Cressida: "the nonsocial, nonpolitical, nonhuman half of the living structure" [Cixous]

Here's a reflection I wrote on the 2nd best play of the term, Troilus and Cressida.  Somehow I failed to post it (I really need to stop doing that).  
_________________________________

I went to watch Troilus and Cressida last night (Feb. 8th), with a group of friends from college.  It was a student production, playing at the same theatre where I watched The Last Five Years in the fall of 2008. 

And, once again, I left the theatre shaken. 

I had never watched, nor read, Troilus before, and so had no idea what to expect.  I knew it was, on some level, about two lovers in the midst of the Trojan war, but I didn’t know that it was also, much more forcefully, about the dissonance between the heroic world of warrior men, and the women’s realm they took for granted and violated without notice. 

Never having read the text, I’m unsure how much of the theme’s prominence was due to the original and how much to directorial choices, but either way it was a powerful (and sickening) depiction. 

From the beginning, women, clad in silk nightshifts (for the Greeks) and adapted Grecian togas (for the Trojans) set up the space – space that was then vacated of female presence (or, in the few cases that women remain on stage, active female presence).  Initially, I found the costume choices jarring, not least because of the dissonance between the semi-historical Trojan dresses, and the modern military attire of the men.  But as the play wore on, I came to appreciate that dissonance as a symbol of the utter separation of the two worlds.  As Kim (my  flatmate) pointed out during intermission, she disliked the costumes because they made the women vulnerable, and these “were not vulnerable women.”  But I think that was the point.  They make the women vulnerable despite themselves—barefoot in a world of boot-clad men—as the play goes on to graphically demonstrate that they are. 

But where I first truly grew uncomfortable (and began to sense the direction the play must be going) was in the “joyous” scene where Troilus and Cressida finally come together and swear their vows, and where Pandarus declares that if Troilus is true, let all faithful men be named Troilus, but if Cressida is false, let all faithless women be called Cressid.  She cannot be honored for a faithfulness that is expected of her, only dishonored by betrayal. 

And, of course, the injustice of this curse is staggering.  For women are not granted choices in a time of war.  They are treated as property, not beings with agency, yet they are still judged by adherence to ideals they have no choice in upholding (or violating). 

And so it is that Helen is talked about in all male-councils, bargained with as a possession that will increase or decrease male honor, and kept or given away on this basis alone. 

So it is that Cressida is traded to the Greeks, while Helen kept, because giving Helen back (despite general consensus that she is a whore without worth) would lessen Trojan honor, proving that they could not keep what they had stolen.  So Cressida is traded in order to return a captured Trojan (male) and uphold Trojan (male) promises. 

And Pandarus weeps, not for his niece given to the enemy, but for the boy who loves her, for this, he is sure, will destroy him.  It would be better, Pandarus declares, that Cressida had never been born than that this separation pain Troilus. 

And while Hector is welcomed into the Grecian camp as a brother in arms, worthy of honor despite the hundreds of deaths he has caused, Cressida, innocent of shedding a single Grecian’s blood, is met with sexual and physical assault. 

And, of course, Troilus sees her with Diomedes and judges her by standards of strength and choice she does not posses. 

Meanwhile, Andromache's pleas that Hector remain at home are received with the declaration that she is bringing him dishonor, for he has given his word that he will fight that day.  Never mind that Hector’s death, and Troy’s overthrow, will mean the enslavement of his prophetic wife and sister.  No, it is masculine honor at stake, not women’s freedom. 

And Achilles, who has promised his Trojan love that he will not fight, breaks his word to the woman in order to honor his love for his (male) companion, Patroclus. 

And the play ends with the Trojans singing, in the face of Hector’s death and Troy’s doom, of the honor for which they will be remembered.  And the women, weeping, sing with them – despite the knowledge that they have no part in the heroic deeds that will be passed down in memory, and will, instead, outlive their men to die in captivity and enslavement far away from home. 

And it makes me rage, because they simply don’t get it.  The men, with their honor and their male bonds and their realms of action and decision, do not understand the cost.  They break no promises, and are therefore innocent.  And, in their own way, so breathtakingly, fragily, beautiful.

The play itself was well acted, especially by Pandarus, Hector, and Thersites -- the wretched fool -- played by an actress with incredible physical control.  Cressida fidgeted too much, and though I understand the intention behind filling her with nervous energy, the movement was generated by the actress, not the character, and therefore distracted from the imagined reality, rather than adding to it.  Overall, Cressida, as a character, was not portrayed as overly sympathetic (this is not a girl I'd particularly want to know), but then I kind of think that's the point -- she doesn't deserve sympathy because we like her, she deserves it because she's just an ordinary human girl who's been wronged.  And thanks to some pretty impressive directing, the fight scenes, rather than being half-hearted and corny (as I feared they would be) were stylistic and interesting -- feeding the actors' energy and our own.    

