Category: Academic (page 1 of 2)

Where Welfare is Paramount,
Bans Are a Smoking Gun

A response to Emily Patterson’s article, “Exeter would be right to ban smoking, and other colleges should follow,” published in “The Cherwell” (ed. 31/10/17)

I must begin by stating than I am not opposed to designated smoking areas or reasonable restrictions. I support Exeter’s efforts to enforce existing policies and regulate cigarette dispensing. The fact remains, though, that Emily Patterson’s article in The Cherwell this Tuesday was sorely lacking in concrete analysis of how a blanket ban on smoking might disproportionately impact student life at Exeter.

Smoking is a stigmatized habit and comes with its own host of assumptions pertaining to the socioeconomic or cultural identity of smokers. Moreover, chronically anxious individuals, as well as those of us who suffer from sensory hypersensitivity, often use smoking to manage symptoms that develop in over-stimulating college environments: including welfare teas, weekend pre-drinks, and all manner of seminars and classes. Alienation on the basis of these conditions can only prove harmful to demographics that Exeter has an ethical and legal obligation to protect—and this more than anything is what makes the “equal and opposite” fallacy in Patterson’s argument ring so hollow.

The day that every Oxford college fully provides for students experiencing addiction, anxiety, and hypersensitivity is the day that I gladly take my cigarettes out to Turl Street. Until then, we should work on strategies with a more sincere emphasis on progress and a more nuanced consideration of what “welfare” entails—who it privileges, who it undermines, and how its parameters might be reshaped to achieve a holistic definition of the term.

While Exeter students have a right to smoke-free spaces, we also have a right to spaces where the choice is ours to make, and where we do not feel ostracized for a practice imbibed with disparate, complex, and highly individualized meaning. I am aware of the dangers of smoking, and am in favor of ensuring that cigarette smoke affects non-smokers as little as possible. But I am unconvinced that a student’s desire to be sheltered from having to “walk by” smokers is adequate grounds for demanding that we all stand out on Turl Street at any time of day or night regardless of circumstance or underlying complications.

The question of what (if anything) Exeter owes its students, who hail from a wide variety of backgrounds and live alongside one another in relative harmony, is only valid insofar as it might engender compromise. To some extent, then, demands for complete protection from any form of smoke seem unrealistic and entitled. While students who smoke (as well as many non-smokers sympathetic to this situation) are working hard to find common ground, Patterson’s uncompromising stance and desire to forcibly regulate all student smokers to areas outside of our home does nothing to enact meaningful change. Her argument operates on an unstable premise where a complex issue deeply embedded in the fabric of student life is reduced to an inconvenience for those attempting to further a rigid idealization of college existence.

It should come as no surprise that the image Patterson’s article champions is not just smoke-free; it also lacks, by proxy, any serious dialogue surrounding the rights of disabled, chronically anxious, and addicted students. Patterson’s own assertion, that those of us concerned with the welfare of students with anxiety and pre-existing addictions are “missing the point,” stands testament to this fact. Patterson believes that a ban on smoking will send a “clear message,” and it certainly will—but the message would not be against smoking, per se. The message would be against students who smoke, which necessarily includes many of us from the aforementioned backgrounds. Non-smokers are entitled to smoke-free areas; but are they entitled to an entire campus scrubbed of discomforts if that comes at the stated expense of their peers?

I have attempted to verbalize just a few of the questions about identity, ability, and belonging that should inform Exeter’s official position on smoking. If these reasons do not constitute sufficient motive for us to consider a more reasonable compromise—one that does not knowingly alienate a large portion of students, not to mention faculty and staff, from the safety and familiarity of campus—than I don’t know what does. Patterson thinks that a blanket ban on campus smoking will help to improve the overall plight, but evidence and reason indicate the opposite. You cannot make an issue disappear by confining it to where it cannot be seen: especially not when that issue involves people, and especially not when those people are your peers.

I encourage Patterson, and Exeter Colllege as a whole, to reconsider their position. If we truly share a common goal in promoting student welfare, our energies are better spent finding a more holistic and reasonable long-term solution.

Oxford Preliminary Paper 1B

‘We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves’

– John Berger

How do forms of literary description ask us to look at ‘things’ AND/OR at the relations between the self and the other?

In much of the literature and history of the English canon, the corresponding notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ have denoted, in conjunction, one relatively simple paradigm of oppositional identification, wherein the ‘self’ remains broadly separate from the ‘other’ (or entity of comparison). But developments in feminist, postcolonial, and Marxist literary thought complicate this phenomenological schema by foregrounding the racially ‘othered’ self, and specifically, the Black self. Edward Said, Franz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre all address, to varying extents, the manner in which a realized Black identity can function as both ‘self’ and ‘other’ simultaneously, due to its historical and ongoing positioning within the racialized structure of the West—for while a Black man might identify a white man as ‘other’ in relation to himself, the pre-existing systems of power in the West mandate that this white man be perceived as “not only ‘the Other,’ but also the master” (Fanon, 148). From a hegemonic standpoint, then, it will always be the Black man who is ‘othered’: his relentless marginalization is ensured by the very nature of the structures already in place. This dynamic ascribes a relative lack of demarcation to the Black identity, within the given phenomenological model of ‘self’ and ‘other,’ and thereby necessitates a category of critical theory that interrogates the interaction of oppositional identification beyond these binary foundations—that is to say, a discourse that addresses not only the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ but also the ‘othered self.’

