroux notes, the borders of cultural difference have
become “unfixed, unsettled, porous, and hybrid” and that it is “increasingly difficult either
to defend notions of singular identity or to deny that different groups, communities, and people are increasingly bound to each other in a myriad of complex relationships” (40).
However, at the same time I am all too aware that race matters, that any of these avenues of access (language, social class, gender, ethics) can only take me so far before I find myself at an impasse confronting the limits of my racialized literacies as I move through Beloved.
Just as Frederic Henry emerged in the details of my reading experience as a man who
respects the ultimate alterity of Catherine’s corporeal experiences and I came to recognize the irreducible difference between myself as a gendered reader and Frederic, so too here in
Beloved do I recognize and respect the ways in which the experiences of African
Americans like Sethe, Denver, and Paul D cannot finally be contained by any comparisons or connections I might make as I work to cross the border between my experiences and
their experiences. The affective result of this recognition is to make me uncomfortable. I feel as
though I must read gingerly, being careful not to pathologize the Otherness of Morrison’s novel or to use it as a resource for redefining whiteness as the implicitly Universal.
Accounting for the particulars of my movement through these early pages of Beloved
Reed Way Dasenbrock makes a similar point in his PMLA article, “Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English.” Citing novels by R.K. Narayan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Rudolfo Anaya, and Witi Diimaera as works of literature that are “multicultural, not only in having multiculturalism as part of their subject matter and theme, but also in allowing for readers from a range of cultures” (18), Dasenbrock makes the point that the very unintelligibility of such works for a “less informed reader, far from preventing that reader from experiencing the work justly, is what creates meaning for that reader” (18), While I veiy much agree wiüi Dasenbrock that gaps between readers and the textual worlds they encounter (in this case, between me and Morrison’s characters) can be a significant part of one’s textual experience, I am, though, uncomfortable with the broadness of Dasenbrock’s generalizations about the monolingual reader of Anaya’s novel, the pakeha reader of Tangi, non-Chinese readers of Kingston’s work, and Western readers of Narayan’s narrative. 198
includes acknowledging these tensions and my uneasiness and discomfort. I find, though,
that as I move further into Beloved that my anxieties about reading across race are
dislocated and subsumed (at least temporarily) by the ways in which the narrative challenges me to enact modem/postmodem literacies that I have acquired as an academic
reader ‘ ' The processes of sorting through the multiple perspectives of Sethe, Denver, and
Paul D, trying to understand how all the rememories fit into a comprehensive chronology, and setting aside narrow conceptions of character and mimesis in order to experience the
fullness of Beloved’s complexity all increase my readerly anxiety. It is easy (perhaps too easy) for me to allow the confusion and disquietude engendered by such
modem/postmodern techniques to subsume the tensions and uneasiness that arise out of my
status as a white reader of an African American text. The process of displacing my anxiety
about race into a field of questions about narrativity, the discursive construction of both
history and contemporary reality, and the quintessentially unstable nature of any totalizing
ontology actually begins with Sethe’s first rememoiy of bargaining with the tombstone engraver.
Reading Beloved as a Modern/Postmodern Text Although this rememory foregrounds for me the distance between Sethe and me even though we might share a gendered identity, it also pushes me to reconceive my understanding of how this narrative might be functioning as a ghost story. This first rememory links the title of the novel, “Beloved,” with the baby ghost “full of venom” who is haunting 124. As the rememory of the engraver closes, I find myself in a less remote past when Baby Suggs is still alive. Her comment to Sethe that “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband’s spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don’t talk to me. You
” I am more interested in the experiential dynamics of my encounter with Morrison’s Beloved than with making a carefully calibrated classification of Morrison and her work as either modem or postmodern. The qualities of my experience-instability, indeterminacy, multiple perspectives—are, I think, endemic to both modem and postmodern works. I would align myself with Maggie Sale who “refuses to reproduce the marginalizing project of tradition and canon building” and rejects the prescriptiveness of strict generic or historical categorizations (49). 199
lucky” (5) works to begin the process of naturalizing the supernatural. As a reader, I find
myself shifting away from my preconceptions about what might unfold in this “ghost
story.” Paul D’s calm response, “You got company?,” to the pool of red, undulating light
that engulfs him as he enters 124 further soUdifies my sense that the presence of a ghost is
something to be accepted at face value, as a routine occurrence. Carol E. Schmudde and Barbara Hill Rigney have both commented on the ways in which Beloved draws upon the
genre of the ghost story. In “The Haunting of 124,” Schmudde argues that “At the most
basic level of plot and setting. Beloved is a ghost story, the tale of a nineteen-year haunting
of a house at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati” (409). Schmudde goes on to suggest that “Beloved may be unique in using the ghost story to shock its readers into locating the
source of horror not in mysteries beyond this world, but rather in the repressed and
unclaimed realities of the factual, historical past” (415). Barbara HiU Rigney makes the
similar point that “Beloved is not an ordinary ghost story, certainly not the Henry James kind of psychological thriller that depends on the psychopathology of the protagonist ___
Morrison’s characters are survivors, condemned to life and to sanity, and the spirits they see are as real as the history they endure” (234).'^ The naturalization of the ghost, and the way that it, as a representative of the past, truly lives achronologically alongside the present are parts of what make me begin to consider how I might read Morrison’s novel in light of modem and postmodern traditions.
Not only do I find myself modulating my expectations about the past and present, the living and the dead, but I must also sort through a number of different perspectives on
Other critics have argued that Beloved is not merely a ghost story or not a ghost story at all. Karla EC. Holloway, who argues that “If Beloved is not only Sethe’s dead daughter returned, but the return of all the faces, all the drowned, but remembered, faces of mothers and their children who have lost their being because of the force of that EuroAmerican slave-history, then she has become a cultural mooring place, a moment for reclamation and for naming” (522). Elizabeth House takes a different approach and suggests that Beloved is “not a supernatural being of any kind but simply a young woman who has herself suffered the horrors of slavery” (17). House goes on to offer a detailed analysis of sections four and five in Part Two of the novel, arguing that in referring to “round baskets” and “gunsmoke,” Beloved is remembering the capture of her mother by slave traders, that Beloved’s descriptions of crouching are derived from the horrors she experience on the Middle Passage, and that she was subsequently imprisoned and sexually abused by officers from the ship before escaping and finding her way (arbitrarily) to the stump outside 124. 200
these past and present events. While Sethe’s and Paul D’s mutual rememories of Sweet
Home place me in an uncomfortable position, Denver’s perspective on her mother returns me to the present. Denver is confused by the way her mother is all of a sudden “Looking, in fact acting, like a girl instead of the quiet queenly woman Denver had known all her life.
The one who never looked away, who when a man got stomped to death by a mare right in front of Sawyer’s restaurant did not look away; and when a sow began eating her own litter
did not look away then either. And when the baby’s spirit picked up Here Boy and slammed him into the wall hard enough to break two legs and dislocated his eye, so hard he
went into convulsions and chewed up his tongue, still her mother did not look away” (12). For Paul D, Sethe was “Halle’s woman. Pregnant every year including the year she sat by
the fire telling him she was going to run” (9), but now she is a fragile survivor whom he
cradles with “his body [as] an arc of kindness” (17). Sethe herself seems to want desperately to avoid developing a sense of selfhood and of her own identity. Working “hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe,” Sethe wants to avoid the
archaeological project of considering how her past experiences have shaped the many selves that she is today (6).
The shifts among time frames as the various rememories surface and recede, the multiple perspectives on the present offered by Denver, Paul D, and Sethe, and the
naturalization of the presence of a venomous baby ghost all push me to read Beloved within the traditions of modernism/postmodernism. Fulfilling her promise, Morrison has provided “the places and spaces so that the reader can participate” (“Rootedness” 341). For me, the modem/postmodem narrative techniques become that “places and spaces” where I participate in Beloved. With its fragmented plot and continual shifts among narrative voices, Morrison’s novel in many ways offers me an experience not unlike Joyce’s
Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, or Absalom, Absalom!, Ellison's Invisible Man, D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, or even Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. As I move further into the novel’s progression, I experience along with the characters a dissolution of narrative certainty and find myself continually trying to stabilize 201
and make coherent the tellings and re-tellings of Sweet Horae, Sethe’s escape and Denver’s
birth, the arrival of Schoolteacher at 124 Bluestone Road, and Paul D’s experiences in
Alfred, Georgia. These movements into the past are intricately interwoven with the forward progression of Beloved’s arrival, her possession of Sethe, and ultimate exorcism,
Denver’s growth and moves toward independence, and Paul D’s reclamation of himself as the mst flakes fall from the tobacco tin in his chest. So connected and interwoven are all
these threads that it is difficult to articulate a response to all of them. But because the kernel
of the narrative lies in the woodshed and in Morrison’s decision to reincarnate Margaret Gamer, a slave who, having escaped across the Ohio River, chose to kill her daughter rather than see her reclaimed by a slave catcher, let me try to trace my response to the ways
in which this one particular narrative episode unfolds and the ways in which
modem/postmodem issues allow me to distance myself from racial issues.'^
E-Race-ing Readerly Anxiety: A Trip to the Woodshed
In the opening pages of the novel, even the opening sentences, I leam that the ghost
of a venomous baby is haunting 124, and that the house is “palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut” (5). I also leam in these first few pages that the baby’s spell is “No more powerful than the way . . . [Sethe] loved her,” and that Sethe had felt “baby blood”
soak “her fingers like oil” (4; 5). But in these early pages, I have no reason to suspect that it is Sethe who pulled the handsaw under the crawling already? baby’s chin. The unfolding horrors of Sweet Home and of Sethe’s escape and Denver’s birth make it easy to imagine plenty of likely villains who would leave a mother holding the body of murdered baby. Even though there are indications (e.g., Sethe’s defensive response to Paul D that “I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Gamer: it cost too much!” [15]; Sethe’s guilt over Baby Suggs’s collapse; and her reference to the “perfect death of her crawling-already? baby” [99]) that make me aware of my distance from and limited knowledge of the full nature of the horrors of Sethe’s life, I am still shocked at the
" See Ashraf H.A. Rushdy’s “Daughters Signifyin(g) History” and Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s “‘Margaret Gamer’: A Cincinnati Story” for detailed discussions of the Margaret Gamer case and of Morrison’s use of such historical “facts.” 202
end of Part One by the climatic multiple revelations (from the perspective of Schoolteacher and the slave catcher, of the community, and of Sethe herself) of what happened in the
woodshed. The first overt statement I encounter about Sethe’s role in her child’s death comes from a not particularly credible source-Nelson Lord, a classmate of Denver’s at Lady Jones’s school. Denver remembers Nelson asking her “Didn’t your mother get locked away for murder?” (104). While a playground remark such as Nelson’s is not to my ears particularly credible, Denver’s response-retreating into deafness-begins to fill me with dread. But I am steered away from Sethe’s past by the intervening narrative episode about Paul D’s experience on a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia and by Beloved’s disturbing visit to
Paul D in the woodshed. When the narrative returns me to the time in which Sethe has just arrived at 124, it seems impossible to imagine her as the murderer suggested by Denver’s classmate. The day after an almost biblical feast at 124 (a feast some neighbors felt was a bit arrogant in its extravagance), Baby Suggs tends her garden, noticing that “The sky was blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. She could hear birds, and faintly, the stream way down in meadow. The puppy. Here Boy, was burying the last bones from yesterday’s party. From somewhere at the side of the house came the voices of
Buglar, Howard, and the crawling girl The quiet clok clok clok of wood splitting reminded her that Stamp was doing the chore he promised to the night before” (138).
Although Baby Suggs senses that “Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess,” there is “Suddenly, behind the disapproving odor, way way behind it... another thing. Dark and coming.
Something she couldn’t get at it because the other odor hid it” (138). Just as Baby Suggs is “Thwarted yet wondering” in trying to discern the precise nature of the “dark and coming” thing, 1 am left “thwarted yet wondering” as the narrative pulls away from the scene at 124 and takes me back to Baby Suggs’ life with the Gamers and her establishment in Cincinnati after Halle had bought her freedom. After an eight page detour away from the “dark and coming” thing, I am returned at the end of this section to Baby Suggs standing 203
“in the garden smelling disapproval, feeling a dark and coming thing, and seeing high-
topped shoes that she didn’t like the look of at all. At all” (147).
When I turn the page to the next section, I find myself positioned not with Sethe,
Baby Suggs, Paul D, or Denver, but instead jarred by the sudden way in which I am forced
to share the perspective of the four horsemen, “schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff,” who come to reclaim Sethe and her children (148). I am offered a
paragraph-long lesson on the importance of “taking cate” when capturing fugitive slaves “because likely as not the fugitive would make a dash for i f and “you ended up killing
what you were paid to bring back alive. Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not
be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin” (148). From this racist perspective, the characters I have come to love and admire are transmogrified into imbeciles. Rather than the dignified man who fulfills his promise to chop wood for a
household of women after they have offered a huge feast to their neighbors, Stamp Paid becomes “A crazy old nigger.. .in the woodpile with an ax... grunting, making low, cat noises like” and Baby Suggs becomes “a woman with a flower in her hat Crazy too,
probably” (149). It is with these four horsemen that I travel for the first time into the
woodshed where two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time. (149)
As schoolteacher, the nephew, and slave catcher ride away from the “damnedest bunch of
coons they’d ever seen,” they deal with what they have just seen by turning it into “testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who need every
care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred” (151). The overt racism of the four horsemen makes it easy for me to distance myself from this initial perspective on the events in the woodshed. Because schoolteacher, his nephew, and the slave catcher are so clearly morally bankrupt, I immediately discount their version of the story and await further revelation that might make the events in the woodshed more comprehensible. The modem/postmodem dimensions of the narrative I have already 204
encountered lead me fully to expect that I will be offered additional versions of Sethe’s response to schoolteacher’s arrival. This expectancy combined with the obvious inadequacy of the four horsemen as narrators of the infanticide allow me to postpone difficult questions
about Sethe’s actions and about how I might be implicated in the system of race relations
that lead to her “rough response to the Fugitive Bill” (171). It is easier for me to focus on
the difficulties of narrating this event, rather than on the event itself.
In the next section of the novel, I experience not a retelling of the infanticide, but instead, I watch another reader, Paul D, try to make sense of a textual account of Sethe’s
actions. When Stamp Paid presents Paul D with the newspaper clipping, Paul D pushes it because “The print meant nothing to him” (155). I can sympathize with Paul D’s reaction.
Just as schoolteacher’s perspective on Sethe’s actions mean nothing to me, the “black scratches” of the newspaper clipping signify nothing to Paul D. But just as the overt
racism of the first “factual” account of the death of the crawling already? baby makes it easy for me to focus on the incomprehensibility of the events, so to does Paul D’s status as a
reader of the narrative about Sethe allow me to shift my attention away from the event itself
to issues of unnarratability. Both Paul D and I are confronted with the “facts” about the death of the crawling already? baby, but as Morrison suggests, “the crucial distinction . . . is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth.
Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannof ’ (“Inventing Memory” 113). The process, though, of using human intelligence to construct truth allows me, as a particularly situated reader steeped in modem/postmodem traditions, to sidestep painful
questions about Sethe’s actions.
Even in the final section of Part One of Beloved when I have access to Sethe’s rememory of what happened when she “recognized a hat, and split to the woodshed to kill
her children” (158), I am able to focus on the tellability of the story rather than on the story itself. As Sethe begins spinning out a story to answer Paul D’s questions about the newspaper clipping, she spins “round and round the room. Past the jelly cupboard, past the window, past the front door” (159). Turning and returning from her struggles to leam about parenting at Sweet Home to her pride in having gotten herself and her children to 205
Cincinnati, Sethe tries to provide Paul D with a sense of the circumstances that led her to try and “outhurt the hurter” (234). Looking at the clipping in Paul D’s hand, Sethe, who
“could recognize only 75 printed words (half of which appeared in the newspaper clipping) . . . knew that the words she did not understand hadn’t any more power than she to
explain” (161), and she knew that “the circle she was making around the room, him [Paul D], the subject would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody
who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off-she could never explain” (163). Ultimately, Sethe resorts to a reduction:
the truth was simple, not a long-drawn-out record of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells. Simple; she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (163)
Sethe’s spinning and the way she foregrounds the status of her experiences as narrative (“If they didn’t get it right off-she could never explain [163]) occupies as much of my attention
as does her description of having “carried, pushed, and dragged” her children to the woodshed so she could put them “over there where no one could hurt them.”
The process of gradually discovering Sethe’s role in the death of the crawling already? baby and then moving among shifting perspectives-from the unsatisfying
account of schoolteacher and his henchmen to Paul D’s reaction to the newspaper clipping to Sethe’s attempt to explain her actions-causes me to read Morrison’s narrative as I have other modem and postmodern novels that require me to sort through a complicated layering of perspectives, to unscramble fractured chronological sequences, and to negotiate my way
through ambiguities in the text. Wolfgang Iser would argue that the “indeterminate sections, or gaps, of literary texts... are a basic element for the aesthetic response” (9), and he goes on to suggest that “since the eighteenth century, indeterminacy-or at least an awareness of it-has tended to increase” (15). While I would want to quibble with Iser about his privileging of indeterminacy at the expense of other features of texts and of readers’ 206
responses to various aspects of a textual experience, it would be disingenuous to claim that
I have been unaffected by the interest in indeterminacy and ambiguity that has dominated
English studies, I read the indeterminacy and ambiguity of countless modem and postmodern novels as highlighting the inherent instability of the past, present, and future, the unknowability of Truth, and/or the nonexistence of Truth outside an individual’s solipsistic, discursive constraction of it. But in foregrounding their own synthetic dimensions, modem/postmodem texts create a space for me as a reader where I can focus on episteraological and ontological abstractions, rather than on painful questions such as how the racial history of the United States makes it difficult to judge Sethe’s attempt to put her children “Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe.” In his critique of “ludic postmodernism,” Peter McLaren notes that by focusing on “the fabulous combinatory potential of signs in the production of meaning” as part of a self-reflexive deconstmction of Western metanarratives, postmodernism “often simply reinscribes the status quo and reduces history to the supplementarity of signification or the free-floating trace of textuality” (198). In coming to understood what happened in the woodshed, the modem/postmodem dimensions of Beloved function on one level as a way for me to distance myself from disturbing questions about the infanticide and to transform the death of Sethe’s oldest daughter into issues of signification.