"Medea I will become"

They huddled together, a mass of breathing, heaving, humanity: women, sibyls, witches, spirits, chorus, fates, woman.  Medea.

Medea unveiled.  De-masked.  Fractured, powerful, dangerous, vulnerable, mourning, mad, screaming, agonized, laughing, victorious, deadly.  Each of the actresses, both Medea and not Medea.  Medea as she becomes, Medea as she was, Medea as she is not.

By far the best play of term, it held us in its grasp for only fifty minutes.  A bare stage, a flurry of movement, a wailing, cacophony of voices.  It embodied the chaos of a conflicted soul, a woman torn between her choices.  This Medea was not guilty or innocent, evil or good, justifiable or monstrous, woman or demon, but all at once.  This Medea was the raging presence of all her sins and all her virtues -- her past guilt and long forgotten innocence.

It was a Kristevean revelry in the rage, rhythm, and passion of the chora, yet created from its chaos meaning that crystallized like diamond, digging deep.

And at its climax, splattered with the blood of a torn child, Medea stood, gloating in her furious, avenging glory, and crouched, shattered with grief, agonizingly gentle as she gathered the torn pieces of her once-breathing child. 

Here's a link to a brief clip from the play.

surprises

One doesn't expect one's giants to be human.

Toril Moi --
bulwark of feminist academia -- is
in person
a school-girl
with crimpy blond hair
and a red handbag.

Writing is Woman's (or why theory makes my head hurt)

So, this is my attempt to think through, in a space that is nonthreatening in its informality, some of my ideas for the theory essay that is currently leaving me wordless and angsty.  I would like to claim (though my college friends would have to verify) that I've never struggled so much with an essay in my life.  That I've never been so utterly incapable of coherent thought, or worthwhile expression.  Maybe it's the pressure of trying to create something worthy of Oxford (whatever that means), or maybe it's the attempt to reflect on pure, unadulterated theory, without the grounding in literature and life.  Or maybe I'm just out of practice.  After all, other than two application essays and a few (short) creative writing pieces, I haven't written anything since graduating almost two years ago.

But I really want this OUT OF THE WAY.  Done with, so I can move on to better things.  Things like Icelandic literature and books on myth.

Here is what I do know:

It is an essay that will touch on the work of Cixous.  And Virginia Woolf.  And maybe Kristeva, Irigaray, and others.

It is an essay about women.  About women and their relationship to writing.  About women and the metaphor of writing the body.  Feminine ecriture, writing is woman's, and all that.

Toril Moi has an essay, written in 2008, that points out one of the main complications that seem to lie at the heart, not just of women and writing, but of feminism and theory in general.  There seems to be a tension, a conflict even, between political feminists and literary theorists (be they queer, postmodern, etc.)  Between those who need the signifier "woman" to retain it's meaning and significance, and those who wish to displace the binaries (and the signifiers) altogether.  In writing, this issue takes the form of dissonance: a political mandate to read and study the work of women writers vs. the theoretical conjecture that the author (and gendered subject) is dead.

Moi argues that the feminists and theorists have no real answers for each other, and generally escape conflict by avoiding the debate altogether.

But I think there's a way out of this seeming standstill, and always has been.  When Roland Barthes wrote about the death of the author, he was affirming, in many ways, what feminists already knew: that the patriarchal, masculine subject -- the mythic phallus, impenetrable and whole -- was an illusion.  A protection, as Peggy Kamuf puts it, between the boundlessness of an unlimited textual system and our own power to know.  And it was time, Barthes argued, for the myth to be put to death, and the text liberated from the constraints of the Author-God.

But this displacement of the omnipotent (male) Author, rather than erasing the political significance of women's writing (as so many feminists seem to fear) opens new doors to symbolically re-interpret the relationship between gender/sex and writing.

Virginia Woolf famously asserted, in her 1928 treatise on women and writing, that great writers are androgynous (and must not think of their sex).  She also asserted, somewhat contradictorily, that women must write as women, and not as men.

Taken on closer evaluation, these two statements prove to be related, for Woolf seems to imply that to write as a woman -- a real woman, and not the stagnate image created in the patriarchal conscious -- is to be androgynous: fluid, multiple, ever-shifting, changing, never coded, never closed.  It is, in short, to be all that phallogocentricism, in its obsession with stability, wholeness, and rigidity, is not.

Helene Cixous makes a similar argument, stating that woman has never lost her bisexuality.

As the repressed/oppressed/negated signifier in the binary man/woman, woman holds no commitment to the phallocentric order.  In fact, it is the very passion with which patriarchal discourse has attempted to obliterate her that provides the means for her to break free.  For the signifier "woman," subsumed/submerged/swallowed/annihilated by its partner "man," can never hold the weight of the real woman, with breath and blood, body and voice.  All woman has to do is show up -- write her body, her very self, into being -- for the existing discourse to crash and burn.