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, epitomizes the strategies and ideals of such a discourse; as early as the first pages of the text, Morrison’s depiction of the fraught relationship that the protagonist, Sethe, endures with her own ‘self’ fundamentally disallows for any diametric reading. Of course, as a Black woman in antebellum America, Sethe is perpetually ‘othered’ in relation to the conditions of her existence; the parameters of her selfhood are thus defined, at least in part, by their oppositional positioning against the literary backdrop of a patriarchal, white supremacist culture. But even beyond the sociopolitical assessment that Fanon emphasizes, the character of Sethe demonstrates a number of compelling tensions between various forms of oppositional identification. The body upon which the narrative takes form, and wherein Sethe’s conflictions and identity are rooted, is maternal as well as formerly enslaved; therefore, its associations to motherhood recall many of the differential paradigms of ‘self’ and ‘other’—specifically those pertaining to children, such as Lacan’s mirror phase or the psychosis of the nursing child. Throughout the narrative, Morrison draws upon the notions of oppositional identification that her thematic emphasis on maternity has produced, employing the selfsame images of birth and psychosis to represent the horrors of slavery. In this fashion, Morrison brilliantly depicts a loss of differentiation between mother and child that mimics the absence of demarcation associated with enslavement; the maternal and formerly enslaved body of Sethe thereby provides the vital symbolic link between each instance of differential identification of the ‘self’ that the text contains.

It is precisely this nuanced representation of the Black ‘self’—as a kind of self-actualized, cultural ‘Other’—that facilitates Morrison’s narrative recalibration of racial centrality in Beloved: what Beth McCoy identifies as an “authorial shift from racialized ‘object’ to racialized ‘subject’” (McCoy, 44). The narrative of Beloved provides, through the production of the text itself, a literary realm wherein the Black ‘self’ is no longer reduced, like some bizarre form of racial chiaroscuro, to an othered foil for the white ‘self.’ Instead, the juxtaposition of a Black ‘self’ against the white ‘other’ establishes the conditions upon which the thematic weight of the novel is largely contingent, by allowing for a differential formation of the Black ‘self.” But this is not to suggest that the full relevance of Black identity in Beloved should be reduced to its terms of relation to the white supremacist paradigms that preceded it; on the contrary, to do so would resituate Blackness as oppositional to the Eurocentric presuppositions of the canon, and thereby reestablish whiteness as the “objective” center of criticism. Nevertheless, the fraught interaction between Morrison’s literature and the aesthetic conventions of the medium with which she engages lends her work a heightened sense of sociopolitical subversion; it therefore seems tantamount, in critical analyses of Beloved, to approach its conceptualization of Black selfhood both in relation to the white supremacist paradigms that inform the text, and as an organic discourse in its own right. For while Morrison’s text reckons fully and consciously with the pre-existing myths of white centrality, the novel is in no sense dependent upon them; on the contrary, Morrison articulates throughout Beloved, “a fully developed theory…that is central to her larger political and philosophical stance on black identity” (O’Reilly, 1).

In any relation between a ‘self’ and ‘other’ within the initial phenomenological model, there is necessarily a degree of oppositional distance whereby the identity of one can be induced from its relation to the other. But the events that inform Beloved’s narrative core are defined by the near-total absence of this distance; instead, the text is linguistically, syntactically, and thematically characterized by an almost staggering sense of intimacy. This loss of differentiation, which the Black ‘self’ suffers both in a phenomenological sense and in the circumstances of the narrative, is disturbing; thematically and linguistically, Morrison draws the Black subject within the narrative into the proximity of the white ‘other’ and makes any form of distinction almost unsettlingly difficult. The most memorable instance of this occurs, of course, when Sethe sees her former masters approaching her home, and reacts against the violence she anticipates by murdering her own daughter. In this instance, rather than replicating the traditional model wherein the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ establish a sort of necessary contingence upon mutual opposition, Morrison depicts a reimagined sense of identification that seems, rather than differential, disturbingly similar. The distance between ‘self’ and the ‘other’ is thereby eradicated; the two become not foils, but mimetic horrors of one another and themselves. This hideous sense of like identification can be read as an allusion to the disturbing mutual reliance of the slave and master upon one another: a specter of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic that haunts the foundations of the text.

But the physical images of intimacy and proximity in Beloved are certainly not limited to the racialized conceptions of ‘self’ and ‘other.’ In this same scene, Morrison also uses near-identical imagery to represent the problematized sense of differentiation inherent between infants and the maternal figures who have been, as historian Walter Johnson articulates, “…forced by their slavery into a doubled relation with their bodies and their children” (Johnson, 11). Even before the supernatural return of her child, Sethe enfolds her daughters within her own maternal identity: in the moments leading up to Sethe’s grisly murder of her own daughter, Morrison writes, “…she collected every bit of her 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…where they would be safe” (Morrison, 163). In this passage, Sethe’s children are described as “parts of her,” engulfed within the greater whole of the maternal body. In some sense, this image could function as a poignant indicator of Sethe’s limitless devotion to her children; but this reading is problematized by the sheer brutality of Sethe’s subsequent actions. Instead, the overlapping of Sethe’s identity with that of the murdered child seems to thrust the ethical nature of her infanticide into ambiguity, suggesting that she has killed a “part of her,” rather than an autonomous human being. The very language of the passage obscures the agency of the murdered child, thereby casting doubt upon whether Sethe’s actions were a ritual sacrifice, or a kind of suicide. In accordance with this image, the allegorical distance between Sethe and Beloved becomes virtually nonexistent in the text: Jean Wyatt argues that Beloved’s fixation on Sethe echoes infantile psychosis, mimicking a “desire to regain the material closeness of a nursing baby” (Wyatt, 474). This insight is augmented by the images of blood and milk that imbue the narrative recounting of Sethe’s “rough choice” (Morrison, 180), and Morrison’s frequent use of terms like “hunger” to associate Beloved’s desire for Sethe with a desire or need for consumption. Similarly, the sense of utter unification that Sethe experiences is shared by Beloved, as indicated in the ambiguous line, “You are my face; you are me” (Morrison, 216). This quotation appears in arguably the most haunting and obscure section of the text, wherein Beloved’s further references to being “in the water” (Morrison, 216) also function as a potential description of the experience of a child still in psychosis: completely void of identity, and utterly unable to differentiate any semblance of identity separate from the body of the mother.