Possibilities for a Modern/Postmodern Pedagogy and Literacy Education: Three Teachers in B eloved Parts Two and Three of the novel, however, make me go beyond merely allowing modem/postmodem narrative techniques and concerns to displace anxieties engendered by the act of reading across race. While the first half of the novel culminates in revelations that resolve some of the mysteries surrounding Sethe’s flight to the woodshed, the second half of the novel (Parts Two and Three) advances the action taking place in and around 124 in 1873-Beloved’s parasitic possession of Sethe, Denver’s growth, Paul D’s return from the church basement. More though than merely advancing the action, these sections also help me see how modem/postmodem literacies can be deployed in the service of a pedagogy that 207
will allow me to engage the painful issues raised for me as a white reader of Beloved,
rather than merely functioning to help me e-race my readerly anxiety. In order to understand how Parts Two and Three of Beloved school me in the
potential of a modem/postmodem pedagogy, it is first necessary for me to turn back to Part
One and to the images of teachers, writing, reading, and learning present there.Most
obvious and most unsatisfactory (to put it mildly) in his pedagogical practices is
Schoolteacher. In Part One, this “Schoolteacher” emerges as one of the most heinous and wretched slavemasters in line with Simon LeGree (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Dr. Flint (Incidents in the Life o f a Slave Girt). In Part Two more specifics are revealed about his pedagogical practices. Schoolteacher enacts what Paulo Freire calls the “banking” concept of education. Sitting on the porch with his nephews. Schoolteacher would “talk and they’d write. Or he’d read and they would write down what he said” (193). By “projecting an absolute ignorance” onto his students. Schoolteacher justifies his own existence as the person who owns and controls knowledge (Freire 58), and with such a “mechanistic, static, naturalistic view” of his students’ consciousnesses, it is not surprising that Schoolteacher resorts to empirical and objective methods in order to quantify and study the African Americans at Sweet Home (Freire 64). Sethe recalls that “Schoolteacher’d wrap
" Parts Two and Three of Beloved also push me to go beyond the recognition that the engagement such strategies demand of me does more than merely increase my affective involvement with the narrative-a point Philip Page makes when he argues that “The narrative fragmentation denies the reader the expected level of immediate comprehension and forces them to wait for explanations, to remember previously narrated fragments, and to piece together the narrative’s chronology. And yet, partly because of the necessity for readers’ active participation, the cumulative effect of the intensive exploration of the characters’ memories is profound” (36-37). "lam indebted to Linda Krumholz’s article, “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved' for first calling my attention to die ways in which one can read Beloved as a lesson in pedagogy. Although the arguments 1 advance here are for the most part quite compatible with the arguments Krumholz advances, we diverge in one critical area. Krumholz posits her reading of the novel (i.e., “Morrison brings together the African-American oral and literary tradition to create a powerful and intensely personal representation of slavery in American... that indirectly critiques historical and pedagogical methods prevalent in the United States” [405]) as a reading available to all readers. 1 hope 1 have demonstrated in this dissertation the importance of moving away from such universal readings, and I want to emphasize that my reading of Beloved arises out of the ways in which my particular literacies converge with the text. In what follows, 1 will note other, more local ways in which my reading both converges and diverges from Krumholz. 208
that string all overhead, ‘cross ray nose, around ray behind. Number my teeth” (191), and although she has never told anyone else, Sethe tells Beloved how Schoolteacher instructed
his pupils to make two columns on their paper and to put Sethe’s “human characteristics on
the left; her animal ones on the right,” cautioning them “And don’t forget to line them up”
(193). The investiture of such pedagogical methods and scientism in a character who is so
reprehensible clearly undermines this particular approach to knowledge and learning.'^ The second publicly proclaimed teacher I encounter in Beloved is Lady Jones who
“did what white people thought unnecessary if not illegal: crowded her little parlor with the colored children who had time and interest in book learning” (102). While I do not witness
much of Lady Jones’s teaching, I do witness its effect on Denver; “she had almost a year
of the company of her peers and along with them learned to spell and count. She was
seven, and those two hours in the afternoon were precious to her. Especially so because
she had done it on her own and was pleased and surprised by the pleasure and surprise it
created in her mother and her brothers” (102). The value of Lady Jones’s school for
Denver seems to be in the connections she feels she is making with her classmates, in the
pleasure her learning gives to her family members, and in the “beauty of the letters of her name” (102).
While Lady Jones’s school functions as a site for communion and connection that builds Denver’s self-esteem, I notice subtle indications that Lady Jones subscribes to an ideology that takes a traditional, utilitarian view of textual literacy as an empowering avenue to freedom. Lady Jones could make an appearance in Janet Duitsman Cornelius’s When I Can Read My Title Clear alongside teachers like Lily Granderson, Harriet Brent Jacobs and her daughter, Frances Rollins, and Mary and William Weston, aU of whom conducted schools for freed African American men and women in the years after the Civil War. In
When I Can Read My Title Clear, Cornelius documents “The tremendous drive by black people to grasp learning once it was legal for them to do so,” and Cornelius’s research reveals that “the numbers of literate former slaves who appeared from the ranks where
See Barbara Christian’s ‘“Somebody Forget to Tell Somebody Something’” for a related discussion of schoolteacher’s participation in a nineteenth century intellectual tradition of “providing intellectual arguments for a profitable legal and dehumanizing institution” (338). 209
literacy was supposed forbidden show how much enslaved African-Americans valued the liberating qualities of literacy within the slave community” (10). However, by opening her
study with an unproblematized quote from Frederick Douglass about how and why he
learned to read, Cornelius reveals her own commitment to “the liberating qualities” of
textual literacy, and her study focuses only on the ways in which African Americans before and after the Civil War schooled themselves in traditional print literacy, not on any
alternative literacies that might have existed in African American communities. Lady Jones’s inability to recognize such alternative literacies is reflected in her description of
Baby Suggs as “the ignorantgrandmother... a woods preacher who mended shoes”
(247). Such a view of Baby Suggs on Lady Jones’s part suggests to me that even though
Denver’s school experiences are largely positive, the structured school environment may
breed a certain unwarranted arrogance for book learning.*^
Although Baby Suggs is an“ignorant,.. woods preacher,” she is the teacher I
encounter in moving through Beloved who actually holds out to me a potential re-imagining of pedagogy and literacy education in new ways that are compatible with
modem/postmodem perspectives. As Linda Krumholz notes “Baby Suggs’ ritual methods of healing, teaching, and interpreting challenge basic pedagogical and episteraological premises of the United States’ social system” (398). From her preaching in the Clearing to
the ways in which 124 under her stewardship becomes “a way station, the place [people]
assembled to catch news, taste oxtail soup, leave their children, cut out a skirt,” and where there were “discussions, stormy or quiet, about the true meaning of the Fugitive Bill, the
" Coming to understand how education seems to functions as defensive, coping strategy for dealing with her interracial status furthers my sense that Lady Jones’s school is not entirely unproblematic. When Lady Jones’s “light skin got her picked for a colored girls’ normal school in Pennsylvania... she paid it back by teaching the unpicked,” and “She believed in heart that, except for her husband [‘the blackest man she could find’], the whole world, including her children despised her and her hair” (247). Only once Lady Jones’s education is “pat and firmly set,” thus marking her social superiority is she capable of dispensing “with rancor” and being “indiscriminately polite” (247). In suggesting that Lady Jones may be committed to a narrow, textual, academic conception of literacy and that education may serve a defensive function in Lady Jones’s life, I do not mean to overlook her kindness and generosity. It is Lady Jones to whom Denver turns when she realizes that Sethe is being consumed by Beloved, and by alerting the community to the circumstances at 124, Lady Jones is responsible for the many pans, plate, and baskets of food that appear on the stump in the yard of 124. 210
Settlement Fee, God’s Ways and Negro pews; antislavery and manumission, skin voting, Republicans, Dred Scott, book learning. Sojourner’s high-wheeled buggy, the Colored
Ladies of Delaware, Ohio, and other weighty issues” (173), Baby Suggs recognizes that “knowledge is multiple, context-dependent, collectively asserted, and spiritually derived”
(Krumholz 396). Such a view of knowledge undermines the value of textual literacy. In her gatherings in the Clearing, Baby Suggs, after praying silently, would call forth the children to laugh, the men to dance, and the women to cry. In the silence that followed such a communal expression of emotion. Baby Suggs would speak “the Word,” not based on a careful textual analysis of Bible, but inspired by her own experiences, her connections with others, and their shared historical context.'® In her work on the autobiographies of African American women, Katherine Clay
Bassard suggests ways to understand the unique relation of women like Baby Suggs to textual literacy. Bassard suggests the need to separate not only women’s slave narratives from those of men like Frederick Douglass who ‘“bought into’ the ideology of literacy, freedom, and economic advancement” (119), but also to separate female spiritual autobiographers from women slave narrators like Harriet Jacobs. Bassard writes Having been denied the pulpit, the official space of interpretation of the Word of God, women, black and white, “organized” outside of formal church institutions where they were free to recognize each other as spiritual leaders. The battle for the pulpit centered on the right of women to “take a texf’-select and interpret passages of Scripture. Thus, for black women spiritual autobiographers, textuality, reading, and interpretation were central concerns, and their own texts reflect this extraordinary sensitivity to the power relations of written language. Though it is tempting to dismiss spiritual autobiographers as apolitical, their pohtics, much more so than that of the slave narrators, involves a politics o f language itself. (122)
Although Baby Suggs has not left us her spiritual autobiography per se, she is certainly operating within this tradition. As Bassard notes, “if one reads/writes ‘by the Spirit,’ one may bypass the ideology of literacy as true freedom” (124), and among African American spiritual autobiographers, “dreams, visions, visitations from angels, and voices from God”
Krumholz argues that the rituals in the Clearing “manifest the Freudian psychoanalytic process of healing as well as a spiritual process of healing that combines African and Christian religious elements” (397). 211
become the preferred vehicles of communication (127)." Thus, it is not surprising that
there are numerous instances in Beloved when textual literacy is inadequate, insufficient,
and even dangerous. When Woodruff, the Bodwins’ hired hand, suggests to Baby Suggs
“Go see Reverend Pike, ma’am. He’ll reacquaint you [with the Lord]” (146), she replies “I won’t need him for that. I can make my own acquaintance. What I need him for is to
reacquaint me with my children. He can read and write, I reckon?” (146). The letters written by Reverend Pike turn out to be ineffectual in a slave economy where, as Baby
Suggs leams, “nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children” (23). Baby Suggs knows ‘Tyree and John cut thirty years ago... finding them would do them more harm than good” (143), and she leams in her search for Ardelia that
“you couldn’t write to ‘a man named Dunn’ if all you knew was that he went West” (147). The only written record of Baby Suggs’s life-her biU of sale-does not even correspond to her own sense of identity. As Gamer tells her, “When I took you out of Carolina, Whitlow called you Jenny and Jenny Whitlow is what his bill said” (142).“ Far removed from the scientism of Schoolteacher and, to a lesser degree, from the textual literacy-as-freedom ideology of Lady Jones, Baby Suggs’ life and actions suggest a pedagogy consistent with the view of knowledge as contextually-dependent, communally-derived, and multiplicitous, a view of knowledge that does not depend on the reading and interpretation of a written text Baby Suggs’ home is a place of “healing, ease, and real-talk” where one might leam the alphabet or a new stitch (95), where one might mix “a tonic... that cured a relative” or
In an interesting parallel, Bassard documents the ways in which “the misuse of language is a sin” for spiritual autobiographers like Jarena Lee and that “Sin comes to Lee in the form of a lie told to her mistress” (126). In Part One of Beloved, Sethe describes how Baby Suggs, holy, “proved herself a liar, dismissed her great heart and lay in the keeping-room bed roused once in a while by a craving for color and not for another thing” (89). Other moments in the text that I read as highlighting the inadequacy of textual literacy included Stamp Raid’s newspaper clippings that fail to offer an adequate understanding of Sethe’s actions in the woodshed and also the discussion of the different views Halle and Sixo take toward textual literacy. Halle is the only Sweet Home man who takes Gamer up on his offer to teach them the alphabet and basic arithmetic; Sixo foregoes the opportunity because he feared it would “make him forget things he shouldn’t and memorize things he shouldn’t and he didn’t want his mind messed up” (208). Ultimately, Halle ends up smearing clabber on his cheeks while Sixo roasted “without a tear just so the roasters would Imow what a man was like” (126). 212
French-knot “the stamens of pale blue flowers” on a pillowslip “while arguing the Settlement Fee” (249). At 124, all knowledge is shared in a public space, and more learned
debates about contemporary political issues coexist alongside knowledge that is often devalued, e.g. embroidery stitches and folk medicine.
Baby Suggs also comfortably recognizes that knowledge and insight may not coincide with external hierarchies governing human relationships. She admits that “when
she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breathe, knew that there was nothing like it in this world” (141). And perhaps most importantly, Baby Suggs is capable of existing with contradictions: she does not “approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice” (180). Although
Baby Suggs does not yield to Stamp Raid’s exhortation to continue to “Call” and “Say the Word” (178) after the Misery and she instead takes to her bed to contemplate colors, her voice at the end of the novel still has the power to move Denver into the world. As Denver struggles with her fear on the porch of 124, she hears Baby Suggs laugh
‘You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don’t remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can’t walk down the steps? My Jesus my.” But you said there was no defense. “There ain’t.” Then what do I do? “Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.” (244)
Just as she schools her granddaughter and all those around her. Baby Suggs schools me in reading Beloved. Accepting the lessons Baby Suggs has to offer about literacy and learning helps me move beyond merely displacing my readerly anxiety about reading across race into a field of questions about raodemity/postmodemity. Instead, 1 come to understand the links between the pedagogical principles of Baby Suggs and 213
raodem/postraodem principles, and with this new understanding I can find productive
ways to engage witli Morrison’s novel/'
In Part Two of the novel when I am confronted with the strange, fugue-like monologues of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved, I try to allow them to co-exist and to
experience them as the men, women, and children in the Clearing experience Baby Suggs’
call. The first monologue, beginning “BELOVED, she my daughter. She mine” belongs to
Sethe (200). Pleased with Beloved’s return, Sethe offers up a praise song to the bond between mother and child while at the same time explaining/justifying her plan to take herself and her children “to the other side where my own ma’am is” (203). The second
monologue, beginning “BELOVED is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my mother’s milk” unfolds Denver’s thoughts about her mother and sister (205). But
Denver’s perspective extends beyond the mother-child dyad. She gives voice to the effects
of Sethe’s actions on her and her brothers, and her musings expose the ways in which Sethe’s action cemented Denver’s relationship with her absent father and with her grandmother. The third monologue begins with “I AM BELOVED and she is mine” and then continues for two pages with no punctuation and only white space serving to segment the text into comprehensible units. I try to follow Baby Suggs’ lead and move beyond a strictly textual literacy grounded in the morphology and syntax of standard, edited English, but 1 am disoriented not only by the strange presentation of the monologue on the page, but also by the way in which this monologue does not deal with 124 or Sweet Home. Instead Beloved describes a place where flowers are gathered in round baskets, where she must crouch, and where people fall into a bread colored sea. Rather, though, than in engaging in
Peter McLaren would argue that Baby Suggs moves me toward a “resistance postmodernism” which recognizes that “the sign is always an arena of material conflict and competing social relations as well as ideas” (199). Such a resistance postmodernism “tries to move beyond epistemic skepticism and explanatory nihilism to concern itself with issues related not just to the commodification of language but to the commodification of labor and the social relations of production” (200). In her validation of literacies other than scientific and textual. Baby Suggs exposes the ways in which knowledge can produced by more marginalized discourses, and in doing so, she calls into question the existing “social relations of production.” In Baby Suggs’s house, the domestic production of embroidered pillowcases and skirts can take place alongside debates about current political issues and in the gatherings at the Clearing, spiritual healing is produced not by reliance on textual interpretation of the Bible, but by communal weeping, laughing, and dancing. 214
the sort of measuring and cataloging that schoolteacher undertakes when he encounters the
unassimilable African Americans at Sweet Home, I want to allow these monologues to all
coexist and to let them move me toward a multiplicitous understanding of Sethe, Denver, Beloved, and the relationships between them. The fourth monologue is this sort of fusion-
-the yellow flowers are “on the quilt now where we sleep” (214)-and what begins as the Beloved’s claiming of Sethe is transformed into a dialogue first between Beloved and Sethe
and then between Denver and Beloved before ultimately culminating in a chorale of voices addressing both self and other, I want to achieve the same sort of relationship with these
monologues as both individual parts and as a whole that Baby Suggs recognizes between
the parts of Sethe’s body and her wholeness. When Sethe arrived at 124, Baby Suggs had
bathed her in sections in ways that made Sethe whole again. At the end of the novel, the importance of such a relationship between wholes and parts, is evidenced by Sethe’s
wondering if Paul D will bathe her in sections, “And if he bathes her in sections, will the
parts hold?” (272).
It is Baby Suggs’ literacy practices and pedagogies that also make me want to honor
the vision of Ella and the women of Cincinnati who share a communal sense of having seen
a “devil-child” that “had taken the shape of a pregnant woman” while not discounting the confusion of Stamp Paid who disputes whether it was the same “narrow” girl he had seen
in 124. When I reach the final two pages of Beloved, I recognize the need to “know when to stop” (104) in seeking definitive answers about Beloved and her relationships to Sethe, Denver, Paul D, and the sixty million and more who are “disremembered and unaccounted for” (274)."'