And since woman has no allegiance to the phallocentric ideal of unity and oneness (for, as Luce Irigaray so blatantly points out, woman's sexuality is not one, but two, and not two, but many), she is free to be nothing and everything; to return and start again from elsewhere; to never say exactly what she means.  Lacking a phallus to begin with, she is unfettered by the fear of castration.  She could never claim to posses the (one) truth, so she has no need to defend it.

And since woman is multiple, and writing is multiple, Cixous can make her claim -- bold and threatening -- that writing is woman's.

For it is time for a new metaphor, not the Father-Author and his text, but the mother-writer and the boundless Other that she births.  For, as Kamuf points out, the metaphor of the father is one of mediation and intentionality.  It is to stand removed, and to present a work whole and unblemished, as one conceived it to be.  The metaphor of motherhood, on the other hand, is one of illegitimacy, of borrowed names, and of deep, vulnerable, exposure.

It is the realm, not of the universal (masculine) truth, but of individual (feminine) experience.  The realm of the embodied text (and it is, somewhat ironically, embodiment and specificity [rather than universality] that allow individual voices to survive in all their multiplicity and contradiction).

As Woolf writes in Three Guineas, "As a woman, I have no country.  As a woman I want no country."  To be a woman is to be an exile, separate from the patriarchal structures of culture and power that have defined so much of our discourse and rhetoric -- our very tools for understanding the world.  But as Kristeva states, all writing must come from a place of exile, for only then can we be set free from the bonds of the common sense.  Or in the words of Cixous, we must trade places with the moon to gain a new perspective.

Luckily for women -- especially women who desire to write -- we already live on the moon, so writing with a new voice, untainted by the Law of the Father and the rules of a phallogocentric economy, isn't hard at all.

All we need is the courage to find our voice in the first place.

a jot (regarding radical feminism and queer theory)

Warning: forthcoming moment of intense geekiness.  All those not interested in feminist theory, this is your chance to run away.

So, I just read a transcription of a talk given by one of our Women's Studies conveners (at the London Feminist Network's "Feminar"), addressing the difference between radical feminism and queer theory's use of the term "gender."  Fascinating.

But I'm not sure I agree.

Cameron and Scanlon's critique seems to ground radical feminism firmly within a dialog of rights.  Liberation from an oppressive system is the goal (and a very worthy one, I might add), and it is achieved through clear political objective.

That I have no problem with.

However, I'm wary of letting utilitarian objectivity (for so it almost seems) discredit queer theory's potential to disrupt established binaries, and thereby enact social transformation.  For, by defining gender as the system of power relationships existing between men and women, radical feminism has tied it inseparably to a binary that queer theory seeks to displace.  If they succeed (which I would argue they often do) in undermining the concepts of an essential sex, a true gender, or a coherent sexuality, do they not thereby create a world in which the male/female binary is rendered absurd?  If the binaries undergirding oppression and inequality (male/female, white/black, etc.) are demonstrated to be, not only unstable, but entirely fantastical, must not the entire system collapse?

It seems to me that binaries cannot survive in a world that has, not two, but (as Virginia Woolf once pled for) an infinity, of genders.

But perhaps I am being simplistic.

I am not my hair, I am not this skin, I am the soul that lives within . . .

Kohleun just introduced me to the song "I am not my hair" by India.Arie, the themes of which are close to my heart.  It may seem like an obvious message, yet there are moments when I feel like the whole crazy world just doesn't get it -- and that it's the most important message we can hear.

It's not just about hair, obviously, but all of the ways in which we're required to live up to expectations and imagined reality.  All the ways we're required to hide our true humanity.   

I wrote "Bare" for a creative writing class a few years ago.  It was a semester of intense angst centered around this subject, and I almost shaved my head over Christmas just to prove a point.   

Some people have been offended by this piece, but please don't be.  It's not meant to be taken analytically, as an absolute profession of belief, but as an experimental attempt to capture something that I've experienced.  And that I long for.  As I've said elsewhere, "I think, through this, I was trying to touch on the issue of pain . . . devastation . . . war . . . and the way our society hides from those things. From the reality of sweat and blood, behind the facade of perfection. I believe in beauty, but it is a very different type of beauty than the ideal my culture is trying to force down my throat. It is a beauty that comes through the ashes—the marks of living—rather than by denying them."

Bare—An Ode to Beauty Bald

I want to shave my head. It’s one of those crazy ideas that terrify my parents. They interpret it, I think, as a sign of my slowly dissolving faculties. The warping of my brain by too much study and feminist theology. After all, why would anyone want to destroy all sign of womanly beauty? The golden ringlets that grew into longer curls. Shear them off in humiliation and shame.