But at various points in the novel, Beloved also seems to carry within her the entire history of American slavery; in light of this, the appalling conditions, overwhelming darkness, and horrific proximity of bodies that she describes can also easily be read as a description of a voyage on an American slave ship. The very language of the passage is spatially devoid: punctuation is lacking and words seem to merge upon the page, signifying a disorienting and overwhelming sense of physical closeness that represents, according to Wyatt, “The loss of demarcation and differentiation of those caught in an ‘oceanic’ space between cultural identities, between Africa and an unknown destination” (Wyatt, 474). In either reading of this passage, this proximity is defined as a categorically dangerous state of being—a conviction mirrored earlier in the text by the grisly nature of the master- slave dialectic, and later by horrific consequences of Sethe’s lack of differentiation from her daughter. “There are no gaps in Sethe’s world,” Wyatt writes, “no absences to be filled with signifiers; everything is there, an oppressive plentitude” (Wyatt, 474). The complete lack of any form of distance between the Sethe and Beloved, whether it is read as the extended psychosis of a nursing child or a supernatural manifestation of the horror of non-differentiation within the Middle Passage, impedes Sethe’s conception of herself and very nearly consumes her.

The tragedy inherent within Morrison’s multifold, symbolic use of motherhood throughout the novel, particularly in relation to Sethe’s volatile relationship to her maternal and once-enslaved body, is particularly evident in the manner in which the various pieces of textual imagery simultaneously inform and corrupt one another in seemingly arbitrary, incongruous, or even upsetting ways. Slave masters, schoolteachers, mother’s milk, rusted shackles, childbirth, pregnancies, blood, slave ships, steel bits, frightened mothers, laughing children, empty homes—as the images clash and conflate, their horror lies, unsurprisingly, in a lack of differentiation. In this sense, the entire text allegorizes, through a number of narrative, linguistic, and thematic mediums, the white Other’s hegemonic perversions of the Black effort to formulate a realized self within pre-existing phenomenological terms. Although she offers no categorical solution to the problems of differentiation and identification that the text so thoroughly interrogates, Morrison nevertheless provides her audience solace in the form of the novel itself: a riveting narrative plane wherein the realized Black ‘self,’ though relentlessly ‘othered’, can nevertheless be represented and identified on its own terms—and where the Black maternal body, despite its history of suffering and enslavement, can provide this still-emerging ‘self’ with an intimate physical site of violence, desire, and resistance.

Works Cited

Collins, Patricia Hill. “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships.” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 4.2 (1987): 4-11. JSTOR. Web.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto, 1986. Print.

Ghasemi, Parvin, and Rasool Hajizadeh. “Demystifying the Myth of Motherhood: Toni Morrison’s Revision of African-American Mother Stereotypes.” International Journal of Social Science and Humanity IJSSH (2013): 477-79. JSTOR. Web.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Google Scholar. Web.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York, NY: New American Library, 1988. Print.

O’Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. Albany: State U of New York, 2004. Print.

Wyatt, Jean. “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” PMLA 108.3 (1993): 474-88. JSTOR. Web.

Oxford Preliminary Paper 1A

“All similes are true and most metaphors are false”

– Donald Davidson

In his essay “What Metaphors Mean,” Donald Davidson writes, “The most obvious semantic difference between simile and metaphor is that all similes are true and most metaphors are false. The earth is like a floor…. But turn these sentences into metaphors, and you turn them false; the earth is like a floor, but it is not a floor” (Davidson, 41). This assertion, while not fundamentally untrue, is nevertheless problematized: Davidson fails to acknowledge that the tension between literary subject and comparative object—which emerges from metaphoric structure, and gives rise to the semantic conditions he describes—is a categorical strength of the metaphor as a literary device. Metaphors interrogate and enrich a literary subject by challenging the ordinary parameters of its semantic reality: a function made possible by the precise sense of factual or literal incongruence that Davidson observes. In both William Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 18’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Metaphors,’ the poet endeavors to adequately convey his or her subject through figurative rhetoric. Plath is ultimately the more successful of the two: her employment of metaphors lends form and nuance to a topic too complex for simple articulation, while Shakespeare’s use of an extended simile, though effective, generates a diametric and comparatively simplistic representation of the poetic subject. The figurative strength of Plath’s poem, particularly in contrast to Shakespeare’s, is contingent upon her use of metaphors to interrogate the areas of the unnamed and the unnamable. Thus, the juxtaposition of these two texts underscores the metaphor’s literary potential to rival or even surpass the figurative capacities of the simile; through their production of the very dynamic that Davidson identifies as “false,” metaphors can in fact express a number of remarkably subtle and intricate narrative truths.