Most importantly, though. Baby Suggs’ pedagogy helps me to return to the incident in the woodshed and to realize that I can neither “approve nor condemn Sethe’s rough choice” (180). Baby Suggs’ educational practices are based on communal knowledge and grounded not in universal ethical principles textually coded in the Law or even in the Bible
“ See James Phelan’s “Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response” for an analysis of the ways in which the final two pages of the novel similarly “blocks any impulse to master the stubbornness of [Beloved’s] character by pointing to the gaps that keep her from yielding to our understanding, and then by extension to all the history that we have lost, especially to that of the sixty million and more whose names we do not know.” 215
but on contextualized, lived experiences. As Peter McLaren might put it, Baby Suggs has schooled me in the need to disrupt a “notion of universal common humanity” by exploring
the contexts of “power, discourse, culture, experience, and historical specificity” in which people live their lives (204). Thus, Sethe’s attempt to “outhurt the hurter'’ is not to be judged on the basis of an externally codified ethical framework, but can only be understood as it occurred at the intersection of slavery, abolitionism, consumerism and capitalism,
gender relations, and the other referent fields that give shape to Sethe’s lived experiences.
Understanding the intersection in which Sethe finds herself simultaneously defines for me
the boundaries of my own position and makes those boundaries available for me to examine and discuss.
If I am to examine, define, and perhaps extend these boundaries, though, such a process can take place only within a community of other readers. The ways in which Baby
Suggs’s life and literacy is founded on a commitment to communally-based knowledge suggests to me that in trying to understand Sethe’s actions and to understand Beloved as a whole one needs to do so within a community. Sethe’s confrontation with her past begins when Paul D arrives on her porch. For Sethe, Paul D’s arrival raises the issue of whether she should ‘Trust things and remember tilings because the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank?” (18). Later Paul D tells Sethe, “you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, ‘cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you ‘fore you fall.
Go as far inside as you need to. I’ll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out” (46).
If Sethe is to engage in interrogating her own history, she wiU need the support and help provided not only by Paul D, but by Beloved, Denver, Ella, and the other women of
Cincinnati. Later in the novel. Stamp Paid serves as negative example, illustrating the inappropriateness of sequestering knowledge and using it as individual property. He feels guilty about having been a “sneak” who insisted “on privacy during the revelation at the slaughter yard” when he showed Paul D the newspaper clipping (169). This guilt arises out of his awareness that by sneaking knowledge around he has hurt other people; he feels bad about not having considered Sethe’s feelings or Denver, and “Deeper and more painful than his belated concern for Denver or Sethe ... was the memory of Baby Suggs It 216
was the memory of her and the honor that was her due that made him walk straight-necked
into the yard of 124, although he heard its voices from the road” (171). If I am to
acknowledge the full implications of the events in the woodshed and of the “Sixty Million
and more” lost in the Middle Passage and in slavery to whom Morrison dedicates her
novel, I will have to do so as part of a community of readers. Such a community of readers is evidenced throughout this essay in my footnotes
and textual citations. Critics like Linda Krumholz, James Phelan, Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, Barbara Hill Rigney, Karla Holloway and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, and all the
others have enriched my reading of the novel, enlightening me about aspects of Beloved
which were unavailable to me as a particularly situated reader. Other critics whose works
are not specifically cited in my text (including but not limited to Maggie Sale, Albert Bell, Jacqueline Trace, Eusebio L. Rodrigues, Susan Jaret McKinstry, and Anne Goldman) have
also enriched my reading. The arguments advanced by these other readers are all cogent
and compelling and have deepened my understanding and appreciation of Morrison’s novel. Because they make their particular readings available, I have the support I need like
Sethe. If Paul D promises to catch Sethe if she falls, then I will count on the work of these and other critics to catch me if I stumble. These readings all engage me in the process of what Wayne Booth would call “coduction” from “co (‘together’) and ducere (‘to lead, draw out, bring, bring out’)” (72).“ For Booth, coduction is the process of positioning one’s narrative experiences within the “immeasurably rich context” of the narrative experiences of others who are both like and different from oneself (70). But coduction implies reciprocity, and although I may be limited in my ability to offer particular insight into how Beloved draws upon call-and-response traditions and the Blues (Sale and Rodrigues), what it is like to be a white male reader of Morrison’s novel (Phelan), or how Beloved intersects with various cultural stereotypes of motherhood (Goldman and McKinstry), I am still able
” By invoking Booth’s useful conception of “coduction,” I do not mean to endorse his position that coduction is part of the process of making judgments about texts. (Booth introduces his neologism in a section of the second chapter of The Company Wc Keep entitled “How we Come to the Act of Judging.”) I am less concerned about reaching evaluative positions and am more interested in sharing and interrogating sameness and difference without the burden (and distortion) of rankmg and prioritizing textual experiences. 217
to contribute to the conversation. Because of ray particular situation, I am able to read the
ideologies of literacy inherent in school teacher, Lady Jones, and Baby Suggs.“ Placing my reading in conversation with these other critics is, I think, one way to
answer the concern I share with hooks that accounting for the details of my reading
experience can merely be made to replicate structures of domination and power. As
Michael M.J. Fischer notes, “one needs a check against assimilating the other to the self,
seeing only what is similar or different One must avoid comparison by strict dualist
contrast A third, fourth, or fifth comparison inevitably involves multidimensionality, and
a sense of larger universes of significance” (201). The work of these other critics have
helped me see what lies beyond the white handkerchiefs (like the white handkerchief of
Stephen Tyler’s which hooks finds so symbolic on the cover of Writing Culture) in my own reading. By offering up a reading of Beloved as a way to explore whether my call for local
and particular accounts of textual encounters merely allows for the réinscription of patterns of domination, some critics might charge that I have predetermined the outcome of my
argument by selecting a text that is so appealing to academic readers. Hortense Spillers has
noted that The American academy, despite itself, is one of the enabling postulates of black women’s literary community simply because it is not only a source of income for certain writers, but also a point of dissemination and inquiry for their work.... In short, the image of black women writing in isolation, across time and space, is conduced toward radical revision. The room of one’s own explodes its four walls to embrace the classroom, the library, and the various mechanisms of institutional and media life, including conferences, the lecture platform, the television talk show, the publishing house, the ‘best seller,’ and collections of critical essays [Tradition] arises not only because there are writers there to make it, but also because there is a strategic audience of heightened consciousness prepared to read and interpret the work as such. Traditions are not bom. They are made. We would add that they are not, like the objects of nature, here to stay, but
To critics who might charge that I am bringing something to the text that I believe independently and am merely confirming what I already believe, I say, “Yes, you’re right-I am.” But I am also acknowledging throughout this dissertation the importance of allowing readers to articulate those things. Sales, Bell, Trace, and Rodrigues, have all also brought particular literacies to the text-knowledge of African American church services, of slave narratives, of Black feminist theology, of the Blues. The particularities of what these readers have brought to Morrison’s text are what make their readings so valuable. 218
survive as created social events only to the extent that an audience cares to intersect them” (249-50).
And Toni Morrison is not just enabled by the academy; she in turn enables it, extending its
boundaries, and creating the traditions Spillers speaks of in new ways. Because Beloved reflects the symbiotic and exciting, newly (but not fully) hybridized relationship between
the academy and African American women, it is possible that it not by any effort on my
part that my ethnographically-derived reading strategies avoid reinscribing existing power
relationships, but that Beloved itself denies any attempts on my part to appropriate it Speaking in multiple voices, drawing on various intellectual academic and nonacademic
traditions, Morrison’s novel would resist anyone’s attempt to colonize it What will happen, though, if I turn to a text that is more fully Other to me and that provides me with
no easy access? In such a reading encounter, will it still be possible for a thick description
of my textual experience to function in productive ways?
“I ‘SPECT WHITE PEOPLE WON’T BUY IT ’: READING
WAY PAST COOL
Jess Mowry’s Way Past Cool holds out the possibility of such a very different kind
of experience for me. As I noted in the opening of this chapter. Way Past Cool has received little attention from academic readers, and Mowry himself ended his own association with the academy after eighth grade. As a reader thoroughly entrenched in the various practices that make up the increasingly heteroglossic world of the university, what sort of stance should I adopt in approaching the textual world Mowry lays out before me? How might my academic literacies both constrain and enable my relationship to Mowry’s text? How does my position as a middle-class, white woman impinge on the relationships I develop with characters like Gordon, Lyon, Ty, Markita, and Deek? What is an appropriate and productive response to the disorientation I experience when I encounter a textual world so different from anything else I have known? 219
In the introduction to Identity and Inner-City Youth, Shirley Brice Heath and Milbrey W. McLaughlin caution me against defining the world Mowry writes of as merely a negative alterity to my world. They note that most inner-city youth “regard school as a
place that has rejected and labeled them by what they are not rather than by what they are.
Young people resent, for example, labels such as ‘non-college bound’ for those whose academic achievement is interpreted by schools as insufficient for further education” (4).
In “Embedded Identities,” McLaughlin goes on to argue that “youth-serving” outreach programs which focus on what urban young people are not and thus make them a problem
to be solved are far less effective than “youth-based” programs which respect youth as
unique resources with particular talents to be developed. While I do not merely want to
view Way Past Cool as a not academic book, neither do I want to make the move that Richard Shusterman makes in “The Fine Art of Rap” when he appropriates the popular music of urban youth and transforms rap music into an opportunity to meditate on artistic traditions and aesthetic theory. According to Shusterman, rap music, with its “recycling appropriation rather than unique originative creation, the eclectic mixing of styles, the enthusiastic embracing of the new technology and mass culture, the challenging of modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy and artistic purity, and an emphasis on the localized and temporal rather than the putatively universal and eternal” is the ultimate expression of “a postmodern popular art which challenges some of our most deeply entrenched aesthetic conventions, conventions which are common not only to modernism as an artistic style and ideology but to the philosophical doctrine of modernity and its differentiation of cultural spheres” (614).
Heath and McLaughlin and Shusterman suggest two different ways to approach urban, economically disenfranchised populations-one that highlights the importance of understanding this world on its own terms and the other demonstrating ways in which this world can be transformed or translated into something digestible and understandable by people who are for the most part far removed from it. The gap between these two positions is not insignificant, and the stakes in the debate about how to approach, understand, and define the younger members of urban populations are high. In “Sociological Perspectives 220
on Gangs,” Ruth Horowitz cites Walter Miller’s argument that “it is critical that social
scientists define what a gang is in order to counteract the manipulation of the term by
people outside the social science research community” (43), and she agrees with him that definitions of gangs “affect publicity, the manner in which gangs are treated by the criminal
justice system, and the distribution of resources” (43). Although Horowitz and Miller
work in the field of sociology, they would find an ally in Houston Baker, Jr. In the second
chapter of Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy, Baker examines the ways in which
stereotypical views, definitions, and understandings of urban youth and their music
affected the potent semiotic field surrounding the reports of and reactions to the rape and assault of a young woman jogging in Central Park in 1989. According to Baker, “rap
economics, in contest with the public law and the law of the ‘public,’ had more to do with the writing of the Central Park jogger incident as a moral panic of ‘wilding’ than anything”
(50). As an answer to the problem of understanding the lives of urban young people,
Horowitz argues for the value of pluralistic definitions of gangs which acknowledge the local and particular circumstances of a gang. From Horowitz’s perspective, such local and
particular descriptions will be more useful not only in attempting to understand the lives of
urban, young people but also in determining public policy and ensuring an equitable flow
of social service dollars and resources. Horowitz’s call for localized definitions of gangs is
echoed in Albert K. Cohen’s “Foreword and Overview” to Gangs in America. He writes:
“you can’t understand these gangs unless you understand how they represent adaptations to very special opportunities in the social organization” (20). Felix Padilla’s The Gang as an
American Enterprise, an ethnography of a group of second-generation Puerto Ricans who belong to a Chicago street gang which Padilla calls the Diamonds, provides one such localized description of a gang. Way Past Cool provides another, and at this point in this dissertation it should come as no surprise that 1 will attempt to offer a local, particular, and detailed account of what it is like for me to move through the textual world that unfolds in the pages of Mowry’s novel. But while ethnographies like Padilla’s are clearly intended for an audience of social scientists, perhaps extending to public policy-makers. Way Past 221
Cool, as a fictional work is more problematic. In a profile in People magazine, Mowry is quoted as saying “I wrote the book for black kids, and I ‘spect white people won’t buy it”
(66). And when Publishers Weekly devoted several pages to a feature on multicultural
authors, Mowry is quoted in a sidebar written by Calvin Reid saying “At FSG [Farrar,
Straus, Giroux] it was just me and one other writer, they only recently got a few other
black writers. Maybe we’re just in vogue right now, with all this hip-hop gangster bullshit.
It allows white people to explore the ghetto in the safety of their living rooms. People are just interested in the symptoms of social problems, the violence, the gangs, but they aren’t interested in what it would take to really cure the disease” (33). Mowry’s statements make me squirm, and my discomfort, to a larger extent, is due to the accuracy of his charges. I
am very much exploring “the ghetto in the safety of my living room.” But I also believe
that such an exploration can be a starting point, rather than merely a titillating voyeuristic
exercise. Houston Baker offers an account of how when a culturally diverse class of students in England came to see that “Henry V was a rapper-a cold dissing, def con man,
tougher-than-Ieather and smoother-than-ice,” they realized that “Patriotism... is a ‘hype’ if it means dying for England” (98). According to Baker “there was one stout lad who held
up his hand and said he would be ready to die for England,” but a “black British young lady . . . shouted across the room, ‘That’s because you’re English!”’ (99). If Baker’s account is any indication of the power of placing diverse worlds in conversation with each other, then 1 feel justified in working to understand not only the textual world of Way Past Cool but my own world as well in order to move to a more equitable, hybridized, and way past cool world.
Dodging Bullets: The Disorienting Experience of Way Past Cool When 1 first open Way Past Cool, 1 am immediately thrown into a drive-by shooting;
“Gordon! GUN!” screamed Curtis, diving off his skateboard onto trash-covered concrete. Gordon dove from his board too, all 180 pounds rolling and skidding then scrambling warp-seven behind a dumpster as a full-auto fired from a blattered black van. Velcro ripped and his backpack burst open. Books and a binder tumbled out Another gun joined the first, a rhythmic 222
steely stutter of Uzis in chorus. Bullets pocked brick, sending chips whizzing and spattering to a whine of ricochets that sounded just like the movies. The dumpster rang dully as silver dents stitched its rusty sides. (3)
Just as disconcerting to me as the flying bullets are the ways in which these young men,
who like most kids I know carry “books and binder” in a backpack, are also well versed in the operations of automatic weapons and know that the “thirty-two round magazines
emptied fast at 550 rounds per minute” and that “a-hind stupid ole garbage cans” is no place
to hide during a firefight but that “Dumpster steel mostly stop bullets” (4; 5).“ The
disparity between my literacies and the literacies of these young men is epitomized in an
exchange between Lyon and Gordon about the Friends’ old, misfiring .22 pistol.
Examining the gun, Lyon remarks “Mmm. I see what happened. Rimfire bullets be most
like to jam. That cause the primer stuff be in the rim, an with cheapo bullets like these it don’t all the time go clear around. Then the firin pin hit a empty spot an you end up with jack” (7). Gordon responds “Shit! I don’t wanna hear all that stuff, man! Like we gonna
be pop-quizzed on gun fixin in school or somethin! It the onliest goddamn gun we got, an
the onliest goddamn gun we ‘ford right now, so’s just make it shoot again an stop rattlin my goddamn chain, huh!” (7).
Throughout the progression of the novel these moments where I realize how veiy differently literate these characters are continually occur. When Lyon hears sirens in the distance, he is immediately able to read the sound: “Two blocks up an three over... Comin this way warp-seven. Ain’t no ambulance nor fire truck neither” (15). In this world, other children read the fact that Gordon is fat as a sign that he is “some kinda survivor,” and as Lyon tells Gordon “Lotta hungry kids give they left nut to be your size” (82). Young people in “Oaktown” also know to use “softer” skateboard wheels like “Powell 85s or Variflex Street Rages” so they can move about silently in the streets after dark, and only rich kids skated on “hard wheels” such as “Bullet or Rat Bone 97s” which were “noisy, rapid-wearing, and expensive” (122). And when Markita approaches the alley where Ty is sobbing and contemplating suicide, she immediately recognizes the dangerous position in which has placed herself by having “silhouetted herself against the openness behind hef’ (163). Although these characters mix up words like “affection” and “infection” or “Pennsylvania” and “Transylvania,” they have literacies which allow them to not only survive but which also establish Aeir membership in the community in which they live. By citing these literacies which are very different from mine, I do not mean to overlook the ways in which I do share some literacies with these characters, especially Markita who remembers reading Dickens in school, who has studied pictures of African masks in her mother’s encyclopedias, and who has given her son a Speak ‘N Spell. 223
Gordon is absolutely right that gun repair is an unlikely subject for an academic test, and in these early pages of the novel, I come to see the ways in which not only school
but other societal institutions as well are profoundly out of touch with the realities of the lives of these young men. When Gordon realizes his homework is blowing around the
alley after the shooting, he “snatched up the papers and tried to wipe them clean, then gave
up and stuffed them into his pack.” Lyon suggests, “Yo, Gordon, tell the teacher you got
em all dirty gettin drive-byed” (7), and Gordon answers
Too fuckin funny, man! Ain’t one of them stupid teachers gotta live around here. Not know from nuthin what is. Shit, this my goddamn English story too... how I gonna spend my motherfuckin summer vacation! Been bustin my goddamn ass over it all cocksuckin week, an now ole Crabzilla gonna kill me for sure! (8)
In fact, on this particular morning the Friends find themselves not just closed out of the discursive worlds of their classrooms but physically denied access to the school as well. After Lyon attends to the wound in Curtis’s shoulder caused by a piece of flying debris
during the drive-by, Gordon realizes “Shit, we so goddamn late now them school doors is prob’ly locked!” (12). The Friends lament their exclusion from school not because they see education as an opportunity for advancement and a way out of economic distress but because more basic physical needs are met by the school cafeteria. Ric begins “Yo! We
don’t score school lunch...”, and Rac finishes the sentence “We don’t get nuthin all goddamn day!” (12). Later in the novel when Ty contemplates getting a driver’s license in
order to become a junk collector and scrap dealer rather than continuing to serve as Deck’s bodyguard, he remembers “They charged now for the driver training course at school- another advantage rich kids had over poor” (146). Any romantic myths I might have about the value of education and about the potential of teachers to help these youngsters are 224
destabilized by the experience I have with the Friends as their walk to school on this
particular morning is interrupted by the drive-by shooting. “ Just as school is hopelessly out of touch for these children so are other societal
institutions such as hospitals and the police. When Curtis squeals about his wounded shoulder, Gordon tells him “An you stop actin like a goddman puss! Spose you wanna go
to ‘mergency, now?” (9). While Curtis considers this, Lyon tells him “Way past fun....