I try to explain. How a boy I liked, once told me that he liked my hair. Liked it down. Said it made me beautiful, those strands of tarnished gold. Strands that are not me.

And I rebel. I will not be my hair. I will reclaim my womanhood from a Bible that proclaims me, and my head, to be man’s glory.

I want to be known for the mind that lies beneath the hair. For the part of me that thinks and yearns and ponders. For the passion and the life, under the meaningless wisps that grow and die, without my consent or say-so. That require nothing of me. Reflect nothing on me.

I want to shave my head in honor of those who never had the choice. In solidarity with the broken. The women at Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Those who survived, and those who didn’t. To honor a humanity that was not taken, cannot be taken, with our hair.

To celebrate survival. From cancer. Leukemia. Radiation and chemo. The women who wear headscarves, and wigs. Afraid to show the scars of battle. The sign of loss, and life. Proof that they’re still here.

I want to join the ranks of men like Yule Brynner and Michael Jordan. Of human beauty unadorned. Skin, and sweat, and age. Unafraid to expose the blue veins that pump life, blood and oxygen, through membrane and golden tissue. The sandpaper texture. The shape of their skulls.

I want to demonstrate a different kind of beauty. Sleek and sexy elegance that denies hairspray and color dyes, styling products and curling irons. Proclaim freedom from magazine images and picturesque perfection. From Barbie dolls and Disney princesses, long silken tendrils, hair to their knees. Coiffured and flowing expectations. Stop hiding beneath the mask of color.

I want to wear henna on my head. Make patterns of tribal beauty. Declare myself at home with earth and sky.

I want to stop running from the feel of my own skin. I want to be myself, free of pins and clips and rubber-bands. And I want to love it.

I want to inhale wind and rain through the pores on my skull. To taste life and pain. To deny the acceptability of pretence, to destroy the masquerade, the papier-mâchéd perfection. To mourn injustice with the women of Beowulf—heads bare, weeping to high heaven. Sackcloth and ashes, and shorn hair.

And most of all, I want to be a nun. Set apart for unreserved worship. To return to child-like innocence, and feel nothing between my head and God, but air and sunlight. To be uncovered before my maker, not in shame, but in the humility of a newborn, and beloved, child. To remember my humanity in the presence of a genderless God. A God who created my soul before she created my hair.

I want to feel my prayers rise out of the top of my skull. Float along air currents. Be breathed in by the Almighty (hairless) God.

Sappho the Muse

I discovered Sappho this week. And she, combined with teaching haikus to my 7th graders, may have changed my life.

I've never really been a huge fan of poetry, especially not the kind with awkward line breaks, overkill descriptions, and no narrative. Epic poetry I love. Smooth flowing poetry (like Boland's and Nye's) I can appreciate. But that's about as far as it goes.

This past week, however, I have been awed by the power of apples turning red, silver moons setting, and 5-syllable lines. The power of simple words, line breaks, and concrete images, to evoke emotion and meaning.

Although they are

Only breath, words
Which I command
are immortal.

-translated by Mary Bernard

Like a sweet apple
turning red
high
on the tip
of the topmost branch.
Forgotten by pickers.

Not forgotten--
they couldn't reach it.

-translated by Julia Dubnoff

NUCL and Mrs. Dalloway

One conference down, and two to go.

This Saturday I'll be reading "Feminine Consciousness, Community, and Isolation in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway" (which should actually be "Mrs Richard Dalloway: the Tension of Feminine Consciousness," or something more like a title and less like a list) at the Northwest Undergraduate Conference for Literature in Portland (assuming we find a ride).

And since I know you're all so interested, here it is! =)

This was the first tutorial paper I wrote in Oxford. The style is pretty different than a thesis-driven American essay, so keep that in mind. Also, it's basically a rough draft since I had to do all the research, and all the writing, in less than a week (not something I'd ever attempted before). I'd love to have the time to completely rewrite it, because some of the ideas fascinate me, but I don't feel like they're expressed very well (or fully articulated) in this essay.

Anyway, this version has been tampered with (I had to rearrange a few of my sections), but hopefully it still flows alright.

Feminine Consciousness, Community, and Isolation in Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
© 2008 Karith Amel Magnuson

The world of Mrs. Dalloway is spilt between the forces of isolation and community. It is a book about the individual within society—a book about fragmentation and unity. At the story’s center is Clarissa Dalloway, and Clarissa Dalloway’s party. Clarissa, the society hostess, defines ‘life,’ that essence that she loves and lives for, in terms of bringing people together, solving the supreme mystery that is “simply this: here was one room; there another.” Asking herself what she truly means by this thing called ‘life,’ she expresses a desire “to go deeper…to combine, to create”: “Here was So-and-So in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it.” It is her “offering,” her “gift,” and even Peter Walsh cannot help but come under her influence, despite his contempt for her social obsessions: “She seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed.” Her party, with which the book ends, is the culmination of this desire to assemble (bringing together characters from throughout the book and Clarissa’s past) but it is by no means its only manifestation.