This essay posits that figurative language, especially in poetry, mimics a number of the structural and post-structural linguistic paradigms outlined by theorists such as Saussure, Jakobson, and Derrida. By generating interactions between the poetic subject and its object of comparison that closely resemble those of a sign and its signifier, similes and metaphors echo differing variations upon well-established semiotic models; in much the same manner that linguistic meaning emerges as “…the result of a process of division or articulation, of signs being themselves only because they are not some other sign” (Eagleton, 129), the subject of a poem is defined by both its analogous and its differential relationships to a comparative object. This is evident in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 18,’ wherein a single simile runs through the text, comparing the subject—a nameless, genderless figure presumably functioning as a love interest for the narrator—to a summer’s day. ‘Sonnet 18’ demonstrates an inherent awareness of the inadequacy of its own simile: the references to “rough winds” and “summer’s lease” (Shakespeare, 18, ll. 3-4) underscore the relatively transient, and therefore inferior, nature of the comparative object. In this sense, Shakespeare’s employment of figurative language evokes the structuralist conception of the ‘poetic’ as residing, above all, “…in language’s being placed in a certain kind of self-conscious relationship to itself…the sign is dislocated from its object: the usual relation between sign and referent is disturbed, which allows the sign a certain independence as an object of value in itself” (Eagleton, 98). More specifically, though, the extended simile that runs throughout ‘Sonnet 18’ echoes the structural semiotic model applied in the writings of Saussure: it contains a “delimited structure of meaning” (Eagleton, 127) wherein the correlation between sign and signifier is direct and often simplistic. The subject of ‘Sonnet 18’ is like a summer’s day in that he or she is “lovely” and “temperate,” but not like a summer’s day in that he or she is “more lovely” and “more temperate” (Shakespeare, 18, l. 2). The association is fundamentally diametric, and leaves little space for interpretive nuance.

The demarcation inherent within the figurative language of ‘Sonnet 18’ is similarly apparent in the structure of the text itself: the consistent rhyme scheme, augmented by uniform iambic pentameter and an absence of enjambment, constitutes a perfect Elizabethan sonnet. Even the poem’s volta elucidates upon the simplistic nature of the relationship between the subject and its object of comparison: the word “but” in line 9, which denotes the poetic ‘turn,’ is in this case a mere vehicle whereby the narrator asserts that the poetic subject, once immortalized in literature, will defy the limitations that characterize the object of comparison (Shakespeare, 18, l. 9). The absolute nature of the relationship between the love interest and the object to which he or she is analogized is thus reiterated; the subject continues to be “like” or “not like” a summer’s day in a variety of differing but ultimately diametric ways. This simile therefore presupposes a fixed semiotic structure indicating little other than the beauty and aesthetic preservation of the poetic subject; it is “true” in the manner that Davidson’s interpretation of truth demands, but fails to employ the broader possibilities of figurative representation.

Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Metaphors,’ on the other hand, achieves a richer depiction of its subject largely because its allegories cannot be semantically categorized as “true” when reimagined as literal statements. Professor Catherine Addison asserts that, “Between sameness and its opposite lies an infinite possibility of degrees” (Addison, 408). The implications of this statement are vital to the language and conception of ‘Metaphors’: unlike Shakespeare, who establishes a direct correlation between two like objects, Plath constructs an entirely metaphorical understanding of her subject, the pregnant female body. Plath’s poem contains several metaphors for pregnancy; but rather than functioning as simple indicators of gestation, these references to elephants, “ponderous” houses, and “melons strolling on two tendrils” (Plath, ll. 2-3) engender specific evocations of awkwardness and enormity. This dynamic is echoed in the poem’s meter: various instances of enjambment disrupt the iambic pentameter, creating a palpable sense of impregnation within the rhythm. Paired with the numerical significance of nine syllables in each of the nine lines, indicating nine months of pregnancy, the formal composition of ‘Metaphors’ establishes the entire poem, like the individual images it contains, as an extended metaphor for an expectant body.

As Davidson himself asserts earlier in his essay, “[A metaphor’s] interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator” (Davidson, 31). In other words, the literary value of metaphor arises largely as a consequence of its own imprecision: by indicating the nature of a poetic subject through varying descriptions what the subject is not, metaphors generate space for a critical analysis grounded in oppositional identification. Plath establishes her poem as “a riddle in nine syllables” (Plath, l. 1): employing various metaphors and compelling the audience to ‘solve’ the text by identifying these metaphors as allegories for her pregnant state. This initiates a discourse between reader and text that is contingent upon the metaphor’s factual ambiguity and resultant need for interpretation. Like Shakespeare, Plath recognizes that even figurative language is not fully adequate for communicating her subject; thus, the unspeakable magnitude of pregnancy in ‘Metaphors’ is represented not simply through metaphors, but through the very inability of these metaphors to fully verbalize the speaker’s state of being. Each allegorical image augments the interpretive versatility of the text, and the reader is tasked with giving interpretive form to the poetic subject by identifying not only the narrator’s pregnancy, but also its analogously denoted implications.

In this manner, the very characteristic of metaphor that Davidson identifies as “false” — namely, its lack of direct correlation between subject and object of comparison—becomes the primary means by which poets such as Plath better communicate their subject matter. Metaphors expand the thematic parameters of a text by situating the subject in the discursive excess between literal and allegorical, and so become, as Winifred Nowottny explains, “a useful means of dealing with the area of unnamed experiences” (Nowottny, 57). This recalibration is linguistic as well as thematic: by eliminating a single word—usually “like” or “as”—metaphors eradicate physical distance between the subject and the object of comparison, creating a condensed syntactic structure wherein interpretive potential can move beyond the constraints of the factual. In Plath’s poem, for instance, the word “pregnant” is never explicitly used; the text’s implications reside in a figurative space made possible by the nonliteral nature of the analogous images. Similes, on the other hand, can inhibit this dynamic by establishing the fixed, diametric subject-to-object correlations exemplified in ‘Sonnet 18.’ From a linguistic standpoint, then, poetic similes recall the structuralist conceptions of language by echoing a “delimited structure of meaning” between sign and signifier; poetic metaphors align with post-structural semiotic ideals by engaging with the differential excess between a subject and its object of comparison.