Get to sit on your butt an wait for hours, aside all kinda cool people what been shot an
stabbed, ODin an pukin all over the place” (9). And at the end of the novel it is a doctor from South Africa who “Only went to nigger doctor college there” and “Can’t help no
white folks” (180) that treats Ty’s wounds because, as Markita says, “Best believe he know the difference tween a law an the right thing to do!” (303).
If hospitals and the medical community are merely indifferent to the lives of people
living in Oaktown, the police are actively malicious and brutal in their treatment of the citizens they have sworn to “serve and protect” (292). After the drive-by shooting, the
Friends are stopped by two officers, who “Helmeted in stark white... looked like intergalactic mercenaries grounded on a planet whose native inhabitants hated their guts”
(16). Approaching the boys, “The black cop considered the row of little sculptures, then squatted with a grunt and a creak of leather an tore into the backpacks like a gorilla who smelled a banana. He seemed disappointed he didn’t find one. Finally he stood with another grunt and rubbed his back. A shiny black boot freed the homework to the breeze and sent Lyon’s board skittering into the street” (17). The cop then searches the boys, “slapping where he should have patted, and jerking arms back to check out their undersides like junk-shop merchandise that nobody could make you buy if you broke” (18). After smacking Curtis’s bleeding shoulder, the cop says “Welcome to a kinder, gentler America
While David Schaafsma’s Eating on the Street does not offer easy answers to teachers working with inner-city youth, Schaafsma’s chronicle of his work with other teachers and widi students in Detroit offers hope that is not present in Mowry’s depiction of the Friends’ relationship to school. Part of the success of Schaafsma’s program may lie in the fact that as a “community-based, collaboratively designed summer writing program” (xv), the Dewey Center Community Writing Project had many of the positive characteristics the Heath and McLaughlin found in the successful youth-based service programs they studied. 225
boy” (18). As I continually witness the ways in which the Friends and their neighbors are
brutalized by institutions such as schools, hospitals, and the law enforcement community, I
come to realize that I have never been anything but admirably served by these various institutions. From a finger sliced open while washing dishes that required a trip to the
emergency room for stitches to reporting a minor traffic accident, my encounters with hospitals and police officers have been completely positive. The cop’s mocking use of
George Bush’s inaugural slogan, “a kinder, gentler America,” functions not only as
political satire, it also reminds me that I do traly live in a kinder, gentler world than the
Friends. Unlike the Burger King where Markita and Leroy work, the fast food restaurants
I frequent do not have their service counters encased in bullet proof glass; and while the
hallways of Lyon’s apartment building are dark because “[light] bulbs got stolen as fast as they could be replaced, their filament wire being just the right size for reaming the #25
needles junkies liked best,” the hallways of my comfortable apartment building are well-lit
(25; 121-22).
The diverse literacies that allow the young people of Way Past Cool to orient themselves to the world in which they live (e.g., knowing how guns work, reading the sounds of sirens) coupled with the ways in which these young people are cut off from some of the institutions that make my life safe and comfortable places me in a difficult position as a reader. My difficulties are only compounded by the ways in which I am continually reminded that I am really reading about children. None of the Friends has yet turned fourteen, and the physical descriptions of them emphasize the vulnerability of their young bodies. After he is injured in the shoulder, Curtis “puffed his little chest almost as far out as his tummy” (11, my italics), and it is ultimately a Big Bird band-aid that covers his wound (76). When Gordon bestows the newly acquired Iver Johnson pistol on Curtis,
“Ric and Rac stomped along behind; they didn’t weigh much and it was hard for them to stomp loud enough to be heard” (56). Even Deek, the sixteen year-old drug dealer and murderer, is described as having “soft boy-breasts” (24), and Markita thinks he looks “like the Beaver would have looked at sixteen if he’d been black and pigging for years on junk food” (25). These young bodies, though, carry scars from bullet wounds and switchblade 226
slashes. Just as their bodies can be read as texts that reflect a world that writes its violence on a child’s tender “tummy,” so too does the behavior of the Friends and those around them
combine child-like playfulness with adult pursuits in ways that are strange to me. When Gordon mentions “scheming on” Wesley at school to get more information about Deek’s plans and the Crew’s willingness to allow him to deal drugs in their territory, Lyon remarks that it is easy to get Wesley to “talk free” “when he be sweating to copy somebody’s
homework” (79). Ty’s young brother, Danny, is nicknamed Furball after the Tiny Toons cartoon cat, but this Furball “gots a name with his blade” (197). These children love the
taste of popsicles with Colt .45 or beer and so too are their lives blends of adult concerns with more child-like behaviors.
And perhaps strangest of all to me is that these young people are very aware of their own disenfranchisement. While he works on repairing the .22, Lyon raps “You ain’t furry
an cute, so’s you way cool to shoot, be a whale or a seal, then you got some appeal” (14). Later when Ty reads the Tribune for news of the deaths of the boys from Bakersfield, “The
paper’s front pages were filled with details of some humpback whales that had beached themselves in the Bay. A massive rescue operation was underway to save them” (202-
203). But as Deek predicted, “There was single short paragraph on the paper’s back page: two youths found dead in an East Oakland motel room of an apparent drug overdose.
Details were being withheld pending further investigation” (202). As Rac succinctly notes “Law say black kids eat shit and die” (13).
In the previous paragraphs I have sought to articulate the ways in which the world of Way Past Cool and the characters who live there force me to recognize my own privilege and to complicate and extend ray understanding of the lives of young people living in economically depressed inner-cities. It is a jarring, disturbing, and compelling experience.
I would now like to interrogate in a more focused way my responses to two specific incidents in the novel-the Friends’ attack on a junkie in Gordon’s apartment building and the conclusion of the novel in Markita’s apartment The first incident challenges the ways in which ethical concerns enter into my reading experience and the second causes me to reconsider how aesthetic concerns affect my response to a text I realize that many people 227 would charge me with having committed a gross oversimplification in separating ethical and aesthetic response, and as a general principle, I agree that ethics and aesthetics are intertwined. In this specific case, though, the position of the two events in the novel’s progression makes me want to focus on one more than the other in each case. The incident with the junkie in Gordon’s apartment building occurs only about one-third of the way into the novel, and because of the disorientation I experience on so many other levels when encountering the world of Way Past Cool, I am at that point completely unconcerned with the aesthetic satisfaction the novel offers me. By the conclusion of the novel, I am prepared to consider not only the sort of ethical experience I have had as my literacies converge with Mowry’s narrative but also how my own aesthetic sensibilities in terms of completeness and closure affect my interaction with the text
Challenging Ethical Boundaries When Tunk reports a junkie is prowling the halls of Gordon’s apartment building, Lyon announces “We run that junkie off on the way out so’s he don’t be hasslin your mom comin home” (91). And when Tunk peers through the peephole and sees the junkie
“checkin out” the door immediately across the hall, Gordon seems especially concerned and protective because “That ole Mrs. Washington’s ‘partmenL She cook nights at some hospital. Way cool lady. Sometimes brings home cookies and shit for us. Hell, she gots nuthin in there but a goddamn ancient Sony! Black an white!” (92). I am touched by the fact that running off the junkie seems prompted by the Friends’ desire to be protective of the women in their lives, and 1 am initially prepared to applaud the assertiveness of these young men and their willingness to set aside the pleasures of watching TV and drinking 228
beer in order to rid the hall of a menace/^ This only makes my response to, as Lyon says,
"Toast time, homey” (93) more complicated. Like Gordon, I wonder what Curtis and Lyon are up to with a spray can of sheen and a Bic lighter, but Curtis offers assurance that “For
sure, Gordon! Me and Lyon done this lotsa times!” (94). Bursting into the hallway, Lyon “aimed the spray can His delicate finger jammed down the button and held it, shooting
sheen all over the dude’s face” (95). When Curtis fires his Bic into the spray stream.
There was a muffled FOOM. Yellow-blue flame exploded around the dude’s head, blinding bright in the dim-lit hallway. The can recoiled in Lyon’s hands but he kept his finger pressed tight on the button. Fire hissed like a blowtorch from the nozzle. The dude’s hair crackled. The dude screamed. The crowbar clattered on the bare board floor as he clawed and beat at his flaming face and hair. He twisted frantically to get out of the fire stream. He staggered back, slammed into a wall, tried to run, and crashed face-first into the other. He stumbled in circles for a few moments, then finally broke into a blind lope for the stairwell. Blood gushed out of his nose from hitting the wall. His screams echoed down the narrow hall. Lyon followed him, cutting off the spray, but pale yellow flames still flickered and crackled in the dude’s matted hair.... The dude lurched to the head of the stairs. The flames were dying out, but his hair still smoked and stank. He ground his fists into his eyes, blinking hard, lashes charred, trying to see his attackers. Suddenly, Gordon drove between Curtis and Lyon in a football block, slamming his loose bulk into the big dude’s body. Another scream echoed in the hall as the dude went over backward down the steel-edged steps in a tangle of arms, legs, animal cries, and fleshy thuds. (96)
The violence of the Friends’ attack startles and horrifies me. Although I have already witnessed a drive-by shooting and Gordon’s wounding of Justin/Keeja, I am unprepared for this near incineration of a human being. The fact that by the end of the attack the junkie, who at the beginning of this narrative episode was a twenty-year old with a “gaunt face, gray-toned skin, and the bruiselike smudges under his eyes” (94) is reduced to a
The protectiveness of Gordon toward his mother and Mrs. Washington causes me to take a less critical view of the misogyny that is part of the lives and language of these young men. I am initially quite put off by the ways in which having balls, or in Gordon’s case ‘“dustrial-strength balls!” (11) is a huge compliment among the Friends and anything minor or insignificant is labeled as “pussy” (Lyon tells Curtis the wound on his shoulder will “Leave a cool scar later on. Better'n just a pussy ole shot in the arm, any day” [10]). But the tenderness these boys exhibit toward their mothers is really very touching. Earlier in the novel, Rac had warned Ric about making fun of Gordon’s $2.98 watch from K-Mart because “His mom give him that for his goddamn birthday! It a heart thing" (12), and Ty recognizes that his mother has her hands full working to pay the rent and keep food on the table; he does not blame her for the fact that Danny is sitting in a Burger King hoping to sign on as one of Deek’s kid dealers because there is not always enough food at home. 229
“black smoking bundle on the landing below” that emits “low moans, whimpers, and a curse” before it eventually struggles to “its hands and knees and started to crawl away” (96)
gives me no comfort. The ultimate dehumanization of the junkie into a “still-smoking shape” does nothing to minimize my sense of what the Friends have done (96). In
Beloved, the fragmented chronology, the multiple perspectives of different characters, and the endlessly recursive rememories intensified the impact of Sethe and Paul D’s
experiences, but at the same time these modem/postmodem techniques afforded me a certain distance from the events. In the straight-forward account of the burning of the junkie, I have no buffer zone between me and the events in the apartment hallway. When Mr. Franklin (another neighbor in Gordon’s apartment building) opens his
door to see what the ruckus is all about, I expect his adult reaction to the actions of these
young men might help me sort through what I have witnessed. Mr, Franklin asks, “You get
the bastard, Gordon?”; he nods when Gordon replies “Spect we did,” and then inquires, ‘Your mother home yet, son?” (96). Gordon tells Mr. Franklin that his mother should be arriving shortly, and he adds “But my friends here just now leavin. They make sure that sucker gone for my mom come in” (96). Instead of threatening Gordon with a negative report to his mother about his complicity in nearly burning a man to death, Mr. Franklin smiles at Gordon. He then concludes the conversation by asking Gordon about his grades in school and encouraging Gordon to “keep them grades up, son. Onliest way you gonna get somewheres” (97). Mr. Franklin does not seem at all disturbed by the violence the
Friends used in attacking the junkie, and he seems actually to approve of the boys’ behavior.
Needless to stay this narrative episode brings me smack up against the limits of my own ethical framework. I want to insist that the punishment does not fit the crime, that breaking into an apartment where no one is home to steal a Sony TV does not merit the sort of physical injuries that the Friends inflict on the junkie. Even though the Friends are trying to establish the building as one that is unsafe for thieving junkies, trying, with the means they have and the attitudes they have developed, to make a stand against the total anarchy that could easily overtake them, the near incineration of the junkie seems 230
deliberately cruel and excessive. Further complicating my ethical response are the myths of childhood, myths that shaped my own growing up experiences, that I carry with me. The
rambunctious exuberance of Lyon and Curtis as they arm themselves with the aerosol can
and bic lighter is both very like and very different from the sort of excitement I can recall over less serious slumber party pranks. In the discordance, though, I come to realize how inappropriate it is to transfer my notions of “childhood” into the world in which the Friends
hve. How am 1 to judge these young men who with a certain youthful glee seriously injure
another human being? What sort of judgments am 1 capable of making about the behaviors
of these youngsters who are placed in the position where their own vigilante justice is the only protection they have against the numerous threats they face? Articulating the ways in
which my world is so different from the world of these youngsters has made me leery of merely imposing my ethical standards on them. As Markita’s mother says, “One law for both the lion and the steer ain’t no law at all.” But working more deeply than that is my
growing awareness that in this world my sense of appropriate and ethical is inadequate and
that the “rules” which govern the lives of the Friends, Ty, Danny, Markita, and the others better enable them to make decisions and stay alive.
When Lyon has an open shot at Ty, he considers the way the rules function; ‘There
was logic in the rules, and to shoot the dude dead right there wasn’t logical to Lyon. The rules also let you use your brain and your heart to do the right thing. Not like what the cops and the TV called laws” (123). These rules cause the Friends to save the third-grader Marcus from having his brand new Cons stolen right off his feet, but then require that the
little boy empty his pockets (containing all of $2.47) to pay for this protection. Gordon tells
Marcus “Rules don’t come for free,” but Gordon accepts the $2.47 as payment in full, telling Marcus he doesn’t need to “sco’ some more tomorrow” and that “You pay for rules, rules ‘tect ya” (49). The rules are also what maintains a peaceful balance of power between the Crew and the Friends. As Gordon notes, “We most never fight with em no more. Not since we all little ole kids. Shit, why should we? Hood they got no better’n ours” (14). And at the end of the novel, the two gangs each take one of Deek’s Uzis, and Curtis reports “Number three hid by for ‘mergencies in neutral ground. We make a rule over it” (308). 231
The rules ensure a certain peace and equity in the neighborhood, but they do not tolerate drug dealing and drug using-activities which make people violate the rules and
endanger the neighborhood. As Lyon tells Furball, “Deek’s shit gotta be chilled. Maybe below zero. What it take be what it is” (195). The Friends and the Crew are prepared to
murder Deek in order to prevent him from dealing drugs in their territory, just as the junkie’s drug use and intrusion into the apartment building made the near incineration of
him appropriate under the rules. The ethical norms or “rules” of this narrative world, though, are quite foreign to me and are in an uneasy relation to the ones I usually operate
with. While in one sense, at a level beyond surface actions and behaviors, the ethical norms of the Friends (e.g., helping those who are unable to defend themselves, working to
ensure the safety on one’s home, etc.) are quite compatible with my own. But reading Way Past Cool is not for me merely a process of transcending local difference and recognizing common general principles. Seeing how values I might share with the Friends are transmuted by the particular circumstances of their lives in Oakland forces me to reconsider and interrogate those values. For example, the ways in which I understand
“childhood” is extended by the Friends, and the values I attach to such a concept are complicated by my engagement with Gordon, Lyon, Curtis, Ric, Rac and all the others. I come to realize that my beliefs in the idyllic, natural innocence of children is actually predicated on financial and physical security I sometimes take for granted. The hopefulness of the Friends and their willingness to believe that things will someday be better is much more of a conscious choice-and a brave one. Gordon’s careful copying of “his English composition onto fresh binder paper with ponderous strokes of a first-grader’s huge pencil” is, for me, a brave commitment on his pail. Similarly, the former maintenance closet where Lyon lives across the hall from the apartment where his mother entertains her customer is a testament to Lyon’s commitment to making his world as best as he can. The Friends had helped him rescue a refrigerator from a condemned building, and Lyon had painted it black. And Lyon keeps his magazines and books neatly stacked on board-and- brick. For me these small domestic details reflect Lyon’s refusal to be overwhelmed by the world around him. As Lyon says when Curtis asks him if things in Oaktown will ever be 232
better, “Believe, homey. But it gotta START with kids. Most people lose the good part of
their hearts when they get older” (201). My experience with Way Past Cool involves more
than merely finding the broader, universal principles of which the “rules” are merely a local permutation. It forces me to re-think my previously held assumptions.