Indeed, Clarissa seems to associate this same idea of ‘life’ with the city itself. For while the book ends with Clarissa’s party, it begins with her pushing open her front door and plunging into the swinging, jingling, trudging uproar that is the city. She is swept along, surrounded by automobiles and rushing, laughing, mourning humans—individuals who are brought together in chance meetings (such as that between Clarissa and Hugh in the park), mutual awe (like the rumor allowed to “accumulate in their veins” ), and puzzlement over flying advertisements. Throughout the book this theme is maintained—the city as a backdrop for union, the meeting of disparate souls. In Laura Marcus’ book, Virginia Woolf, Marcus argues that this use of city as “consciousness in motion” is typical of modernist authors. However, Marcus suggests that Woolf is unique in her exploration of “communication and circulation in the city”—presenting London, not as a wasteland of isolation, so much as a unifying of individual aspects of society and humanity. Indeed, it is within this larger context of the city that the true significance of Clarissa’s party can be seen. It is not simply to bring together her specific guests that Clarissa plays the enchanting hostess, but to become part of the larger unifying force that London symbolizes: “She, too, loving it as she did [life; London; this moment in June] with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it...she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.”

But against this physical backdrop of London, there is also the internal struggle for unification within Clarissa herself. It is the struggle for identity; the desire to bring together the different aspects of experience and emotion, and create a coherent whole. Upon looking at her face in the mirror, Clarissa purses her lips “to give her face point. That was her self – pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together...different...incompatible...into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting-point, a radiancy.” She must assemble “that diamond shape, that single person” before she can return to the duties of the house. As Marcus explains, “Her identity fragmented, it has to be recollected, assembled, gathered together like the torn dress she intends to wear to her party that evening.”

This tension—this desire to unite disparate elements into a unified whole—is present in Clarissa’s constant memories of the past. Throughout the book, Clarissa is shadowed by her eighteen-year-old self: throwing open the French windows at Bourton, kissing Sally Seton, taking walks with Peter Walsh. The present is constantly filtered through previous experience—through events, relationships, and places. Peter remembers the younger Clarissa remarking, “She felt herself everywhere...she was all that. So that to know her, or anyone, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places.” And as she walks through London, Clarissa ponders the connection she still has with Peter, “she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there...being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best...it spread ever so far, her life, herself.” And this constant spreading, these connections that define and redefine Clarissa’s identity, this ability to simultaneously be eighteen and in her fifties (“she felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged” ), leads Clarissa to the conclusion that a person’s essence cannot be defined or captured: “She would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.”

In The Experimental Self, Judy Little argues that the significance of this fractured identity is found in its role in the formation of a uniquely feminine consciousness. She proposes that women’s place on the outskirts of society has left them unsuccessfully socialized, and therefore capable of a subjective identity. They are forced to learn the language of a male-dominated social sphere, while also possessing their own language—the language of their mothers. This, Little states, allows women to be uniquely adaptable, able to migrate between different visions of reality and points of view. She suggests that this grants women an extreme relational tendency (unlike men who define themselves in opposition to the other), and quotes Patricia Waugh to state that women’s fiction “can be seen...as an attempt...to discover a collective concept of subjectivity which foregrounds the construction of identity in relationships.” Such an identity must, by nature, be extremely volatile, changing (or fragmenting) with the relationships that shape it, and Little goes on to state that, in Woolf’s novels, “self is a discourse...a means that facilitates the celebration of friendship and shared lives.”

However, there is another side to this feminine consciousness, and that, ironically, is self-chosen isolation—isolation used to withstand domination and preserve self, even at the cost of community. The suicide of Septimus Warren Smith, and Clarissa’s interpretation of his death, is perhaps the ultimate example of this practice. For Septimus, though not a woman, is certainly an outsider in society, so made by his traumatic experiences in the Great War and his inability to maintain “a sense of proportion.” Clarissa describes Septimus’ death, not as passive acquiescence (though she later cries out against the darkness), but as a self-chosen defiance—defiance, presumably, against men like Sir William Bradshaw, who “make life intolerable” by “forcing your soul.” This is consistent with Clarissa’s hatred of Miss Kilman, who desires, in Clarissa’s mind at least, to convert her, to destroy “the privacy of the soul.” And even when she speaks of the men she loves, of Peter and Richard, Clarissa seems wary to let them too close, or share too much intimacy: “There was a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect, thought Clarissa, watching [Richard Dalloway] open the door; for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect – something, after all, priceless.” She was right, she states, to not marry Peter, because he demanded that everything be shared, “everything gone into,” and “it was intolerable.”