Of course, the identity that a metaphor ascribes to a ‘sign’ or literary subject is necessarily contingent upon its oppositional relationship to an allegorical object, and inevitably becomes inapplicable in a literal semantic context. Davidson’s claim that metaphors will constitute untruths when read as sentences, while similes will retain their factual validity, is thus substantiated; but this reading seems incomplete in light of works such as Plath’s, wherein semantic tension is precisely what allows the text to communicate thematic truths well beyond the confines of literalism. When Davidson’s definitions of “true” and “false” are reimagined within the framework of poems such as ‘Sonnet 18’ and ‘Metaphors,’ it is apparent that similes are likely to be insufficient or even outright false, because their inherent semiotic simplicity can yield, as Shakespeare himself acknowledges, inadequacies of comparison that result in a subject “belied with false compare” (Shakespeare, 130, l. 14). Metaphors, in contrast, emerge as a complex and useful literary device, the merit of which should not be limited to the oft-reductive discourses surrounding our conceptions of the literal and the semantic.

Works Cited 

Addison, Catherine. “From Literal to Figurative: An Introduction to the Study of Simile.” College English 55.4 (1993): 402-19. JSTOR. Web.

Davidson, Donald. “What Metaphors Mean.” Critical Inquiry 5.1, Special Issue on Metaphor (1978): 31-47. JSTOR. Web.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1985. Print.

Fishelov, David. “Poetic and Non-Poetic Simile: Structure, Semantics, Rhetoric.” Poetics Today 14.1 (1993): 1-23. JSTOR. Web.

MacCormac, Earl R. “Metaphor and Literature.” Journal of Aesthetic Education6.3 (1972): 57-70. JSTOR. Web.

Nowottny, Winifred. The Language Poets Use. 5th ed. London: Athlone, 2000. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. “Metaphors.” Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. 116. Print.

Shakespeare, William. “18.” Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: Washington Square, 2004. 39. Print.

Shakespeare, William. “130.” Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: Washington Square, 2004. 269. Print.

“I Do It So It Feels Like Hell”

The Suicidal Body in the Works of Sylvia Plath

In Women Poets and the American Sublime, Joanne Feit Diehl identifies “the engendered body” as Sylvia Plath’s primary trope (Diehl, 136). This assertion is echoed in the writings of critics such as Kathleen Lant, who examines in Plath’s poetry “a concern with the body and with the physical” (Lant, 624), and Steven Axelrod, who illustrates a multitude of ways in which “Plath enthusiastically traced connections between body and text” (Axelrod, 9-10). The significance of Plath’s literary treatment of bodies, and particularly suicidal and female bodies, is heightened by the cultural context in which her works were written. In the rising field of psychoanalysis in twentieth century America, women were not only denied sexual agency, but also symbolically castrated via phallocentric systems of scientific thought; for instance, Sigmund Freud’s conviction that “The libido is constantly and regularly male in essence, whether it appears in man or in woman,” which Simone de Beauvoir challenges at length in The Second Sex (Beauvoir, 74). Of course, it would be nearly impossible (and likely inadvisable) to write on the treatment of human bodies in Plath’s works without acknowledging the overwhelming presence of Judaic and Holocaust imagery within them. But this essay poses no answer, however tentative, to the question of whether or not Plath’s fascination with the Holocaust is necessarily justifiable; that is to say, this piece does not intend to establish any ethical ground (or lack thereof) upon which Plath’s literature should necessarily be read. Rather, the work seeks to observe the presence and thematic relevance of suicidal bodies, including Jewish and female bodies, within The Bell Jar, ‘Daddy,’ and ‘Lady Lazarus,’ with a particular regard for their impact upon the narrative relationship between the psychological and physical in each text.

In chapter twelve of The Bell Jar, Esther observes, “It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, a whole lot harder to get at” (Plath, TBJ, 142). Of course, suicide is a defining thematic element of The Bell Jar as a novel; a relentless desire for self-inflicted death characterizes Esther’s entire narrative. But the quotation at hand bears a particular significance in its implied recognition of a sort of distance between the physical form (“that skin” and “thin blue pulse”), which Esther repeatedly brutalizes throughout The Bell Jar, and the enigmatic, unnamed something that exists “somewhere else,” and can be compellingly read as Esther’s realized sense of self—her ego or linguistic “I.” In light of this, the passage offers one possible interpretation of Plath’s preoccupation with the body; namely, that a realized identity generates tensions between the visceral and the psychological. The very word “suicide,” derived from the Latin sui (‘of oneself’) and caedere (‘kill’), indicates both linguistically and conceptually, the destruction of the self; and although Esther seeks to eliminate her physical form, recognizing the contingency of the “I” upon it, she nevertheless identifies, in her reference to “somewhere else,” a degree of separation between the body she mutilates and the self she seeks to kill. The body and the “I,” though in many ways inextricably bound, are also necessarily distinguishable from each other in the language of the narrative. This is echoed in the recurring imagery of blood, which Esther encounters repeatedly throughout The Bell Jar—most notably in the physically and psychologically gruesome experience of losing her virginity. Blood operates within The Bell Jar as one of the text’s most visceral narrative devices; but its source of its distribution, the heart, is also a primary indicator of the psychologically realized self, and its rhythm conveys that ultimate self-affirming phrase, “I am I am I am” (Plath, TBJ, 152). Beneath Esther’s relentless endeavors towards the destruction of her own anatomy, a more complex interrogation of the ego is evoked; thus, Plath constructs a narrative understanding of the body that underscores the psychoanalytic value of the text.