Challenging Aesthetic Boundaries
In many ways it is the rules that lead to what initially seems to me like an inappropriate, fairy tale ending to the narrative. After the shoot-out at the car wash which costs four lives (Turbo, Lyon, Deek, and the white police officer), Ty wakes up in the novel’s final section “to the sound of a young child’s laughter. It wasn’t an angel but it was close enough for Oaktown, and probably the closest he’d ever get to the real thing” (299). Recovering from the infected gash on his arm and the bullet wound in his shoulder, Ty realizes he is in Markita’s bed “naked beneath the single blanket. His body felt clean, as if he’d just been bathed. There stiff new bandages on his forearm and around his biceps and leg. The smelled and felt professional His eyes roamed the room; even by daylight it looked warm and safe” (300). Danny is wearing “new clothes... nothing showtime, just 501s that fit him right, the big Nikes he’d always wanted, and a black satin tank top his own size” (299), and he and Markita’s son, I ’row, are playing with a Speak ‘N Spell.
When the Friends arrive, they turn Deek’s money pouch over to Ty. As Gordon explains,
“We took some ’Spenses. But there still almost five grand Yo! I mean, what the fuck we gonna do with all that buck? Stay drunk a year? Shit, then what good we be? Only scare hell out our parents, we give it to them. An just a lotta trouble, man, if word go round we gots mega-money!” (308). Deek’s money will allow Ty to purchase a junk truck so he can earn a legitimate living while going to night school. Danny tells Ty that he is going to join the Friends part-time, and Ty smiles “That be cool. The right kind” (307). Ty goes on to give the Friends his .45 in exchange for the fairly useless Iver Johnson revolver.
After the Friends depart, Markita tells Ty, “Maybe I’m a fool... But I think I gonna feel a little safer walkin home nights” (309). I even learn that those who are not present in this scene of tranquility and renewal have been blessed. Markita and Danny have been 233
shopping and purchased items for Ty’s younger brothers and sisters. As Danny reports to Ty, “We even score stuff for the little kid too” (306).
Of course, though, the most significant absence is Lyon. However, I have been cued throughout the narrative to the fact that Lyon is not long for this world. When Deek first meets with the Friends, Ty sizes up the gang members and in looking at Lyon, he thinks “it was strange how hard it seemed to see him clearly. Like a ghost in a movie, he never appeared as solid and real as the other boys” (60). Later in the novel, Lyon, who spent the first night of his life in a dumpster, weaves for Curtis a mystical story about “collectors" that are “all over the world... But mostly where kids die a lot” and that maybe kids who get collected “get new hearts an another chance to be kids somewheres.
Hell, GOT to be a place where kids wanted” (200). While Lyon’s death is tragic, I have in many ways been prepared for it And although Curtis obviously grieves for his missing friend, when Ty says he’s sorry about Lyon’s death, Curtis shrugs, “He in Jamaica now. I see him when I get there” (308).
So with things ending so positively, why am I, at least initially, vaguely dissatisfied with this ending? In what ways does it violate my sense of completeness and closure? In Reading People, Reading Pbts, James Phelan defines “closure” as “the way in which a narrative signals its end,” while “completeness” is a function of how and whether the tensions and instabilities of the narrative have been resolved (17-18). In Way Past Cool, closure is clearly achieved for me by Ty’s tears and his correction of Danny’s claim, “Game over” (310). For Ty, “Maybe it really just starting” (310). Thinking back over the ways I have been pulled through the narrative by various instabilities, I have difficulty pinpointing any which remain unresolved for me. The Crew and the Friends have successfully worked together to rid themselves and their neighborhoods of the threat posed by Deek. Ty is free of his obligations to Deek and has enough money to buy the truck he hopes will help support him and his family. 1 have the sense that 1 am witnessing the beginning of the life Markita fantasized about having with Ty;
[Ty would] be a gentle savage in bed, patient and caring to his family, and in a few years they’d be able to afford a house with a yard in a good East side neighborhood. Eventually their children, maybe Markita’s own son, whom 234
Ty would be just as proud of as the others he’d father, would teach him Nintendo games and how to program the VCR. (27)
Even the police officers who accepted protection money from Deek have been duly
rewarded. The white cop was killed at the car wash, but as Markita ironically notes, he will get “a big ole funeral. With honors” (305). The African American cop has “been
s’pended till some sorta ‘vestigation done... something bout unproper procedures” (305). But even though all these instabilities have been resolved, does this ending introduce new, unresolvable tensions about the relationship between the novel’s realistic
depiction of the garbage-slimed streets of Oaktown and the almost idyllic final picture of
everyone assembling in Markita’s apartment? Is Way Past Cool open to the same sort of charges bell hooks levels against Alice Walker’sThe Color Purple, “Walker creates a fiction
where in an oppressed black woman can experience self-recovery without a dialectical
process; without collective political effort; without a radical change in society. . . . This fantasy of change without effort is a dangerous one for both oppressed and oppressor. It is
a brand of false consciousness that keeps everyone in place and oppressor structures intact”
(“Writing the Subject” 469). Too many critics have already offered more generous readings of the conclusion of Walker’s novel to make it necessary for me to respond to
hooks’ arguments about The Color Purple, but there are numerous reasons why I think I would be vexed if such criticisms were made against Way Past Cool. Throughout the
progression of the novel, I have encountered numerous critiques of liberal agendas and social movements. From the rescue operations intended to save humpback whales that appear on the front page of Tribune when deaths of the Bakersfield boys merit only a paragraph on the back page to the TV report of “someone getting sentenced to prison for shooting a sea otter” (155), I am continually reminded of the ways in which liberal causes are out of touch with the lives of these young men and women. As Markita tells Ty, “Shit, boy, what good all that stuff do when you can’t even put food on your table fit to eat?”, when he admits having gotten a paper bag at the grocery story because “paper sposed to save the ‘vironment” (171). 235
Running throughout the novel, I encounter a similar critique of African nationalism. Markita tells Ty:
Shit, cAo-boy, what in hell good it gonna do you knowin your umpteenth great-grandfather ran round in his birthday suit chuckin spears at lions an tigers an bears? Hey, that stuff gonna help you survive in this here jungle? Gimme a break, boy! You want ‘African’? Got an get yourself a dose at one of them Muslim meetins or that there black social thing they got way over East. Go an listen to 'em speechin-down bout how they gona MAKE them white suckers pay US back IN spades for all the shit they done to us two hundred years ago! My ass! Yo. They even GOT some white folks there, lookin humble as heU an all shit-eating sorry over what their great grandfathers prob’ly never even done in the first place, an ready to kiss YOUR black butt cause of it! Bout like to make ME puke, best believe! (180).
Markita goes on to note that she has little time “to go worryin over what some dogfuckin skinheads or KKK cocksuckers or just plain greedy-ass white motherfuckers gonna do to me when I scared half to death just takin my two-year-ole son out on the sidewalk at broad- daylight noontime in my very own pure black neighborhood?” (181). Even Deek tells Ty that “Maaaan, it just too fuckin bad there ain’t no more Panthers around. You be a natural.
Yo! Black pride and brotherhood be a long time dead, stupid, case you aint’ figured it out yet” (71), and he reiterates his point later “you bom thirty years too late. Ain’t no more Panthers, my man. Ain’t nobody fightin to make nuthin better” (101). That people seem more interested in organizing to save humpback whales than African American children and that the African national movements have not adequately served people like the Friends, Ty, and Markita suggests to me that there is a certain arrogance in assuming what “collective political effort” and “dialectical process” is a necessary step in changing oppressive structures. In the ways in which the Friends choose to live by the rules, the ways in which Markita decides “she’d be damned if she raised her son up on junk food” (160) and provides J’row with a Speak ‘N Spell, and the ways in which Ty mentally and emotionally distances himself from Deek before finally being freed of his commitment to the drug- dealer are ultimately satisfying to me as political effort once I have retraced my way through the narrative. And I am willing to hope with them that their individuals decisions about 236
how they live their lives will suffice against the violence and thieats posed by the world in which they live.
So where then did my initial dissatisfaction with the ending of Way Past Cool come from? From, I think, my status as a narratee of social/cultural narratives-on the evening
news, in local newspapers, and in weekly magazines-that depict gangs as vicious, predatory packs of animals bent on destruction. When Peter McLaren notes that many
white people now entertain images of the African-American underclass as “a population
spawning mutant Willie Horton-type youths who, in the throes of bloodlust, roam the perimeter of the urban landscape high on angel dust, randomly hunting whites with steel
pipes” (194), I have to acknowledge that I have not been untainted by these images. The
bombardment of stories about drug-related killings, drive-by shootings, and rampant criminal activity drown out the voices of scholars like Houston Baker or Shirley Brice
Heath, who in an address at the 1993 CCCCs convention in San Diego declared that she
would use the terra “youth groups” rather than “gangs” because of the emotional weight that has come to encumber the second term. My initial response to the conclusion of Mowry’s novel was a function of the louder voices. I expected a more violent, starker, less
hopeful conclusion to a novel about gangs, drugs, and the inner city. And some ways the
novel acts upon my expectations while also helping me see the need to go beyond them.
Deek’s status as a rather one-dimensional character who rarely leaves the safety of his “arrogant as hell and expensive to feed” black Trans Am and who is indiscriminately malicious taps into all the stereotypes (23). When Deek hands the boys from Bakersfield syringes, I do not have the same reaction as Ty who screams “NOOOO!” when he realizes
a second too late that the Bakersfield boys are pumping battery acid into their veins (153). I am not at all shocked that Deek murders the young men. Deek perfectly fits my stereotypes about drug dealers. But articulating the particulars of my experience has allowed me not just to move beyond my status as narratee of social/cultural narratives, but to understand how easily that status can shape my response to others. Further, it has given me new social/cultural narratives which will affect how I view the world. 237
In ray reading of the Friends, of their childishness as well as their maturity, of the
ways in which they work for a better life, I am not encountering merely another terrible, tragic story of the lives of the African American male underclass. The local and particular portrait that emerges from the details of my reading experience helps me move beyond easy stereotypes and helps me recognize that groups of urban, young people respond to the specific circumstances in which they find themselves. Mowry's narrative complements the projects of the sociologists (Horowitz, Cohen, and Padilla) I cited earlier: Way Past Cool portrays the Friends as a unique, particularly located group of young men adapting to the special contingencies of their situation. As such. Way Past Cool works against totalizing master-narratives about the African-American underclass. But I hope I have gone beyond a relationship with Way Past Cool in which I, as a white critic, theorize about the “problem” of the Other from a voyeuristic position. By acknowledging the ways in which my mythologies of childhood, my expectations about completeness and closure, are a function of not only ray race, but class and gender and academic position as well, my reading of Way Past Cool stands as a mapping of my own subject positions within a larger field of multiple relations. “
I recognize a lack, though, in that there are few other voices with which to engage in discussions of Mowry’s work. While the critical conversation surrounding Beloved and Toni Morrison assures me of the presence of others with whom I can engage in coduction,
I am largely alone with Mowry’s text, which increases the likelihood that I will dominant or
“ Such a relational mapping of subject positions is what Giroux, McLaren, and other contributors to Between Borders advocate. Interestingly, though, most of the essayists in this volume pursue theoretical questions, rather than undertaking such a mapping of their encounters with specific culturd phenomena. Giroux does offer a reading of Lawrence Kasdan’s film Grand Canyon, but strangely enough, while Giroux calls attention to the way the movie fails to represent meaningful encounters across difference and instead descends into a “New Age adoration of the mysteries and wonders of nature” (47), he never investigates his own position as a reader of Kasdan’s film. Although he critiques the movie (perhaps justifiably), he allows his own status as a cultural critic, as an academic, as a man, etc. with particular interests, predilections, and commitments, to remain uninvestigated. The other two essays in the volume which do offer extended readings of cultural phenomena-Michael Eric Dyson’s reading of Michael Jordan as a cultural icon and Roger I. Simon’s reading of the Columbus Quincentary—have similar gaps. I hope my reading of Way Past C ool , of Beloved (and of the other narratives I have discussed) serve as a more concrete enactment of the theoretical principles advocated by such critics. 238 colonize his text. But as the boundaries of the university’s textual community expand, other reader/writers will find themselves in similar positions as they take up texts which other academic readers have yet to notice. Does the lack of a community of other readers vitiate the usefulness and appropriateness of local, specific accounts of reading? I cautiously answer no. Any reader is actually reader(s), and we read from multiple subject positions, sometimes schizophrenically so. While I think the lack of multiple perspectives on a text increases the possibility that a well-intentioned reader may proceed unaware of particular biases or blindspots, I hope my reading of Way Past Cool has demonstrated that it is possible for detailed accounts of reading to point beyond themselves to even imagined
Others. AFTERWORD
“Everything depends on knowing how much... . Good is knowing when to stop.”
- Baby Suggs
By bringing together the disparate discourses of narrative theory, reader-oriented criticism, and literacy research and scholarship, this study’s goal has been to make space in critical conversations for readers to articulate the personal and political dimensions of their textual encounters. More specifically, I have followed the lead of literacy scholars in arguing for the necessity of positioning acts of reading within local and specific contexts and for having readers offer detailed accounts of their reading experiences. To this end, I have proposed three strategies for developing such an accoimt: (1) constructing a public self throughhypormemata, (2) acknowledging one’s status as a narratee of social/cultural narratives, and (3) speaking in a middle voice. I have used these strategies in offering my accounts of my own reading experiences in moving through Booker’s portfolio and The Wings o f the Dove, The Age o f Innocence and The Girl, Lucy Gayheart and A Farewell to Arms, and Beloved and Way Past Cool, and any reader who has stuck with me this far will have noticed that these three strategies have been continually transformed, reformed, unformed, and deformed as the particular exigencies of my textual encounter demanded. In reading Booker’s portfolio, I constructed a hyponmemata by imagining the various voices as well as silences that echoed in my ears as I moved through his portfolio. In reading Lucy Gayheart and A Farewell to Arms, I briefly cited the discordant nature of ray experiences in both trying to construct myself as a woman and being constructed by others in different contexts (in the university and in family circles) as part of what informed my encounters with these novels. Just as my
239 240 hypormematic gestures have taken various forms, so too have I attempted to offer a range of expressions of my status as a narratee of various social and cultural narratives. In
Chapter V, I acknowledged ray status as a narratee of academic narratives about modernity and postmodemity as well of the television news programs, daily newspapers, and weekly news magazines that help construct and transmit master narratives about urban youth. I have also at different times cited movies, television shows, commercial advertising, and both "popular" and “Uterary” novels as part of my attempts to account for and understand my status as a narratee of social/cultural narratives. My attempts to speak in a middle voice and to acknowledge the contingent nature of my reading have also taken on different forms. In reading The Wings of the Dove, I adopted a middle voice as I tried to mediate and imderstand how ray experience with Kate Croy and Milly Theale interacted with but was not predicated upon the reading an implied Henry James might like me to have. Speaking in a middle voice also allowed me to foreground the unstable nature of my encounter with Way Past Cool and the ways in which I continually re-evaluated my ethical and aesthetic positions. Furthermore, while the form of each of these three strategies has been more malleable than refractory, the boundaries between them have also at times blurred. In Chapter m , my status as a narratee of myths about the literacy of the working class intersects with ray own roots in the lower, middle classes and with my relationship with members of my extended family who work blue-coUar jobs. And it has often been in a middle voice that I have positioned myself as a narratee of social/cultural narratives because the process of pinpointing my position prompts me to redefine that position. For example, in recognizing that my commitment to extending the boundaries of academic discourse may in fact create additional difficulties for students like Booker, my status as a narratee of social/cultural narratives and counter-narratives, the public self I would like to construct, and my use of a middle voice overlapped and intersected in my particularized account of reading Booker’s portfolio. Using a middle voice, I acknowledged my position as a narratee of both liberal and conservative views of the goals of education and I constructed myself as a teacher and researcher in the field of composition and literacy studies who is 241
continually reevaluating and re-theorizing her own positions. In my readings of The Age of Innocence, Lucy Gayheart, Beloved, and all the others, one could find similar moments where all of these strategies overlap.
The shifting, mutating, and overlapping nature of these strategies does not, I
believe, limit their usefulness. In fact, I would argue quite to the contrary: that it is the adaptability and fusibility of such practices which prevent them from becoming merely
taxonomic gestures whereby a reader might list the personal and political dimensions of her reading experience without interrogating the complex relations that might exist between and
among those dimensions. The interactions among these strategies work against the notion that a reading of a text is solely the product of one’s position as a white woman, a basic
writing teacher, or a member of the middle class; instead a reading is a process in which
one’s multiple subject positions are acknowledged, investigated, and, perhaps, redefined.
Constructing a self through hypomnemata, acknowledging one’s status as a narratee of
social/cultural narratives, and speaking in a middle voice function as starting places for
coming to understand and talk about reading as a never ending process of shifting from old positions to new ones, of encountering both selves and others, of both understanding and
working to change how one is positioned within larger social and political contexts. They
are useful heuristics for initiating inquiry into reading practices, not a prescriptive formula
for how one ought to read.
While I would argue that the value of my study lies in the ways it both suggests and demonstrates how readers might initiate conversations about their own textual encounters, I do not wish to evade questions about where such conversations about reading might lead.
Such questions can be posed in a number of ways: Would all particularized accounts of reading be equally valid? What relations might exist between the detailed descriptions of reading experiences offered by different readers? How might detailed descriptions of reading enable or disable a reader’s ability to judge the experience a text offers him or to choose among the experiences offered by different texts? Does the validation of all readers’ detailed descriptions of any textual encounter they might have lead to an uncritical 242
relativism? And perhaps most concretely, how is a teacher to evaluate or grade the various readings her students might offer in the classroom?