This unease seems to represent, not a backlash against Clarissa’s original desires to combine and create, but a fear of domination. This is obviously true in the case of Miss Kilman and Sir William Bradshaw, but subtler when applied to Peter and Richard. Despite both men’s love for Clarissa (though Peter may deny being “in love” with her), there is a level at which, being female in a male-dominated society, she is very much in their power. This is especially true of Richard, because he is her husband, and even Peter comments that one of the tragedies of married life is that “with twice [Richard’s] wits, [Clarissa] had to see things through his eyes.” Furthermore, Clarissa, while walking in London, “had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway.” All the different fragments of Clarissa’s identity are swallowed up by that name.

However, there is another level at which isolation is beyond Clarissa’s control—not an attempt to maintain identity and withstand domination, but simply a frustration of her desire to cohere. For although an outsider’s status grants freedom to move between social spheres and perspectives, it ultimately prohibits full acceptance to any single portion of society. Thus, beneath the surface of Mrs. Dalloway flows a consistent current of discontent—of failed realization—as communion is sought, reached for, and lost. The moments of deepest separation seem to follow those of strongest union (or attempted union), for, if we are to believe Little’s account of feminine consciousness, that which drives Clarissa to pursue unity is ultimately what keeps her separate and apart.

Even in the midst of the ‘life’ that is London, Clarissa experiences moments of intense isolation: “She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone.” Directly following the contemplation of her own domestic bliss, Clarissa comes to the conclusion, “There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe.” This last statement, though seemingly peculiar, is particularly significant. In the second to last chapter it is faintly echoed, when, in the midst of her party, Clarissa moves into a side room and finds herself suddenly alone. “There was nobody. The party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to come in alone in her finery.” Clarissa’s dress, representing her role as hostess and socialite, comes into stark contrast with the sudden emptiness and silence. For though it is her gift to assemble, to bring together, it seems that fragmentation can only be held off, delayed, not prevented. For, eventually, “women must put off their rich apparel,” or even if they do not, the darkness may prevail regardless. For even as Clarissa’s party takes hold, turning “into something now, not nothing,” Clarissa feels dissatisfied, “for though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these semblances, these triumphs...had a hollowness.” And when she hears of Septimus’ death, she interprets it as “her disaster – her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress.”

And so, the struggle against alienation is lost. Septimus is dead, and the splendor of Clarissa’s party has fallen to the floor. “Closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone.” But no. “She must go back. She must assemble.” “They went on living...they would grow old.” Woolf leaves us with no clear answers, only a continuing dance of isolation and community—of drawing together and falling apart. But perhaps that is as it should be. For Woolf sees identity as a dialogue and self as an experiment—they are not to be established, but explored. Through her novels, Woolf is presenting “the courageous view that human beings are ideologically mobile”—are capable of change. Identity, as Woolf presents it, is contradiction warring for coherence, and, Little suggests, being unwilling to explore the fragments, to know more than “the (one) truth or...just one self,” limits a person’s humanity, and the artist’s creative response. Perhaps reaching coherence—creating unity—is not as significant as the process, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.” The process that, according to Mrs. Dalloway, is life.

Bibliography

B. R. Daugherty and E. Barrett, ed., Virginia Woolf: texts and contexts (1996)
J. Little, The experimental self: dialogic subjectivity in Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose (1996)
L. Marcus, Virginia Woolf, 2nd edn (2004)
V. Neverow-Turk and M. Hussey, ed., Virginia Woolf: themes and variations (1993)
V. Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1996)

Feminism and Faith

"Rather than employ a variety of names to more effectively illustrate the mystery of God, the teachers and preachers of our childhood always used the male pronoun. Their words contradicted the lessons they taught us. Religion had given God a man's name while claiming that God was beyond naming, that 'he' was a mystery." -Patricia Lynn Reilly

We're reading Reilly's text, A God Who Looks Like Me, for Feminism and Faith, a group I attend on Thursday nights. So far, I'm not a huge fan of the book. Mostly, I think, because it's a bit too "self-helpish" for my taste. And I'm not completely sure where the author is actually going with her observations. However, it is a good jumping-off place, and has led to good conversations.

The group is a slightly modified continuation of something we started in the fall of 2007. It sort of died that spring (Megan, Tammi, Kohleun and I were the only ones who showed up on a regular basis), was discontinued last fall, and then resurrected this spring. We meet at the home of a religious studies professor (Kendra Irons, who Kohleun T.A.s for), make dinner, watch the occasional movie, and have discussions.

It's a lot of fun, and really refreshing. Most of the students are sophomores, who I hadn't met before this spring, but it's a good group of interesting (and interested) people.