Published within a year of The Bell Jar, the confessional poem ‘Daddy’ apotheosizes many of the most contentious elements of Plath’s work. Like the majority of Plath’s literature, ‘Daddy’ is a terrifyingly visceral, at times even erotic poem, engaging with the body as a representative space upon which both longings and traumas are made manifest. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose suggests that the line, “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo” (Plath, D, ll.5) implies that the narrator’s convoluted psychological fascination with her father can be attributed to his exertion of control over her body. The narrator of ‘Daddy’ is rendered physically unable to move: she is the recipient of a psychological distress that leaves her incapable of performing the actions necessary for bodily survival. Plath, who described Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” as “[a]n almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse” (Plath, Journals, 280), communicates her ruthless desires through the narrator’s physical experiences and suicidal efforts; thus, “The poem…presents itself as protest and emancipation from a condition which reduces the one oppressed to the barest minimum of human, but inarticulate, life” (Rose). But of course, the most overt and controversial use of the body within “Daddy” occurs in its relation to the Holocaust, and in Plath’s appropriation of a heritage and a tragedy that is not necessarily her own. But Rose asserts that in ‘Daddy,’ “…identities are fantasies, not for the banal and obvious reason that they occur inside a text, but because the poem addresses the production of fantasy as such” (Rose); in accordance with this, even allowing for the potentially gratuitous association Plath draws between herself and the victims of an ethnic genocide, there is considerable metaphoric value to Plath’s use of Nazi symbolism. “For doesn’t Nazism itself also turn on the image of the father, a father enshrined in the place of the symbolic, all-powerful to the extent that he is so utterly out of reach?… this body suffers because the father has for too long oppressed” (Rose).

‘Lady Lazarus,’ which many critics position alongside ‘Daddy’ as one of Plath’s three “Holocaust Poems” (Fermaglich, 14), is another text inherently concerned with the body; in the graphic recounting of her suicide attempts, Plath evokes a striking image of resurrection and even of triumph. Throughout the poem, she engages unflinchingly with her body, announcing, “Gentlemen, ladies, / These are my hands. / My knees” (Plath, LL, ll.30-2). The language of the stanza is simultaneously sensual and disturbing: as she verbalizes the “big strip tease,” Plath forces the audience to reckon with the suicidal nature of her physical form. As Gayle Wurst asserts, “Graphically female, made to be unmade, [Plath’s] body…seeks to break its confinement, equating movement with the breaking of silence” (Wurst, 24). These paradigms of sexuality, subjugation, and cynicism allow the narrator’s suicidal body to be read not only as mutilated, but also as strangely powerful, and at times even revenant. Paul Breslin argues that ‘Lady Lazarus’ functions as “a legitimately mimetic representation of the psychology of suicide” (Breslin); and indeed, the text as engages with self-destruction in a trenchant, lucid manner by combining psychological fantasies of death and the erotic pleasures of a pornographic performance. Largely as a result of this, a number of vindicative perspectives on suicide arise in ‘Lady Lazarus’—most significantly, the potential to exert full and violent ownership over one’s own body, the possibility of rebirth, and the grisly but potentially triumphant severing of the psychological and physical selves.

The Bell Jar, ‘Daddy,’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ are, in many respects, markedly different texts; nevertheless, each engages in a striking narrative confrontation with the volatile relationship between physical bodies and the conscious self. Tempestuous interactions between the mind and body, fraught as they are with varied connotations of identity and desire, form a primary thematic cornerstone of each text; and although her use of metaphor offers no clear explanations (and certainly no sense of solace) for her audience, her ruminations upon the self-destroying body carry considerable aesthetic and psychoanalytic merit. Within these three pieces, Plath engages with the suicidal body as an object of great physical and psychological fascination: in efforts to verbalize her own willful movement towards dying, she establishes the presence of suicide in her literature as an intimate narrative interrogation of violence, desire, exploitation, and resistance.

 Works Cited

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Google Scholar. Web.

Beauvoir, Simone De. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf, 1953. Google Scholar. Web.

Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987.. On “Lady Lazarus” University of Illinois. Web. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/lazarus.htm

Diehl, Joanne Feit. Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Google Scholar. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Fermaglich, Kirsten Lise. American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965. Waltham, MA: Brandeis UP, 2006. Google Scholar. Web. 29 Jan. 2016.

Gilbert, Sandra M. “The Supple Suitor: Death, Women, Feminism, and (Assisted or Unassisted) Suicide.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 24.2, The Feminist Legacy of Carolyn Heilbrun (2005): 247-55. JSTOR. Web. 01 Feb. 2016.

Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Big Strip Tease: Female Bodies and Male Power in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Contemporary Literature 34.4 (1993): 620-69. JSTOR. Web. 01 Feb. 2016.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber, 2013. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Frances McCullough and Ted Hughes. New York: Dial, 1982. Print.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. On “Daddy” University of Illinois. Web. <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/daddy.htm>.

Runco, Mark A. “Suicide And Creativity: The Case Of Sylvia Plath.” Death Studies 22.7 (1998): 637-54. Web. 01 Feb. 2016.

Wurst, Gayle. “I’ve Boarded the Train There’s No Getting Off: The Body as Metaphor in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Revue Française D’études Américaines No. 44 (1990): 23-35. JSTOR. Web. 03 Feb. 2016.

Feminism and Faith in the Brontëan Gothic

Jane Eyre and Villette are notable for their respective narrative engagements with the notions of faith and female desire. Even as these novels establish a common thematic ground in Christianity, elements of the supernatural, and even of paganism, infuse both texts. The complex spiritual, political, and erotic inclinations of the female protagonists in these novels are simultaneously echoed and explored through a variety of supernatural gothic tropes; using images of phantoms, madwomen, and mysticism, both texts allow for a larger discourse surrounding the complex relationship between gender, spirituality, and the body. In both cases, mystic narrative elements underscore both the political ideals and the cultures of legend in which much of Brontë’s work is grounded; ultimately, through the supernatural elements of Jane Eyre and Villette, the Victorian Gothic enters into a conflict with Christianity that echoes the proto-feminist themes of each text.

