Thematic: Female Subjectivity

(Crf. Thompson, Maglioni, New Literary Links. From the Origins to the Romantic Age, Teacher’s book, CIDEB, pp. 34-35)

 

·    Throughout history women writers have faced the problem of being barred from institutions of knowledge and learning. How much has this influenced female ways of knowing? Has it shaped them into a form of counter-knowledge, the knowledge of the oppressed as opposed to that of the dominant culture? Is it any surprise therefore that women first find their voice in the novel? This raises problems of language. In the last decades, several interesting questions have been raised by feminist critics on the relationship between language and women. If language is the instrument of knowledge and thought, and if it is itself a male province, with a male grammar, how can a woman speak with her own voice? What is a woman's profit from learning a male language? How can she shape it to reflect her own experience and thought processes? Where is her own 'mother' tongue?

·    In this respect, the experience of women can be compared with that of colonised peoples, who had to be governed and controlled, and who were taught to speak the language of the colonisers (mainly English, French, Spanish and Portuguese but also Italian, Arabic etc.) What is the connection, for example, between the linguistic experience of women and that of Caliban or the speechless Friday of Coetzee's Foe?

Perhaps the 'speechless' Bertha Mason provides a bridge between these two realms. One may wonder what Jane Eyre really learns from the experience of Bertha Mason. What is Charlotte Brontd's relationship with this madwoman in the attic? Is Bertha the depository of a part of female identity that must be repressed at all costs, by consigning it to the realm of the 'mad' and the 'monstrous'? Is Bertha a phantasm or does she constitute a mute subjectivity and language in her own right? One may argue that in Jane Eyre we have an image of a woman who is divided from herself in a way similar to Blake's Good and Evil Angels. Or, if we consider Jane and Bertha two fates of the same coin, we can say that in Bronffs novel we have a woman who contains in herself both lamb and tiger at the same time.

·   In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys' rewriting of Jane Eyre, the madwoman Bertha Mason tells her own story. In this way the novel speaks from and gives voice to a minoritarian position - that of 'mad' women in the Victorian Age - within a dominant cultural discourse. Rhys' novel unveils the hidden complexities and contradictions which lie dormant in the original text.

·   In a more general sense the conflict between desire and duty, or between the inner self and the public persona, forms an important part of many female characters of the 19th-century English novel. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch or Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady are classic examples of this.

·  Angela Carter's 'Wolf-Alice' meanwhile offers us a new mythic vision of woman based on the interweaving of human and animal elements. Here, the animal body is no longer repressed but becomes a source of strength.

• Female subjectivity and desire is often in conflict with woman's socially and economically dependent role (as daughter, mother, wife, mistress, beloved etc.). Women today are increasingly entering roles traditionally denied them. What effect do such changes have upon women's vision of themselves and their place in the world? In her famous essay, Virginia Woolf says that 'a room of one's own' and an independent income is an essential prerequisite for a woman to find her own voice. She is referring specifically to writers (Emily Dickinson would be a prime example) but we might ask whether the point has a wider validity.

·  At the same time, woman continues to be constituted through fashion and image as an object and sign, something to be looked at rather than something which looks (See Christina Rossetti's 'In An Artist's Studio'). At this stage, it may be an idea to consider the present situation and reflect on the following issues:

   - Do women continue to be enslaved by images of the feminine, even if these are images of emancipation?

- Is the eternally shape-shifting image of women in fashion magazines a proof of the ultimate malleability of female identity, as though woman were composed of a thousand masks, none of which is the real she?

·   'She would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.' Woolf's Mrs Dalloway constitutes herself through not knowing who she is, from being a stranger to herself, no longer falling into existing categories of role or character. Similarly Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse: 'Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.'

·  In this respect, we can equate the emergence of a female writing as Woolf conceived it with a kind of liquid, malleable, mobile, 'weak' form of knowledge and identity which is constantly reshaping itself. This can lead us to a number of further issues to explore. Can we find in Virginia Woolf some connection between female subjectivity and 'weakness' of ego boundaries or 'openness' to the flow of life? Isn't there some form of denial operating in Mrs Dalloway with regard to her own body? She sees herself 'being laid out like a mist' that is as something gaseous and invisible. She seems to regard the body as a prison, which limits woman to her reproductive faculty. And yet can we dispense with the body in considering female subjectivity?