If you want to be bored to tears, you can read the article I wrote about the group for my journalism class (fall '07). This is a great example of why I hate this particular form of writing:

A new women studies group at George Fox University will discuss the gender of God, body image, sexist language, female sexuality, the presentation of God in art, domestic violence, identity and other related issues.

At 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 21, Kendra Irons and Jill Lepire held the first meeting of a George Fox discussion group focused on women’s issues and faith. Twelve students attended the meeting on the outside patio of Newberg’s Coffee Cottage. Following meetings will be at 5 p.m. every Friday at Hoskins House, located at 214 River St. on the George Fox campus.

Irons, an assistant professor of religious studies at George Fox, facilitated the meeting, which Lepire, a junior double majoring in psychology and religion, organized. Lepire approached Irons about being the group’s faculty advisor in the spring of 2007. Irons said she agreed because she is passionate about helping women on the “road to feminism.”

Susan Suihkonen, a senior elementary education major, offered Hoskins House as the group’s venue. Suihkonen, who lives in Hoskins House with seven other women, said that they want their house to be a place of safety where people are accepted unconditionally. She sees this as an important environment for the women studies group because “being part of this group puts people at risk of rejection.”

The women who attended the first meeting ranged in age from sophomores to seniors, and were pursuing majors in religion, Christian ministries, writing and literature, art, international studies, elementary education, psychology and philosophy. When asked why they were at the meeting, most answered that they were becoming dissatisfied with the church and its presentation of a male God.

Katiana Hultz, a junior international studies major, said she’s excited about the group because it’s a place where she can be true to herself without offending others.

“We’re very limited in what we feel we’re allowed to think and believe,” said Hultz. “Knowing that there were other people who thought like this made me very happy.”

Conferences on literature . . . here we come!

Now that I'm in my last semester of my senior year in college (we're not even going to address how scary that thought is), I have finally gotten around to submitting papers to literature conferences.

So far, I have submitted to three, and have heard back from two -- both good news. I'll be presenting some of my creative non-fiction work (potentially two essays) at the Speaking Truth to Power Conference (sponsored by the Conference on Christianity and Literature), hosted at George Fox University, April 16-18.

I also just heard that Kohleun and I have been accepted to present at the Northwest Undergraduate Conference for Literature (NUCL), hosted at the University of Portland on April 4th. I'll be reading one of my Oxford essays: "Community, Isolation, and Feminine Consciousness in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway."

Kohleun will be presenting the paper she wrote (in Oxford) on the women poets of World War I.

Now I just have to figure out what people actually DO at conferences...

The Vagina Monologues

If all goes according to plan, Kohleun and I will be graduating in May with the first ever Women Studies' minors from George Fox University. While a minor may not seem that impressive, it's a huge step for the school (and something the writing/literature department has fought hard for). Hopefully, a full-fledged major will be next . . .

As part of this new minor, Kathy Heininge (one of my favorite literature professors) is teaching a Gender Theory class this semester. Kohleun and I are both taking it (it's my sixth class with Kathy), and it's one of the highlights of my week. There are only eight of us (7 girls, and 1 brave guy), and we sit around a table, in a bright sun-light room (assuming it's not raining), and talk about fascinating issues. We never have enough time to really delve into the topics (which is crazily frustrating), but it raises a lot of good questions (something that Kathy is great at -- she always says that she doesn't lecture, she questions).

Anyway. All of this to say that five of us (and Kathy) went to see the Vagina Monologues this past Friday. We went over to Kathy's for dinner first (and petted her beautiful cats and wonderful dog), and then drove down to Western Oregon University in Monmouth.

We actually got there a little late, so we missed the very beginning, but it was still a pretty compelling show. That's not to say that it was an easy, light, or uncontroversial show. There were definitely portions that I found highly problematic and very disturbing. However, I completely support the show's existence, and believe that it raises important topics that need to be voiced, discussed, and demystified. Of course, I suppose the question is, are all of those topics of equal value? Female sexuality, sexual violence against women, the vagina, orgasms . . . ? Is there a point at which the show goes too far? I don't thinks so, not really. If this were simply a show to amuse and entertain, and used sexual/vulgar references as an easy way to achieve those goals . . . then I would take issue. The Vagina Monologues, however, is a far cry from easy, or shallow, entertainment. It is meant to be thought provoking, amusing at times, and perhaps inappropriate (although, who decides what is and is not appropriate in a patriarchal society?) . . . but it is none of these things thoughtlessly or pointlessly.

Ultimately, it is a show that asks questions. Where do we center our value as women? Is it in a particular part of our anatomy? And if so, is that identification a good or a bad thing? A liberating or enslaving thing? Why are we so afraid to use the word vagina? What is it that society has told us about our vaginas, and our relationship to our vaginas? Should we be afraid of them, value them, do everything within our power to protect and hide them, treat them as something odd, shameful, painful . . . inhuman?