Martha Nussbaum’s reading of Aristotle’s arguments for the priority of the
perception of particularities in making ethical judgments helps me briefly sketch how such
questions might be answered. Nussbaum argues that in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics “one point of the emphasis on perception is to show the ethical crudeness of moralities
based exclusively on general rules, and to demand for ethics a much finer responsiveness to the concrete-including features that have not been seen before and could not therefore
have been housed in any antecedently buUt system of rules” (37). Nussbaum goes on to
cite Aristotle’s comparison between ethical and architectural measuring practices:
[Aristotle] tells us that a person who makes each choice by appeal to some antecedent general principle held firm and inflexible for the occasion is like an architect who tries to use a straight ruler on the intricate curves of a fluted column. No real architect does this. Instead following the lead of the builders of Lesbos, he will measure with a flexible strip of metal, the Lesbian rule, that “bends to the shape of the stone and is not fixed” (1137b30-32) Aristotle’s picture of ethical reahty ... requires rules that fit it. Good deliberation, like the Lesbian rule, accommodates itself to the shape that it finds, responsively and with respect for complexity. (69-70)
This process of privileging the perception of particularities over generalizations when making deliberative judgments can, according to Nussbaum, allow one to take into account
“new and unanticipated features of a situation,” “the context-embeddedness of relevant features,” and “the ethical relevance of particular persons and relationships” (38). Turning back to the work I have done in the previous chapters allows me to illustrate how Aristotle’s prioritizing of the perception of the particular can function in conversations about reading if the interlocutors choose to seek closure. Perceiving the particularities of Jess
Mowry’s position outside academic circles prevents me from merely judging the experience I have with his narrative based on the general rules by which I might evaluate texts that have been canonized within the academy. Instead, focusing on the particularities of the situation allows me to engage with unanticipated textual features (a hopeful, happy ending to a narrative about urban youth) without being bound by general academic reading practices that could not have prepared me for this particular surprise. Focusing on the 243
specific and concrete rather than the abstract and the general allows me to ask questions about how my status as a female reader of texts like Lucy Gayheart and A Farewell to
A r m is contextually embedded in a relevant matrix of gender relations in the United States near the end of the twentieth century. If I were to choose between these two texts, perhaps
when creating a syllabus for a course in American literature, my decision would have to take into account this matrix of gender relations. And privileging the particular as the basis
of judgment allows me to acknowledge the undeniable uniqueness of people and their relationships, unique people like Newland Archer and the girl, like Booker and Willa
Gather, like me and like the other readers (e.g., Mina Shaughnessy, Judith Fetterley, Linda Kmmholz, Blanche Gelfant, and Vernon Farrington) whose voices I have engaged. As
characters, writers, and readers, these people have no qualitatively similar replacements, and any general principle of judgment among them could not fully account for their unique
gifts. Just as richly detailed accounts of the local circumstances of reading can be a productive way for readers to think and talk about their textual experiences, so too can
perceptions of particularities play a vital role in mediating between texts, readers, and readers.
But Aristotle, as read by Nussbaum, does not completely eradicate the general from ethical deliberation. As Nussbaum says, “The general is dark, uncommunicative, if it is not realized in a concrete image; but a concrete image or description would be inarticulate, in fact mad, if it contained no general terras” (95), and she argues that “The perceiver brings to the new situation a history of general conceptions and commitments, and a host of past obligations and affiliations (some general, some particular), all of which contribute to and help constitute her evolving conception of good living” (94). Thus, in making deliberate judgments about the detailed accounts of textual encounters that different readers might offer, in discriminating among the various narratives which one might choose to read, there is an inevitable interplay between abstract generalities and rich particularities. Even though textual experiences are concrete and caimot be summarized in an abstract system of imiversal generalizations, rales and guidelines do play a role when they are brought to bear on the situation as part of one’s particular personal and political history. To 244
turn to an example that may seem all too familiar, consider the position of a teacher who is faced with a student paper that does not conform to standard, edited English, According to
Aristotle, it would not be sufficient for the teacher merely to apply a general rule that surface feature errors are unacceptable in student writing. Instead, the teacher would need
to draw upon her understanding about the sources and consequences of the general principles by which the surface features of a text might be deemed aberrant, to
acknowledge her position in an educational system that helps sustain those general
principles, and to perceive the particularities of a specific student making specific errors for specific reasons. According to Aristotle, only when particulars thus engage with
generalizations can deliberative judgments be made.
Privileging the local and the concrete as a way to talk about reading need not lead toward an uncritical relativism. Particularities are an essential ally rather than an enemy in
coming to understand and judge texts, readers, writers and the relations between them. Those concerned with where detailed accounts of textual encounters might lead, those
concerned with making judgments about textual encounters, might first accept Nussbaum’s gentle admonishment not to “cling rigidly to the ideal of the judicious spectator but allow
[themjselves a more kinetic sympathy, susceptible to the fresh perception of the particular” (363). But they can also take comfort in Nussbaum’s epigraphic reference to Walt
Whitman’s By Blue Ontario’s Shores which validates the equable man who “bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion, neither more nor less /H e judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing” (54). Focusing on the particularities, the local, and the concrete does not mean that one cannot or should not make discriminations and decisions about readers and readings, but it does require a re-imagining of such moves toward judgment and evaluation and of the grounds on which these moves are made.
Deferring now to Baby Suggs, I will hope I have known how much is enough; it is time to stop. APPENDIX
BOOKER WILLIAMS’ FIRST-YEAR WRITING PORTFOLIO
245 246
Cover P ag e
Hello and welcome to “B’s Excellent Adventure.” The movie will begin in five minutes, but before it begins I’ll like to brief you on the movie. Because the movie only been in the making for three months, some of the actor’s aren’t at there best. For the most obvious example, in the final act, act four, B forgets one of his lines in the final scene. It’s after he says ‘Therefore literacy in a way is imaginary, " that he sticks in his own words. Be prepared for these things it happens a lot In this movie.
In the first act the Special effect crew uses a new technique called the defying suicide stunt. The stunt is named in honor of the inventor, Mr. Foolish, who died tempting the stunt. The stunt involves putting new film on top of old film to produce what is pronounced in the Greek tongue as the “ALPHA AFFECT’
At the end of the movie we will provide you with a blank card. On this card write down your feelings of the movie. If you enjoyed the movie put a 1 in the top left-hand corner of the card. Then write your comments on the rest of the card that supports your rating. Put a 2 in the top left-hand corner if you disliked the movide, followed by your comments. But be sure its either a 1 or a 2 no in betw eens.
O.K. I hope you got your coke and popcorn in-hand, because the movie will begin in five, four, three:
Sit back, relax, and enjoy. 247
Act One 248
I guess I’ll start off telling you of my first years in school. In first grade I
was significantly behind most of the other kids in reading, and writing.
Speaking wasn’t one of my favorite things to do either. I would stutter whenever
I opened my mouth. I cannot remember me stuttering in kindergarden or
outside of school. I believe I started to stutter in the first grade. I don’t know if I was intimidated by the teacher or by the other students in my class or if it was just bioiogical. I said I was behind most of the other students in reading, but I didn’t think so. I was placed in reading group number four which is the lowest one. We would take turns alternating paragraphs to read. I read better than the other kids, I probably stopped at a few words I didn’t know how to pronounce, but as a first grader I thought I did pretty well. I also had to go to the trailer for reading and spelling. The trailer was a place for kids who the teacher felt needed help in their reading, spelling, and communication skills. The trailer was located outside of our school. We read books and learned whatever we could in a fun way. I felt the only reason why my teacher put me in the fourth reading group was because I stuttered when I spoke, although I didn’t stutter when I read. I was held back that year although I didn’t know why. It was probably because I stuttered. I was a little slow in reading, my spelling wasn’t to good and I was excellent in math.
T he next year w as the sam e as the first. Still in group four, still going to the the trailer, spelling still a little hard, and excellent in math. I probably gained a little by staying in the first grade for an extra year, but it was nothing I couldn't have gotten if I wasn’t held back.
Second grade through the fifth grade didn’t differ much from the first, i was in the lowest reading class and high math class. Since I didn’t do to well in 249
reading classes, though I wasn’t to bad of a reader, I concentrated most of my
time and ability on math. I didn’t care much of anything besides math. I carried this attitude for the next four years.
Ninth grade was the big turn around, in my actions, attitudes, and grades. I can recall my six grade year when my oldest brother, Fred, told me that ninth grade is where it all begins. He said no matter how you did in school prior to ninth grade those grades don’t go on your high school transcript. I believe this is what initially sparked me to try to do well in school. For I always wanted to do well in school but I had no one to push me, or to inspire me to do better than what I did. I think what my brother said in six grade gave me that extra push to do better latter on in ninth grade.
In the ninth grade I entered with a new attitude and a new focus. My new attitude was to strive to be the best I can be in each class. My new focus was the future. I focused on the future because my past and present were filled with failure. I felt like I failed in first grade through eighth grade in school. I struggled just to get a 2.0, and many times I didn’t make it. But, now I saw school as many classes, and not just school anymore. So, I strived to do well in each individual class, this helped me alot. I focused on the future because I wasn’t content were I was. I was from a “broken” home and a poor one too. I wanted, and still want so much more for my family and myself, that I decided to look at school as a “way out” instead of an institution designed oniy to educate people.
This is, and was the attitude I had in ninth grade. I made the Honor roll the first grading period. I can’t remember me ever achieving this before in my life. But, I still had trouble in English class. I liked English class but, it seemed like all of my “hand-in” assignments were graded as “C’s”. I hated getting “C’s” 250
in English. I tried most of the time to get an “A” or at least a “B”, but I only got
“C’s”. As I can recall I got a least a “B” on all of my major assignments in ninth and tenth grade. But the in-class assignments and other class work brought me down to a “0 ”. The in-class assignments were the hardest for me because they usually had to be a certain legnth which, I wasn’t good at. I could write a good two paragraphs, but that was about it. My English teacher would tell me I had a good paper, its just not long enough. My average grade In English at the end of my ninth and tenth grade year was a “0 ”. I went to to summer school at the end of my ninth and tenth grade years, In order to skip the eleventh grade. I think I hated high school, so I wanted to graduate as soon as possible. And I didn’t want my friends Who i’d grown up with to graduate before me. Some things that people said played a role in me wanting to skip the eleventh grade also. For example, when I was going through the the checkout counter at Phar Mor, the cashier asked me are you attending YS.U.(Youngstown State University)? I didn’t want to answer her, I held my head down and said no. I’m in the eleventh.
I lied I was only in the tenth. I can recall another time when I was getting on the bus to go home, the bus driver asked me, “are you in school?” She asked this question because if I wasn’t a student the fee would be greater. My English teacher played an important part in my literary skills. I had the sam e English teacher (Mrs. Wagner) four years in a row(eighth through the twelfth). Because of this she knew what I could do and what I couldn’t do. But she usually didn’t assign work I knew how to do nor did she assign work I didn’t totally know how to do. It was sort of In between, like a “0 ” is in between a “B” and a “D”. In other words she kept her classes moving “forward” and never at a “stand still”.
I learned more than I thought I did my ninth and tenth grade years. My 251 senior year for the most part was a breeze. On all of the major assignments in
English I received a “B+” or higher. My average in English class at the end of my senior year was a “B+”. At the end of my high school years I managed to graduate with a “B” average. I wanted to graduate with a higher G.P.A., but I think I finished O.K. I finished second in my class, and got my picture in the paper because of it. I also received an alumni scholarship from my school, and a full tuition scholarship from Ohio State University.
I’m striving now to be the best I can be in school, and to stay focused on the future. I believe I can, and will make a difference for my life, society, and even the world. For I know from experience what you "sow" is what you"reap".
This saying reminds me of a scripture in the Bible, Gelations 6:9, which states,
“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in do season we shall reap if we faint not.” 252
Act Two 253
interview
Jam es lived in Florida his first ten years of school. Then he moved to
Seattle, where he finished the eleventh and twelfth grades. By moving he lost a lot of friends, but he also gained some. James didn’t mind moving. He enjoys reading, writing, and speaking. He can’t recall ever having a problem in these areas. He was either average or above average all through school because he believed in applying himself, and working hard. Steven King is one of his favorite authors. “The Stand" is one of his favorite novels, because it exemplified the message of mankind destroying mankind. This interested him because that’s the way it is in the real world.
Jam es didn’t have much trouble in school, which is the opposite for me. I had much trouble in school, especially my elementary school years. I didn’t enjoy neither reading nor writing. Come to think of it, I didn’t enjoy any subject that dealt with communication.
Jam es says, his parents didn’t really stress education, but they tried to teach him as much as they could before he went to college. Sometimes he finds school interesting, but other times boring. He probably feel this way because he’s only a freshman. His role-models are his parents, and a high school biology teacher. The teacher works hard, and takes pride in what he does, he helped James realize the importance of education. He states high school and college doesn’t differ much. Some of the differences are in high school he didn’t have to study as much, but here in college he studies a lot, and he also have to adjust to college life. For example, revolving his work and social activities around school. He says “I haven’t adjusted yet, but it’s pretty 254
easy to blend in." He’s confident in his ability to perform on college level, well,
he’s doing good so far.
James enjoys to draw, read, and experience things he never did before.
He pretty much does what he pleases, and don’t worry how others perceive
him. He’s satisfied with what he accomplished so far in his life. One of his
major accomplishments was being able to attend college. Now he’s focusing
on education. Which right now is his Engineering courses.
Jam es and I have totally different backgrounds, but are priorities are very
similar. And we share the same fears, which is not accomplishing our purpose
in life, in our set time frame. First, living right before the Lord, second acquiring
the necessary edcuation to accomplish our goals, and third, maintaining a
balance of family and fun, is how Jam es and I prioritize our life. I don’t know
about James, but sometimes I might forget my priorities, and do something I
shouldn’t. But, overall I try my best to perfectly equalize my life, by my priorities.
Until this is done I haven’t begun to live. For life is a gift, but living is an art form, which dem ands, time, experience, and skill. 255
Act Three 256
Informal Writing
Maicoim X’s thirst, and search for knowledge is sort of like mine.
Malcolm read a lot of books to pacify his thirst for knowledge. I on the other
hand am going to school to pacify my thirst. When Maicoim was released from
jail he applied what he had learned. Malcolm X was an essential revolutionary
during the Civil Rights Movement. He did many things to greatly decrease
racism, segregation, and discrimination. He knew the risk involved in what he
set out to accomplish. His life would be the price he would pay. But he valued the fight towards racial equality more than his life.
Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King are two of my idles when it comes to fighting for your rights, and what you believe in. To satisfy my own wants, and desires are not my priorities, but to bring hope to those who need it, as did
Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King. Now I'm in college learning information which will aid me in my future purpose. I hope I can accomplish this goal in my lifetime, but if I don’t. I’ll die trying. 257
Act Four 258
The Final Project
The following is a recollection of past attitudes, experiences, events and
whatever else goes into developing a brief, but in depth study of childhood
literacy. Instead of composing all of the ideas and different points of view into one summary, I have decided to separate them into four categories. The first is entitled “From a Psychologist Point of View.” This section provides understanding of how a child begins and develops literacy traits. The second section is about a person who I admire, me. In this section I speak about my capabilities as a student, and how I felt being in W110 and being joined with
H110 students. The third section is about the perception of students and teachers. This section provides insight on why and how students and teachers relate to one another the way they do. The fourth and final section is entitled
“The Beginning." This section provides some interesting ways into how to go about defining literacy.
Well, what’s the definition of literacy? Webster states the quality to posses the ability to read and write, is the definition of literacy.
1. From a psychologist point of view
What shapes literacy? According to Jean Piaget, a well-known psychologist of the twentieth century, literacy depends upon the age of an individual. He states that people go through stages in their life beginning at birth (which reflects biological maturation as well as increasing social experience).
The first stage of human development in Piaget’s model is the 259
sensorimotor stage (first two years of llfe)-the level of human development in
which the world is experienced only through sensory contact. The infant
explores the world by touching, looking, sucking, and listening, which leads
children to distinguish their own bodies from the larger environment. Children
become more adept at imitating the actions sounds of others during the
sensorimotor stage, but they do not have the capacity to understand or use
sym bols.
The second stage is the proportional stage (two till about seven years of
age): the level of humans development in which language and symbols are first
used. With this ability they distinguish between their ideas and objective reality,
they need not believe their dreams are real, and they recognize the element of
fantasy in fairy tales. In short, they begin to attach meaning to the world.
The third stage is the concrete operational stage (between seven and
eleven), the level of human development characterized by the use of logic to
understand objects or events. During this stage, children make significant
strides in their ability to comprehend and manipulate their environment. They
may attach more than one symbol to a particular event or object. For example, If
you say to a girl of six, “Today is Wednesday"," she might respond, “No, it's my
birthdayl" But, in a few years she might be able to say "Yes, this Wednesday Is
my birthday."
The fourth stage is the formal operational stage (beginning at about age
twelve) which is characterized by highly abstract thought and the ability to
imagine alternatives to reality. For example, if you were to ask a child of seven
or eight, "What would you like to be when you grow up?” a typical answer might be a concrete response as a "A teacher.” Once the final stage of cognitive 260
development {the process of thought and understanding Is attained, the child
is capable of making an abstract response, such as, "I would like a job that is exiting.”