The supernatural facets of Jane Eyre are manifested in large part by the vibrant imagination of Jane. Immediately preceding her first encounter with Rochester, Jane recalls, “In those days I was young, and all sorts of fancies bright and dark tenanted my mind…and when they recurred, maturing youth added to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give” (Brontë, JE, 132). It is not irrelevant that both in this passage and in relation to the novel as a whole, Jane’s creative energies and spiritual inclinations are emphasized and discussed in relation to the supernatural. Brontë’s attention to Jane’s vivid, complex imagination, which lends the text a distinctly feminist ethos through its uncommonly multi-dimensional representation of the psychology of a Victorian woman, draws heavily upon Jane’s fascination with the mystic elements of her world. Rochester also frames Jane as a preternatural being throughout the novel, describing her as “elfin” and “fairylike,” and drawing her self-image into conflict with the devout Christian identity that she attempts to forge over the course of the novel. The concept of motherhood within Jane Eyre occupies a similarly mystical positionality within the text, most notably through the recurring narrative presence of the moon, which recalls pagan lunar rites and a symbolic relationship with the spiritual forces of maternal power. This is particularly evident in the character of Diana, whose affectionate nature and blood relation to Jane allow her to act as a surrogate mother figure, and whose name recalls the Roman goddess of the moon—a deeply autonomous female figure who recognized no patriarch and is still worshipped within many contemporary pagan spheres. In addition to functioning as a signifier for female mysticism, however, the moon in Jane Eyre is also a deeply sensual image, and often functions as the backdrop against which Jane negotiates her romantic and erotic interactions with Rochester. In this manner, the moon embodies a relationship between paganism and female sexuality that corresponds in turn with the final and most obvious instance of the fantastic within Jane Eyre: the “madwoman in the attic.” Like the image of the moon, Bertha Rochester represents, among many other things, Jane’s repressed sexual desires. Functioning simultaneously as Jane’s double and as the deepest source of her anxieties, this supernatural trope of the insane woman (and foreigner) in Jane Eyre creates a frightening gothic embodiment of female erotic desire, bringing elements of Jane’s own identity into direct conflict with the Christological, patriarchal values of the society she lives in.

In her essay “Gothic Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” Toni Wein proposes that, “Even more than Jane Eyre, with its madwoman in the attic, Villette is a haunted text. Bronte possesses her literary heritage by creating a surrogate Gothic” (Wein, 735). In Villette, the supernatural once again forms a conflict-ridden intersection between sexuality and the Christian female body. In Chapter XII, Lucy describes a legend that states: “that this was the portal of a vault, imprisoning deep beneath that ground, on whose surface grass grew and flowers bloomed, the bones of a girl whom a monkish conclave of the drear middle ages had here buried alive for some sin against her vow” (Brontë, V, 117-18). Like Bertha Rochester, the ghostly nun in Villette signifies the repressed sexuality of the narrator: descriptions of growing grass and blooming flowers evoke an image of fertility and sensual feminine life, while simultaneously representing a sinful female body that has been quite literally subdued beneath the earth. Even the “true” identity of the nun has connotations of sexual impropriety: Ginevra and her lover rely on this disguise to conceal their misconducts. Furthermore, the very notion of a spectral holy woman induces a specific and powerful visual joining of Christianity and the supernatural, and even though the “phantom” is revealed to be only a disguise, its image continues to haunt the text as a whole. Lucy is similar to Jane in that, despite living in a patriarchal Christian society, she operates within a complex, imaginative world wherein her erotic desires become inextricably bound to mysticism and the supernatural. With regards to Lucy’s eventual unmasking of the “ghost,” E.D.H. Johnson observes that, “Lucy is treading on more than the flimsy props of a silly hoax; she is rending the whole fabric of make-believe that has swathed her private world of fantasy” (Johnson, 335).

Of course, both Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre are Christian characters, and are in fact quite devout in their faiths. In spite of her social othering in a predominantly Catholic community, Lucy remains staunch in her Protestant beliefs, while Jane constantly seeks the protection and guidance of God throughout her journey. Even so, the status of either woman as a moral paradigm of Christian femininity is greatly compromised by each one’s relationship to the supernatural elements of her respective world. Jane Eyre and Villette each reveal subversive and controversial truths about their female protagonists, and specifically their bodily impulses and longings for equality, through the mystic elements of the narratives and the manner in which supernatural figures function as thematic doubles. Professor Robert E. Davis explains, “Gothic traditions go on renewing themselves at the uncanny sites where culture simultaneously encounters its profoundest validation and confronts its most destabilizing uncertainties” (Davis, paragraph 5). It hardly seems coincidental then, that the presence of the supernatural in both novels echoes the feminist discourse that Brontë initiates. Occultism and paganism, with their relationship to “goddess religions” and the supernatural, occupy a unique point of destabilization within Victorian literature—they exist in theological tradition as some of the only pre- or anti-patriarchal mythologies with roots in Western culture. Although both Lucy and Jane are Christian women, the radical nature of their social and erotic desires binds them to these mystic, sensual, and anti-patriarchal elements of the occult.