As a Christian, the implications go even further: how does God intend us to view our sexuality -- a sexuality that was divinely created, and declared good? Is it a sexuality that needs to be reclaimed from all of the warping connotations and practices that have been imposed upon it, associated with it, etc.? And if so, how does that reclamation happen? What is the road forward?

There is another aspect of this show which is easier, perhaps, to categorize according to morality and the heart of God. And that is the issue of sexual violence, particularly the large scale sexual violence being perpetrated in places like the Congo (here's a link to an article detailing the reality of the situation). Or the comfort women of Asia, still pleading with the Japanese government for a formal apology before the last of them die, taking their stories with them. If men have the right, in so many societies, to use women’s sexuality against them, surely women have the right to join together and discuss what their sexuality actually means.

The Vagina Monologues is not just about provoking-thought or raising discussion, it is also about protecting the unprotected and eliminating violence (the show inspired a grass-roots movement known as V-Day, dedicated to ending international violence against women and girls).

(Kohleun's Vagina Monologues T-shirt)

"VDAY: Until the Violence Stops"

Virginia Woolf and Cambridge: why she isn't there

I don't think it would be a stretch to say that Virginia Woolf loved Cambridge. She was in awe of its wealth and history -- the heritage of learning it represented and embodied. Of walking there, she wrote: "The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning" (Oxbridge is the term used to sum up all that Oxford and Cambridge together represent). And of course, there is her description of the aftereffects of lunching at King's (a multi-course feast of partridges and ducklings and salmon and soup and cream and salads and potatoes and puddings and wines): "And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

This week, for my primary tutorial, I'm rereading A Room of One's Own (for the third time). It's an amazing text, filled (anti-feminists may be surprised to hear =) with compassion, good humour, and a lot of common sense. I've loved it every time I've read it.

My tutor assigned a piece of secondary literature, however, that's been making me realize how intensely ironic it is to be reading/studying A Room of One's Own in the context of Oxbridge.

On the one hand, Woolf was intensely aware that she, as a woman, was an outsider. Women were not allowed to receive degrees at Cambridge until 1948 (about 30 years after Oxford students), and in 1921 (just 7 years before Woolf gave her historical address at Girton) a mob of male students destroyed Newnham's beautiful bronze memorial gates, in celebration of voting "overwhelmingly" to prevent women from receiving degrees. "The symbolic and real violence of this chilling scene is mitigated in most accounts and turned into a joke to shame the women" (J. Marcus).

To add to this, there is Woolf's own account of visiting Cambridge -- an account riddled with exclusion: "He was a beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me" . . . "[A] kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction. That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library" . . . "and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and, thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and the poverty and insecurity of the other and the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer, I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge."

And of course, there is her less than shining description of dinner at Fernham (Oxbridge's female counterpart) to compare to lunch at King's, and her conclusion: "The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp of the spine does not light on beef and prunes."

While this is disturbing enough, and the starting place for Woolf's discussion of women and fiction, there is the added peculiarity that Woolf, the uneducated daughter of an educated man, never truly belonged at Fernham either, and, as Woolf, has never been accepted at Cambridge. Jane Marcus, the author I was reading (Virginia Woolf, Cambridge, and A Room of One's Own), states that nowhere in Cambridge is there a single plaque to commemorate Woolf's work, and that none of her manuscripts are available in the university's libraries (being held in open collections, instead). All her male relatives, and all her Bloomsbury friends (with the exception of her husband), figure prominently in library and college, and even her female cousins are well respected at Cambridge, having served as librarians and presidents for the women's colleges. Virginia, on the other hand, has only the remembrance of absence and trespass. She -- who visited Cambridge often to see brothers, friends, and a Quaker aunt (the famous Friends' theologian, Caroline Stephen), and delivered one of the century's most celebrated feminist lectures within its confines -- she is only an outsider:

"It is October, 'October, the birth of the year,' as Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own. It is Michaelmas Term in Cambridge, the birth of the academic year. How differently Woolf's elegy for the lost history of women writers echoes on these ancient stones. Why did I expect that she would have left some trace in this town, some mark on its walls? . . . Why is it such a terrible reality to face the facts of Virginia Woolf's analysis of the university as a patriarchal institution, to feel her discomfort here, her sense of being a stranger, as she complains in drafts of the essay? Not much has changed. I itch to take out a tube of the lipstick she so disdained and write 'Virginia Woolf Was Here' all over the walls that bear the names of the great dead who studied here, men's names of course."
-Virginia Woolf, Cambridge and A Room of One's Own: 'The Proper Upkeep of Names' by J. Marcus (1996)