2. The known me
“Great I now I’ll get to do regular English work.” These were my thoughts on the first day of class, when my English teachers explained to the class that we were going to be joined with the H110 students. I felt this way because I didn't choose to be in 11OW, even though I would not have chosen to be in
H110 either, but I guess in my eyes they sort of canceled each other out, therefore leaving me in a regular 110 English class. Back in high school I though, and still do think that some of my major English assignments were the best my English teacher have ever read. I received either a 97%-99% on all of my English assignments, from the last part of my junior year till graduation, but never a 100%(she took off for spelling). I probably should have been satisfied with 110w because originally I tested into the lowest English class. Let me tell you about how I found out about my situation. It was during orientation, I was in a Mentoring Program ciass, when a lady interrupted the session and asked the instructor if she could talk to me alone in the hallway. Well, I smiled I thought she came with good tidings, but oh contrare. When I got in the hallway, she explained could be given free tutor lessons in English and in Math. Hold up, math , why math? “Well, you’ve scored a such and such on your test.” No, no, no I didn’t, I got a such and such. “OhI O.K., well then your not qualified to receive free tutor lessons.” Great see ya lady by(actually I didn’t say that). Man, 261 just the thought of math, it even sounds simple and basic. I stopped saying
math when I entered ninth grade and took algebra. O.K. back to English, I thought to myself there’s no way that I’m going to take that low of an English course in college. No, Way! I knew I was a pretty good writer, only if given enough time to formulate ideas on what, and how to go about writing. I see myself as a very creative, and analytical person. Therefore given enough time, I can begin to invent, shape, and mold my ideas in ways which are satisfying to me, and an English teacher. So, I decided to take the English test again. This time it was easier. I was placed in a room all by myself, quietness all around me and I had a few extra minutes to finish. Unlike the first time I took it, where there was people all around me, who distracted me whenever they got up to hand-in their paper, after only a half an hour. I wasn’t finished when time was expired. I don’t know why my paper wasn't good enough for them to give me a passing score. But no excuses, it was my fault I failed that assignment, I guess.
3. The perceptions of students and teachers
I was planning to contrast the writing style, and the early childhood experiences which had an effect on literacy, of the 110W students and the H110 students. But I was surprised to find out that I didn’t notice any remarkable differences in these areas. Some students from both groups had trouble, or certain household hindrances which definitely had an effect on their literacy lives. There were some differences in the way they communicated on paper, which didn’t surprise me. The fact of the matter is people put more time, and effort into what they are interested in. For example, in elementary I 262
concentrated more of my time and effort in math than any other subject. For
another example, my roommate would rather take the highest English course
above 110 instead of taking a regular 110 course, because he believes he’s
good at it. Even though it’s only a GEC. To wrap this paragraph up. I'm
proposing that people chose to do what’s more comfortable for them. It would
seem that a regular 110 course would be more comfortable, but in reality it isn’t.
I didn’t want to get into this but it’s to late now. There are certain factors which
play a major role in our decision making. I will only elaborate on two Ego and
how we estimate our abilities. Ego in this sense is pride. Maybe those who
decide not take certain courses is because they believe the courses are below
them. Or maybe those who decide to take advanced courses is because they
over estimate their abilities.
How do one receive these two factors? We receive these through the
people we’re around everyday, our friends, parents, and especially teacher’s. I
would probably be surprised at how many teacher’s believe they’re not a vital
link in how their students ultimately turnout. For many students teachers are their only hope to “become somebody.” All teachers aren’t parents but all
Parents are teachers. And because of this if the child isn’t taught the necessary values, and morals at home, in most cases the only alternate source of learning th e se necessities is in the classroom .
I can recall Mike Rose the author of Lives on the Boundary, speaking of a fifth-grade teacher(Mr. Wilson). Rose states “He would have one of his best students read aloud a passage from a science or language arts textbook, then have all the students fill in the blanks on various mimeographed sheets supplied by the textbook publishers,” Mr. Wilson explained, "by having children 263
fill in the blanks, he was reinforcing the material they heard read aloud.” Mr.
Wilson also said (“This method is supported by psychological theory.”) What Mr.
Wilson was doing was probably supported by psychological theory, but there
are many psychologist which have many theories. I believe Piaget would have
let the students take turns reading because it gives the children a sense of
equality.
Mr. Wilson’s explanation makes me feel two ways. First, it makes me feel
sorry for Mr. Wilson, and secondly it makes me feel like laughing at this
nonsense, yet profound explanation. I say this because Mr. Wilson isn’t givng
the other students a chance to be equal with one another. I also feel sorry for
the kids who have to participate in such classes. Since I’ve experienced “the
waiting for m y turn syndrome" before-hand, let m e tell you about it. At the
beginning of the school year when I actually thought the teacher might call upon
me to read, I would pay attention, and follow along in my book, because just in
case. But rarely did the teacher call upon me to read, I mean rarely, when I
figured I most likely wasn’t going to be called upon, I did what must kids do, put
my head down or day dream, but never fail asleep, because just in case.
I initiated the previous paragraph because I strongly believe that how a
child think a teacher perceives him, and his abilities is how a child may perceive
himself. Mr. Wilson’s students obviously felt they weren’t good enough reader’s
to be the chosen one to read. Now, I can’t say if that in any way lowered their
self-confidence level In their abilities to read, but I can tell you what happened to me. When I wasn’t called upon it lowered my self-confidence level. I believed either two reasons, that I just wasn’t a good enough reader, or it was personal. I guess what Charles Horton Cooley (a well known psychologist) 264
states about the “Looking Glass-Self in “Sociology” pg. 128 is true: how we
think others perceive us is how we perceive ourselves.
4. The beginning
B’s definition of Literacy is the condition or quality of being able to read
and write. Consequently Webster has the same definition of literacy as I do.
Many people have their own definition of literacy, which if examined closely is
most likely the same as mine.
Every person on this earth with the exception of a few, have an organized
system and speech used as a means of communication among themselves.
That therefore means everyone has a language. Individual infants have a
language, even though we don’t always understand what they’re trying to convey. Therefore Literacy in a way is imaginary (not iiteral but expected). We know that you can be literate in one language but not another, according to
Webster. But who’s the judge to say if a person isn’t literate? Who’s to say because I can’t understand what he/she writes or speaks that they’re not literate? Is a person literate if they understand themselves only? In essence could the great and mighty Webster, who has ruled the practical information market, have made an error? I think not.
Webster’s dictionary is a standardized dictionary written in the English.
Therefore Webster’s dictionary is the Standard of civilized English language.
But to actually be certain of the previous statement one would have to do research on the words standard (a model to be followed or imitated) and civilized (to endow with law, order, and the conditions favorable to the arts and sciences: to refine) in order to Know the definitions of their original language. 265
Bibliography
Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin Group Inc., 1989
Macionis, John J. Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1991
Williams, Booker L. In His Life and Mind. Nowhere, in. Particular: Printhise-
Hall, Inc. Unknown WORKS CITED
Abel, Elizabeth. “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation.” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 470-98.
Agnew, Jean-Christophe. “The Consuming Vision of Henry James.” In The Culture o f Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, edited by Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, 65-100. New York: Pantheon, 1983
Albertini, \^rgil. “Cather’s Lucy Gayheart: A Girl in Motion.” Platte Valley Review 19, no. 2 (1991): 37-44.
Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1980.
AndeTson,Qaenûn.The American Henry James. London: John Calder, 1958.
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Ashton-Jones, Evelyn and Dene Kay Thomas. “Composition, Collaboration, and Women’s Ways of Knowing: A Conversation with Mary Belenky.” In (Inter)Views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, edited by Gary A. Olson and Irene Gale, 27-44. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991.
Awkward, Michael. “Race, Gender, and the Politics of Reading.” Black American Literature 22, no. 1 (1988): 5-27.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993.
Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. 4th ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972.
Balbert, Peter. “From Hemingway to Lawrence to Mailer: Survival and Sexual Identity in A Farewell to Arms.” The Hemingway Review 3 (Fall 1983): 30-43.
Balester, Valerie M. Cultural Divide: A Study of African-American College-Level Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1993.
Barlowe-Kayes, Jamie. “Re-reading Women: The Example of Catherine Barkley.” The Hemingway Review 12 (Spring 1993): 24-35.
266 267
Bartholoraae, David. “Inventing the University.” InWhenaWriterCan’tWrite: Studies in Writer's Block and Other Composing Problems, edited by Mike Rose, 134-65. New York: Guilford Press, 1985.
Bassard, Katherine Clay. “Gender and Genre: Black Women’s Autobiography and the Ideology of Literacy.” African American Review 26 (1992): 119-29.
Bayra, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood; How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 63-80. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method of Henry James. Philadelphia: Albert Saifer, 1954.
Beers, Terry. “Reading Constraints: Conventions, Schemata, and Literary Interpretation.” Diacritics 18 (1988): 82-93.
Belenky, Mary Field, Blythe Mc\^cker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule. Women's Ways o f Knowing: The Development o f Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Bell, Bernard W. “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrance of Things Past.” African American Review 26 (1992): 7-15.
Bell, Millicent. “Pseudoautobiography and Personal Metaphor.” In Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, edited by Harold Bloom, 113-27. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Berlin, James. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” College English 50 (1988): 477-94.
Bersani, Leo. “The Narrator as Center in The Wings of the Dove." Modem Fiction Studies 6(1960): 131-44.
Blackraur, R.P. Studies in Hemy James. Ed. Veronica A. Makowsky. New York: New Directions, 1983.
Blair, Sara. “Henry James and the Paradox of Literary Mastery.” Philosophy and Literature 15 (1991): 89-102.
Bleich, David. “Ethnography and the Study of Literacy: Prospects for a Socially Generous Research.” In Into the Field: Sites o f Composition Studies, edited by Anne Ruggles Gere, 176-92. New York: Modem Language Association, 1993.
------“Genders of Writing.” Journal o f Advanced Composition 9(1989): 10-25.
------The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988.
------“Gender Interests in Reading and Language.” In Gender and Reading: 268
Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patricinio P. Schweikart, 234-66. Baltimore; Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986.
------Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978.
------Reading and Feelings: An Introduction to Subjective Criticism. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1975.
Booth, Wayne C. ‘Taking Flight with The Wings o f the Dove." In Understanding Narrative, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, forthcoming.
------, jhe Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988.
Bradbury, Nicola. ‘“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’: The Celebration of Absence in The Wings o f the Dove." In Henry James: Fiction as History, edited by Ian F.A. Bell. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984.
Bradshaigh, Lady. ‘To Samuel Richardson.” 10 Oct. 1748. In The Correspondence o f Samuel Richardson. Vol. IV. London: Richard Pihllips, 1804. 177-82.
Brande, Dorothea. “Review of Lucy Gayheart." American Review 5 (October 1935): 625- 29. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Willa Cather, edited by John J. Murphy, 282-84. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984.
Bridwell-Bowles, Lillian. “Discourse and Diversity: Experimental Writing within the Academy.” CCC 43 (1992): 349-68.
Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels. New York: Viking, 1982.
Buley-Meissner, Mary Louise. “Rhetorics of the Self.” In Balancing Acts: Essays on the Teaching o f Writing in Honor o f William F. Irmscher, edited by \^ g in ia A. Chappell, Maiy Louise Buley-Meissner, and Chris Anderson, 29-51. Carbondale and Edwardsvüle, IL: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991.
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar o f Motives. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969. Originally published by Prentice-Hall in 1945.
------Permanence and Change: AnAnatomy of Purpose. New York: New Republic Inc., 1935.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits o f “Sex.” New York; Routledge, 1993.
------Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion o f Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cameron, J.M. “History, Realism, and the Work of Henry James.” English Studies in Canada 10(1984): 299-316. 269
Cantelupe, Eugene B. “Statues and Lovers in A Farewell to Arms." Fitzgerald- Hemingway Review (1977): 203-205.
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence o f the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987.
Carlin, Deborah. Carter, Canon, and the Politics o f Reading. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Cather, Willa. Lucy Gayheart (1935). New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
Caughie, Pamela L. “Women Reading/Reading Women: A Review of Some Recent Books on Gender and Reading.” Papers in Lmguage and Literature 24 (1988): 317-35.
Chambers, Diane. “The Tie That Binds: The Idealization of Sisterhood in Victorian Literature.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, June, 1994.
Christian, Barbara. “Being the Subject and the Object: Reading African-American Women’s Novels.” In Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, 195-200. New York: Routledge, 1993.
------, “‘Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something’: African-American Women’s Historical Novels.” In Wildwomen in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin, 326-41. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990.
Chodorow, Nancy. “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective.” In The Future of Difference, edited by Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, 3-19. Boston: G.K, Hall & Co., 1980.
Chown, Linda. “‘It Came Closer than That’: Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart.” Gather Studies, vol. 2. Edited by Susan J. Rosowski, 118-39. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1993.
Clayton, Jay. The Pleasures o f Babel: Contemporary American Literature and Theory. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.
Clifford, James and George Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics o f Ethnography. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986.
Cohen, Albert K. “Foreword and Overview.” In Gangs in America, edited by C. Ronald Huff, 7-21. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990.
Comeau, Paul. “Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart: A Long Perspective.” Prairie Schooner 55 (1981): 199-209. 270
Comley, Nancy R. “Reading and Writing Genders.” In Reorientations: Critical Theories and Pedagogies, edited by Bruce Henricksen and Thaïs E. Morgan, 179-92. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990.
Con Davis, Robert “Woman as Oppositional Reader: Cixous on Discourse.” Papers in Language and Literature 24 (1988): 265-82.
Cook-Gumperz, Jenny. “Literacy and Schooling: An Unchanging Equation?” In The Social Construction o f Literacy, edited by Jenny Cook-Gumperz, 16-44. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986.
Cornelius, Janet Duitsman. “When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South. Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1991.
Crouch, Stanley. “Aunt Medea: Beloved by Toni Morrison.” The New Republic (October 19,1987): 38-43. Rçt. in Notes o f Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979- 1989,202-209. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit o f Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981.
------, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way. “Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English.” PMLA 102 (1987): 10-19.
Davis, Lennard J. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction. New York: Metheun, 1987.
Davis, Walter A. “The Fisher King: Wille zjurMacht in Baltimore.” Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 668-94.
Devor, Holly. Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality. Bloomington: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989,
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies o f Twentieth- Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985.
Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Implied; The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” CCC 35 (1984): 155-71.
Farr, Marcia. “Essayist Literacy and Other Verbal Performances.” Written Communication 10 (1993): 4-38.
Felman, Shoshana. “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable.” Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 21-44.
Ferguson, Rebecca. “History, Memory and Language in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In Feminist Criticism' Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Sellers, 109-27. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991. 271
Fetterley, Judith. “Foreword.” In Composition and Resistance, edited by C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz, ix-xii. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991.
------The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978,
Fields, Karen E. “To Embrace Dead Strangers: Toni Morrison’s Beloved." In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 159-69. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority o f Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980.
------Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ?aiadis& Lost. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967.
Flynn, Elizabeth. “Reading Student Texts from a Feminine Perspective I.” In Encountering Student Texts: Interpretive Issues in Reading Student Writing, edited by Bruce Lawson, Susan Sterr Ryan, and W. Ross Winterowd, 49-58. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989.
Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, I929-I94I. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993.
Foucault, Michel. “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition, edited by H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 208-26. Chicago; Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983.
Freedman, Diane P., Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar, eds. The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Criticism. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy o f the Oppressed. Translated by Myra B. Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970.
Frye, Joanne S. Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Arm Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1986.
Gabler-Hover, Janet. “Truth and Deception: The Basis for Judgment in The Wings o f the Dove." Texas Studies in Language and Literature 29 (1987): 169-86.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and th e ‘Racial’ Self. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987.
Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988.
Gelfant, Blanche H. ‘“Everybody Steals’: Language as Theft in Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl." In Tradition and the Talents o f Women, edited by Florence Howe, 183-210. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991. 272
------_ Women Writing in America: Voices in Collage. Hanover, NH: University of New England, 1984.
George, Nelson. “Boyz Against the Hood.” New York Times Book Review 24 May 1992, 21.
Gibson, May Ellis. “Edith Wharton and the Ethnography of Old New York.” Studies in American Fiction 13 (1985): 57-69.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982
Giroux, Henry A. “Living Dangerously: Identity Politics and the New Cultural Racism.” In Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics o f Cultural Studies, edited by Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren, 29-55. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Goode, John. ‘The Pervasive Mystery of Style.” In The Air o f Reality: New Essays on Henry James, edited by John Goode, 244-300. London: Metheun, 1972.
Gore, Jennifer. The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes o f Truth. New York: Routledge, 1993
Graff, Gerald. “Interpretation on Tlon: A Response to Stanley Fish.” New Literary History 17 (1985): 109-17.
Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991.
Greenwald, Elissa. “‘I and the Abyss’: Transcendental Romance in The Wings o f the Dove.” Studies in the Novel 18 (1986): 177-92.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1994.
Hackett, Francis. “Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms.” Saturday Review of Literature, 6 August 1949, 32-33.
Hallgarth, Susan A. ‘The Woman Who Would Be Artist in The Song o f the Lark and Lucy Gayheart.” In Willa Cather: Family, Community, and History, edited by John J. Murphy, 169-73. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Humanities Publication Center, 1990.
Harland, Paul. “‘Disconcerting Poetry’: James’s Use of Romance in The Wings o f the Dove.” English Studies in Canada 14 (1988): 310-25.
Hayes, Peter L. “Ministrant Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.” In Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays, edited by Robert W. Lewis, 11-19. New York: Praeger, 1990. 273
Heath, Shirley Brice and Milbrey W. McLaughlin. “Introduction: Identity and Inner-City Youth.” In Identity and Inner-City Youth: Beyond Ethnicity and Gender, edited by Shirley Brice Heath and Milbrey W. McLaughlin, 1-12. New York: Teachers College Press, 1993.
Heath, Shirley Brice. “Urban Literacy Beyond School: The Challenge of Closed Doors and Open Stages.” Conference on College Composition and Communication, San Diego, CA, April 1,1993.
------_ Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. (1929) New York: Scribner’s, 1986.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Women Writer’s L ite r^ Tradition.” Jn Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 116-42. New York: Meridian, 1990.
Heyns, Michiel. ‘“Language of the House’in The Wings o f the Dove.” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism 39, no. 2 (1989): 116-36.
Hitchcock, Peter. “Radical Writing.” In Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, edited by Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstiy, 95-121. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1991.
Hite, Molly. The Other Side o f the Story: Structures and Strategies o f Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989.
Holland, Lawrence Bedwell. The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964.
Holland, Norman N. and Murray Schwartz. “The Delphi Seminar.” College English 36 (1975): 789-800.
