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Adela Thoguht of the Young Men and Women Who Had Come out Before UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE WHOSE DESIRES ARE THEY?: THE POLITICS OF SUBVERSION IN WORKS BY E. M. FORSTER, NATHALIE SARRAUTE, AND JEAN RHYS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By KATHARINE H. CARUSO Norman, Oklahoma 2006 UMI Number: 3238359 Copyright 2007 by Caruso, Katharine H. All rights reserved. UMI Microform 3238359 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 WHOSE DESIRES ARE THEY?: THE POLITICS OF SUBVERSION IN WORKS BY E. M. FORSTER, NATHALIE SARRAUTE, AND JEAN RHYS A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY _________________________________ Dr. Robert Con Davis-Undiano _________________________________ Dr. Daniel Cottom _________________________________ Dr. Francesca Sawaya _________________________________ Professer Honoree Fanonne Jeffers _________________________________ Dr. Bret Wallach © Copyright by KATHARINE H. CARUSO 2006 All Rights Reserved. Table of Contents Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 Romance, Rape, and Modernism in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India ........................... 8 Reading Forster’s Feminine Subject: What to Do with Adela Quested? ........................ 8 The New Woman in Forster’s Chandrapore.................................................................. 16 Private Spaces and Public Places in Forster’s India...................................................... 28 The Inarticulate Woman/Native: Forster’s Narrative Distance..................................... 40 Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropismes: There is No “Other” Woman? ........................................ 58 After the Feminine Subject?.......................................................................................... 58 Critics of “the Feminine” and Sarraute’s Feminist Critics............................................ 68 The Feminine Subject and the Family Dance: Whose Desires Are They? ................... 83 Looking Glass Places in Wide Sargasso Sea .................................................................... 99 Reading “the Feminine” in Jean Rhys’s Creole Subject ............................................... 99 Making Bricks without Straw: Placing the “Rhys Woman” ....................................... 110 “Alien” Landscapes, “Alien” Women......................................................................... 118 Places of Little Sense in Wide Sargasso Sea............................................................... 128 Rhys Romanticized...................................................................................................... 138 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 148 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 153 iv Introduction It is not individuals who have experiences, but subjects that are constituted through experience. Experience in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced. —Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience” This is a study about the ways in which we read representations of the feminine subject in works that have been deemed complicit in strengthening hierarchies of race and gender. The impetus for this inquiry occurred several years ago when I was teaching at an urban community college near Houston. After class one day, as I was packing away papers and my 2000-page anthology, one of my World Literature II students asked to speak to me. Umme, who had taken a course with me the semester before, explained that she wanted to thank me for an “empowering” class. She had been particularly affected, she said, by class discussion on Nawal al-Sa dawi’s “Growing Up Female in Egypt,” but also by our discussions on excerpts from Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. “Growing Up Female in Egypt” is the first chapter in al-Sa dawi’s autobiographical novel, Memoirs of a Female Physician, and chronicles a young al-Sa dawi’s resentment over favoritism shown toward her brother, unrelenting focus on her looks, her limited freedoms, and familial sexual abuse. The chapter reveals how al-Sa dawi grew to internalize her family’s views, began to hate her femininity, and vowed to liberate herself. Umme, smiling, was pleased to share with me that she had been so inspired by the class, and by “Growing Up Female” in particular, that she had refused the arranged marriage brokered by her family—her family who had since barred her from their home. 1 Like most educators, I am grateful for those moments in the classroom of, as Maxine Greene puts it, “Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it” (240), and, like Elaine Showalter, I believe that “we want students to learn a set of critical reading skills they can apply to the world of language, literature, and culture around them throughout their lifetime” (26). Yet my reaction to Umme’s announcement that she had broken ties with her family was one of conflict, more unease and less exhilarated feminist solidarity. I reassured myself that these class discussions had been student-centered. After all, I had been trained by my professors to reject the “banking method” of teaching literature, to use the “multiple lenses approach,” to require students to place literature in historical contexts, to welcome Spivak’s idea of “interruptions: in the classroom.”1 In Showalter’s Teaching Literature, in the section on teaching anxiety dreams, she discusses the challenges of teaching “dangerous” subjects and also surmises that “[p]erhaps teaching literature feels especially unsettling because, unlike physicists or economists, we are not confident of our authority. Moreover, we believe that what we say in the classroom reveals the deepest aspects of ourselves” (3). In the face of Umme’s declaration and despite my attempts at self-assurance, I was left with the nagging question: Who am I to teach these texts? This event led me to inquire about the relationship between the possibilities of a text’s “subversive voice” and how we read/write about/teach such texts. Umme had cited as inspiring literature written by an Egyptian activist, an Antiguan novelist who has been criticized for blaming absentee nationalists as vehemently as imperialists, and a French woman who firmly rejects the label “feminist.” In fact, the latter work, Tropisms, had 1 See Freire 59 and Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic 241. 2 similarly inspired me when I first discovered it in an undergraduate class. Just as Monique Wittig recalls being “on the street reading Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute for the fist time, after that writing and reading were never the same” (45), I read as empowering Sarraute’s satirical depictions of legions of women compelled to embark on shopping missions and telling themselves in mindless refrains that doing so was good for them. Only later would I learn that Sarraute—whose mock epics of women shoppers I saw as strikingly similar to Rosalind Coward’s analyses of popular culture in Female Desires: How They are Sought, Bought, and Packaged—rejected “Women’s Lib” and that feminists had rejected her in kind (“Making Bricks” 35). What value can we retrieve from such texts, and what is at stake when we identify these works as “consciously” or “unconsciously feminist”?2 What connections— between, for example, my experience of Tropisms and Umme’s experience of the same text—can we validly draw across race, class, and national lines? Further, how are our desires to make such identifications complicated by authors like Jean Rhys or Nathalie Sarraute who both deny being “feminist” despite the seeming “unconscious feminism” of their novels? What difference does it make when we read/write about/teach works by E. M. Forster—whose well-known Adela Quested seems to be both “rebel against patriarchy” and imperialists’ hysterical scapegoat responsible for one of the most famous homoerotic break-ups in modernist literature—when we learn that he thinks “most Indians, like most English people, are shits, and I am not interested whether they sympathize with one another or not” (Furbank xx)? 3 2 See Gallez 8. 3 For more on Sarraute as “rebel against patriarchy,” see Barbour 60. 3 In the following study, I attempt to address these questions through an analysis of Forster’s A Passage to India, Sarraute’s Tropismes, and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. I use as a starting point of my analysis the concept of the feminine subject as theorized by Rita Felski and Tamir Katz, and I, too, analyze the “extent to which writers of an earlier period imaginatively constructed subjects as feminine in historically specific ways” (Katz 14). Though I consider others works by Forster, Rhys, and Sarraute in my discussions, I focus on their most often-anthologized texts because of my interest in teaching them and in order to more closely investigate the complexity of their representations of the feminine subject and the critical trends of studies addressing these representations.4
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