Holland, Norman N. The Dynamics o f Literary Response. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968
Holloway, Karla EC. “Beloved: A Spiritual.” Ca/Zatoo 13 (1990): 516-25.
Holloway, Karla EC. and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos. New Dimensions o f Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading o f the Novels o f Toni Morrison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Homans, Margaret “Feminist Fictions and Feminist Theories of Narrative.” Narrative 2 (1994): 3-16. hooks, bell. “Essentialisra and Experience.” American Literary History 3 (1991): 172-83. 274
—. “Culture to Culture: Ethnography and Cultural Studies as Critical Intervention.” In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 123-33. Boston: South End Press, 1990.
------“Writing the Subject: Reading The C obr Purple.” Jn Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 454-70. New York: Meridian, 1990.
Horowitz, Ruth. “Sociological Perspectives on Gangs: Conflicting Definitions and Concepts.” In Gangs in America, edited by C. Ronald Huff, 37-54. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990.
House, Elizabeth B. “Toni Morrison’s Ghost: The Beloved Who Is Not Beloved.” Studies in American Fiction 18 (1990): 17-26.
Ian, Marcia. “The Elaboration of Privacy in Wings o f the Dove.” ELH 51 (1984): 107-36.
Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: FromReader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989.
Jacobson, Marcia. Henry James and the Mass Market. University, AL: U of Alabama Press, 1983.
Jacobus, Mary. Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986.
James, Henry. The Wings o f the Dove. (1902) New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
------“To W.D. Howells.” 17 Aug. 1908. In The Letters o f Henry James, vol. 2, edited by Percy Lubbock, 98-104. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.
Jefferson, D.W. Henry James and the Modem Reader. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding o f /’E’cnftrre féminine.” In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 361-77 New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Joyce, Joyce A. “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 18 (1986): 335-44.
Kapoor, Ranjit Kaur. “The Dilemma of a James Reader.” In The Magic Circle o f Henry James: Essays in Honour ofDarshan Singh Maini, edited by Amritjit Singh and K. Ayyappa Paniker, 224-34. New York: Envoy, 1989.
Karcevskij, Sergej. “The Asymmetrical Dualism of Linguistic Signs.” Translated by Wendy Steiner. In The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946, edited by Peter Steiner, 47-54. Austin, TX: Univ. of Texas Press, 1982. 275
Karcher, Carolyn L. “Male Vision and Female Revision in James’s The Wings o f the Dove and Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Women’s Studies 10 (1984): 227-44.
Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Hemingway’s Gender Trouble.” American Literature 63 (1991): 187-207.
Koelb, Clayton. Review of The Double Perspective, by David Bleich. Journal o f English and Germanic Phiblogy 90 (1991): 123-25.
Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism.” In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 144-67. New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Komar, Kathleen L. “Language and Character Delineation in The Wings o f the Dove.” Tv,ientieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and CriticalJoumal 29(1983): 471-87.
Krook, Dorothea. The Ordeal o f Consciousness in Henry James. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962.
Krupat, Arnold. Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992.
Krumholz, Linda. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review 26 (1992): 395-407.
Langland, Elizabeth. “Inventing Reality: The Ideological Commitments of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” Narrative 2 (1994): 87-111.
Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London: Chatto and Windus, 1950.
Lewis, Robert W. A Farewell to Arms: The War o f the Words. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Le Sueur, Meridel. The Girl. (1938) Minneapolis: West End Press, 1978.
------^ Worker Writers. (1939) Worker Writer Series No. 4. Minneapolis: West End Press, 1982.
Lockridge, Ernest. “Faithful in Her Fashion: Catherine Barkley, the Invisible Hemingway Heroine.” Journal o f Narrative Technique 18 (1988): 170-78.
Lofty, John S. “Time to Write: Resistance to Literacy in a Maine Fishing Community.” The Right to Literacy, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin, 39-49. New York: Modem Language Association, 1990.
Lu, Min-zhan. “From Silence to Words: Writing As Struggle.” College English 49 (1987): 437-47. 276
Lundberg, Patricia Lorimer. “Dialogically Feminized Reading; A Critique of Reader- Response Criticism. Reader 22 (1989): 1-37.
Lynn, Kenneth. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Macnaughton, William R. Henry James: The Later Novels. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
Mailloux, Steven. Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. Ithaca Cornell Univ. Press, 1982.
Marcus, George E. “Ethnography in the Modem World System.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics o f Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 165-93. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986.
Margolis, Anne T. Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.
Mathiessen, F.O. Henry James: The Major Phase. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1944.
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987.
McLaren, Peter. “Multiculturalism and the Postmodern Critique: Toward a Pedagogy of Resistance and Transformation.” In Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics o f Cultural Studies, edited by Henry A. Giroux and Peter McLaren, 192-222. New York: Routledge, 1994.
McLaughlin, Milbrey W. “Embedded Identities: Enabling Balance in Urban contexts.” In Identity and Inner-City Youth: Beyond Ethnicity and Gender, edited by Shirley Brice Heath and Milbrey W. McLaughlin, 36-68. New York: Teachers College Press, 1993.
Mellow, James. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.
Messent, Peter. Ernest Hemingway. New York: SL Martin’s Press, 1992.
Miller, Christopher L. “Theories of Africans: The Questions of Literary Anthropology.” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 281-300. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986.
Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988.
Miller, Linda Patterson. “Hemingway’s Women: A Reassessment.” In Hemingway in Italy and Other Essays, edited by Robert W. Lewis, 3-9. New York: Praeger, 1990.
Mitchell, Lee Clark. “The Sustaining Duplicities of The Wings o f the Dove.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 29 (1987): 187-214. 277
Mizruchi, Susan. The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988.
Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. “A Different Remembering: Memory, History, and Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” In Toni Morrison, edited by Harold Bloom, 189-99. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.
Moddelmog, Debra A. “Reconstructing Hemingway’s Identity: Sexual Politics, the Author, and the Multicultural Classroom.” Narrative 1 (1993): 187-206.
Moffatt, Michael. Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989.
Morison, Elting. “The Uncertain Relation.” Daedalus 109 (1980): 179-84.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Mntage Books, 1993. Originally published by Random House, 1992.
------“Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1(1989): 9-34. Rpt. in Toni Morrison, edited by Harold Bloom, 201-30. New York: Chelsea House, 1990.
------Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988. Orginally published by Alfred Knopf, 1987.
------“The Site of Memory.” In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft o f Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, 103-24. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
------“Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” In Black Women Writers (1950- 1980), edited by Mari Evans, 339-45. New York: Doubleday, 1984.
Moss, Beverly J., ed. Literacy Across Communities. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1994.
Mowry, Jess. Way Past Cool. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.
Interview. “Voice from the ‘hood.” People (22 June 1992): 66.
Mullen, Harryette. “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Live o f a Slave Girl, and Beloved.” In The Culture o f Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, 244-64. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992.
Nader, Laura. “Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 284-311. New York: Pantheon Books, 1969.
Nagel, James. “Catherine Barkley and Retrospective Narration in A Farewell to Arms.” In Ernest Hemingway: Six Decades o f Criticism, edited by Linda W. Wagner, 171- 85. East Lansing; Michigan State Univ. Press, 1987. 278
Neuleib, Janice. ‘The Friendly Stranger; Twenty -Five Years as ‘Other.’” CCC 43 (1992): 231-43.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990.
Oerleraans, Onno. “Literary Value and The Wings o f the Dove."' English Studies in Canada 17(1991): 177-96.
O’Hara, Daniel T. “Critical Change and the Collective Archive.” In Critical Conditions: Regarding the Historical Moment, edited by Michael Hays. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Ohraann, Richard. English in American: A Radical View o f the Profession. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976.
Olson, Gary A. “bell hooks and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation.” Journal o f Advanced Composition 14 (1994): 3-19.
Padilla, Felix M. The Gang as an American Enterprise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992.
Page, Philip. “Circularity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review 26 (1992): 31-39.
Park, Sue. “One Reader’s Response to Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Conference of College Teachers o f English o f Texas 56 (September 1991): 39-46.
Parrington, Vernon L. “Our Literary Aristocrat” The Pacific Review, Jm e 1921. Rpt. in Edith Wharton: A Collection o f Critical Essays, edited by Irving Howe, 151-54. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.
Pattison, Robert. On Literacy: The Politics o f the Word from Homer to the Age o f Rock. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982.
Phelan, James. ‘Toward a Rhetorical Reader-Response Criticism: The Difficult, the Stubborn, and the Ending of Be/overf.” Modem Fiction Studies (1994): forthcoming.
‘I Have Never Seen Anything Like It’: The Beginnings of Waiting for the Barbarians and Beloved.” EGO Faculty Lecture Series, Ohio State University, May 1994.
. “What Hemingway and a Rhetorical Theory of Narrative Can Do for Each Other: The Example of ‘My Old Man.’” The Hemingway Review 12 (Spring 1993): 1-14.
.“Distance, Voice, and Temporal Perspective in Frederic Henry’s Narration: Successes, Problems, and Paradox.” In New Essays on A Farewell to Arms. edited by Scott Donaldson, 53-73. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990. 279
------Reading People, Reaâng Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation o f Narrative. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989.
------“Narrative Discourse, Literary Character, and Ideology.” In Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, edited by James Phelan, 132-46. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1989.
------Worlds from Words: A Uieory o f Language in Fiction. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” In Profession 91, 33-40. Nevy York: MLA, 1991.
------“Ideology and Speech Act Theory.” Poetics Today 7(1986): 59-72.
Prescott, Mary. “A Farewell to Arms: Memory and the Perpetual Now.” College English 17(1990): 41-52.
Pullin, Faith. “Hemingway and the Secret Language of Hate.” In Ernest Hemingway: New Critcal Essays, edited by A. Robert Lee, 172-92. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983.
Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. “End Sinister: Neat Closure as Disruptive Force.” In Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, edited by James Phelan, 120-31. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1989.
------Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics o f Interpretation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987.
Randall, John H. The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Wdla Cather’s Search fo r Value. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Ratcliffe, Krista. “Re-Considering Essentialism for Feminist Composition Pedagogy: Adrienne Rich’s ‘Politics of Location’ as a Theory of Writerly Agency.” The Writing Instructor 13 {1994): 55-66.
Reid, Calvin. “Just a Vogue?” Publishers Weekly (9 August 1993): 33.
Rendall, Steven. “Fish vs. Fish.” Diacritics 12 (1982): 49-57.
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway’s First War: The Making o f A Farewell to Arms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976. 280
Rigney, Barbara Hill. ‘“A Story to Pass On: Ghosts and the Significance of History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." In Haunting the House o f Fiction, edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, 229-35. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennesee Press, 1991.
Robinson, Lillian S. ‘Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon.” In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 105-21. New York; Pantheon, 1985.
Rockett, Will. “Jason Dreams of Freddy: Genre, Supertext, and the Production of Meaning Through Pop-Cultural Literacy.” In Cultural Power/Cultural Literacy, edited by Bonnie Braendlin, 179-98. Tallahasee, FL; Florida State Univ. Press, 1989.
Rodrigues, Eusebio L. “The Telling of Beloved.” Journal o f Narrative Technique 21 (1991): 153-69.
Rose, Shirley K. “Reading Representative Anecdoates of Literacy Practice; or ‘See Dick and Jane Read and Write!’” Rhetoric Review 8 (1990): 224-59.
Rosowski, Susan. “Writing Against Silences: Female Adolescent Development in the Novels of Willa Cather.” Studies in the Novel 21(1989): 60-77.
------The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986.
Rowe, John Carlos. The Theoretical Dimensions o f Henry James. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
Rubin, Donnalee. Gender Influences: Reading Student Texts. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1993.
Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” American Literature 64 {1992): 567-97.
Ryder, Mary R. “Loosing the Tie That Binds: Sisterhood in Cather.” In Willa Cather: Family, Community, and History, edited by John J. Murphy, 41-47. Provo, UT; Brigham Young University Humanities Publication Center, 1990.
Sale, Maggie. “Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved.” African American Review 26 (1992): 41-50.
Sales, Roger. ‘Toni Morrison’s Betoved.” Massachusetts Review 29, no. 1 (1988): 81- 86.
Samuels, Charles Thomas. The Ambiguity of Henry James. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971.
Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway. At the Hemingways: A Portrait of a Family. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961. 281
Schaafsma, David. Eating on the Street: Teaching Literacy in a Multicultural Society. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.
Schmudde, Carol E. “The Haunting of 124.” African American Review 26 (1992): 409- 19. Scholes, Robert. “Who Cares About the Text?” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 17 (1984): 171-80.
Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Routledge, 1989. Orginally published by Methuen, 1987.
Schug, Charles. The Romantic Genesis o f the Modem Novel. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1979.
Schwartz, Murray. “Where is Literature?” College English 36 (1975): 756-65.
Schweikart, Patricinio P. “Reading, Teaching, and the Ethics of Care.” In Gender in the Classroom: Power and Pe^gogy, edited by Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson, 78-95. Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990.
------_ “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading.” In Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patricinio P. Schweikart, 31-62. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986.
Scollon, Ron and Suzanne B.K. ScoUon. Narrative, Literacy, and Face in Interethnic Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981.
Sears, Sallie. The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968.
Seltzer, Mark. Henry James and the Art o f Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984.
Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher o f Basic Writing. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977.
Showalter, Elaine. “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and The Woman of the Year.” In Men in Feminism, edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, 116-32. New York: Metheun, 1987.
Shuman, Amy. Storytelling Rights: The Uses o f Oral and Written Texts by Urban Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986.
Shusterman, Richard. “The Fine Art of Rap.” New Literary History 22 (1991): 613-32.
Sicker, Philip. Love and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction o f Henry James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980.
Sipple, Susan. ‘“Witness [to] the Suffering of Women’: Poverty and Sexual Transgression in Meridel Le Sueur’s Women on the Breadlines^ In Feminism, Bakhtin, and the 282
Dialogic, edited by Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry, 135-53. Albany; State Univ. of New York Press, 1991.
Skaggs, Merrill M. “Death in C Major: Willa Cather’s Perilous Journey Toward the Otàmax^ in Lucy Gayhearty Literature and Belief i 76-88.
Solotaroff, Robert. “Sexual Identity in A Farewell to Arms.” Hemingway Review 9 (Fall 1989): 2-17.
Smith, Valerie. ‘“Circling the Subject’: History and Narrative in Beloved.” In Toni Morrison: Criticial Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah, 342-55. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Spanier, Sandra Whipple. “Hemingway’s Unknown Solder: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War.” In New Essays on A Farewell to Arms, edited by Scott Donaldson, 75-108. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990.
Spilka, Mark. “The Importance of Being Androgynous.” la Hemingway: Essays of edited by Frank Scafella, 201-12. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991.
------“Original Sin in ‘The Last Good Country’: or. The Return of Catherine Barkley.” In The Modernists, edited by Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. MacNiven, 210-33. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1987.
Spillers, Hortense. “Cross-Currents, Discontinuities: Black Women’s Fiction.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 249-61. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985.
Spolsky, Ellen. “The Uses of Adversity: The Literary Text and the Audience That Doesn’t Understand.” In The Uses o f Adversity: Failure and Accommodation in Reader Response, edited by Ellen Spolsky, 17-35. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1990.
Steig, Michael. Stories o f Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989.
Stoltzfus, Ben. “A Sliding Discourse: TheLanguageof A Farewell to Arms.” In New Essays on A Farewell to Arms, edited by Scott Donaldson, 109-36. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990.
Stout, Janis P. Strategies o f Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works o f Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1990.
Stuckey, J. Elspeth. The Violence o f Literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983.
Swartzlander, Susan, Diana Pace, and Virginia Lee Stamler. “The Ethics of Requiring 283
Students to Write about their Personal Lives.” The Chronicle o f Higher Education 17 February 1993, sec. 2, p. B1-B2.
Travis, Molly Abel. “Beloved and Middle Passage: Race, Narrative, and the Critic’s Essentialisra.” Narrative 2 (1994): forthcoming.
Trace, Jacqueline. “Dark Goddesses: Black Feminist Theology in Morrison’s Beloved.” Obsidian I I 6, no. 3 (1991): 14-30.
------_ “Speaking from the Silence of the Slave Narrative: Beloved and African- American Women’s History.” Texas Review 13 (1992): 69-81.
Trimbur, John. “Essayist Literacy and the Rhetoric of Deproduction.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1990): 72-86.
Trumpener, Katie and James M. Nyce. “The Recovered Fragments: Archeological and Anthropological Perspectives in Edith Wharton’s The Age o f Innocence.” In Literary Anthropology: A New Interdisciplinary Approach to People, Signs, and Literature, edited by Fernando Poyatos, 161-69. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1988.
Tuttleton, James. “Edith Wharton: The Archeological Motive,” The Yale Review. 61(1972): 562-74.
Ulmer, Gregory. Teletheory: GrammatologyintheAge ofVideo. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Watt, Ian. The Rise o f the Novel. London: Chatto and Windus, Ltd., 1957. Rpt. by Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1965.
Weimann, Robert. ‘Text, Author-Function, and Appropriation in Modem Narrative: Toward a Sociology of Representation.” Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 431-47.
Wexler, Joyce. “E.R.A. for Hemingway: A Feminist Defense of A Farewell to Arms.” Georgia Review 35 (1981): 111-23.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. (1920) New York: Macmillan, 1986.
A Backward Glance. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933.
Whitlow, Roger. Cassandra’s Daughters: The Women in Hemingway. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.
Wideman, John Edgar. Damballah. New York: \^ntage Books, 1981.
Winnett, Susan. “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure.” PMLA 105 (1990): 505-18.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. “‘Margaret Gamer’: A Cincinnati Story.” TheMassachusettes Review 32 (1991): 417-40. 284
Woodress, James. Willa Gather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1987.
Zebroski, James Thomas. ‘The English Department and Social Class: Resisting Writing.” The Right to Literacy, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin, 81-90. New York: Modem Language Association, 1990.