Davies later goes on to explain the gothic tradition’s relation to the cultural parameters surrounding human understandings of the body, morality, power, desire and secrecy, writing: “…[the Gothic] furnishes a culture largely severed from traditional religious iconography with metaphors for the exploration of the terrors of selfhood, mortality, and the limitations of the human, using and distorting what is perceived to be contemporary culture’s only remaining source of possible transcendence: erotic love” (Davis, paragraph 5). It is therefore unsurprising that the complex and at times irreconcilable fissure between Christianity and supernaturalism within both Jane Eyre and Villette shares a common fixation upon the sensual impulses of the female body. Through their usage of the preternatural, both texts engage in feminist discourse by treating the female body as capable of experiencing both autonomous physical desire and spiritual transcendence. In this fashion, the relationship between Lucy, Jane, and supernaturalism constitutes a rejection, or at the very least a tempering, of the Christological monomyth that dominates Western literature and thought. Both Jane Eyre and Villette establish the female body as desirous of erotic fulfillment, and the female mind as desirous of spiritual ascension. Charged with the impossible task of forging religious identities that do not compromise their agency, as well as achieving positions of gendered and sexual autonomy that do not compromise their faith, Lucy and Jane each provide complex and engaging insight into the various convolutions of divinity, femininity, and supernaturalism within the Victorian Gothic; the supernatural and mystic elements of their narratives simultaneously echo and interrogate the greater political questions surrounding feminism and spirituality that permeate each text.

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Stevie Davies. London: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Ed. Helen M. Cooper. London: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Davis, Robert A. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Pedagogy of Fear.” Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 1.3 (2001). Web. 21 Nov. 2015.

Johnson, E. D. H. ““Daring the Dread Glance”: Charlotte Brontë’s Treatment of the Supernatural in Villette.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20.4 (1966): 325-36. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

Lorber, Laurel, “Haunted by Passion: Supernaturalism and Feminism in Jane Eyre and Villette” (2013). Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs). Paper 1889.

Warhol, Robyn R. “Double Gender, Double Genre in Jane Eyre and Villette.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Vol. 36, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (1996): 857-75. JSTOR. Web. 21 Nov. 2015.

Wein, Toni. “Gothic Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s “Villette”” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Vol. 39, No. 4, The Nineteenth Century (1999): 733-46. JSTOR. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.

“The Wish Too Strong For Words To Name”

Gender and Sexuality in the Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson

In his critical commentary on In Memoriam A.H.H., Christopher Ricks refers to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s sentiments towards Arthur Henry Hallam as a love “passing the love of women” (Tennyson, 332). The implications of this phrase are multitudinous and significant: in the body of work that Tennyson produced following Hallam’s death, the relationship between the two men became a primary contextual backdrop against which some of Tennyson’s finest poetry could be read. The queer-coded elements of Tennyson’s writing provide insight into his complex negotiation of sexual and gender identity in the heteronormative confines of Victorian England, with subtextual expressions of homoromantic impulse lending a subversive quality to In Memoriam, while an intricate depiction of gender and power dictates the narrative of The Princess. The conflation of desire and convention in these two poems generates tension between the cultural norms of Victorian England and the social worlds of the texts, providing the thematic foundation for larger discourses surrounding gender and sexuality in both works. Between the latently queer desires of In Memoriam, and the deeply gendered discourses of The Princess, a nuanced representation of passion, power, and masculinity within Tennyson’s works can be observed and understood.

An understanding of the socialized imposition of compulsory heterosexuality is imperative for expanding and reexamining the critical discourses that surround western literature; its demonstrable presence in the poetry of Tennyson bears specific relevance to the notion of Victorian masculinity, and by extension, to the formulation of intimate relationships between the men of Tennyson’s time. Indeed, the most notable shortcoming of many heteronormative readings of In Memoriam is their failure to fully account for Tennyson’s observable passion for Arthur Hallam. Many critics have attempted to circumvent the potential implications of homoeroticism by constructing a sterile narrative of friendship between the two men: Gordon Haight, for instance, argues that, “The Victorians’ conception of love between those of the same sex cannot be understood fairly by an age steeped in Freud. Where they saw only pure friendship, the modern reader assumes perversion… Even In Memoriam, for some, now has a troubling overtone” (Ricks, 208). Of course, a certain level of homophobic subtext is evident in the very language of Haight’s assertion: the identification of queerness as “troubling,” and of potential same-sex desires as “perversion,” lends little credence to the impartiality of the observation at hand. The more relevant flaw in this reading, however, is its erroneous presupposition that heterosexuality exists as an organic norm through which a complete understanding of all interpersonal human relationships can be achieved. This narrative of ‘natural’ heteronormativity discredits substantial historical and cultural evidence to the contrary: as Adrienne Rich identifies in Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, “The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness” (Rich, 648). A queered reading of Tennyson is necessarily cognizant of the fact that compulsory heterosexuality, particularly as it appears in western culture, is a product of oppressive and oftentimes violent socialization, and does not necessarily reflect a ‘pure,’ ‘natural,’ or accurate state of being. With this in mind, a reading of Tennyson’s poetry that willingly engages with its homoerotic subtext is academically as well as politically relevant; far from being narrow or limiting, such resistance to preexisting structures of compulsory heterosexuality can in fact broaden the parameters of discourse that encompass Tennyson’s poetry as a whole.

In Saint Foucault: Towards A Gay Hagiography, gender and queer theorist David M. Halperin writes, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers…. Queer demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (Halperin, 62). This notion of relative positionality is evoked through metaphor in In Memoriam, when Tennyson writes, “O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me / No casual mistress, but a wife” (Tennyson, IM, LIX 1-2). The conceptualization of Sorrow in these lines, as an emotion so prevalent as to actually become anthromorphized within the text, demonstrates a relative existence: her presence within the poem is necessarily contingent upon the absence of Hallam, because it is Hallam’s death that generates Sorrow to begin with. The heterosexual nature of the relationship between Tennyson and the female-coded Sorrow, then, is similarly relative: as Jeff Nunokawa observes, “[Tennyson’s] heterosexual situation is thus defined as the ghost of prior passion” (Nunokawa, 429). In other words, the notion of Sorrow as “wife” constitutes a heterosexual positionality that exists in relation to whatever preceded it; the implied specter of marriage in these lines contrasts the relationship between Tennyson and Hallam not only through its contingence upon Hallam’s absence, but also through its gendered situation relative to the homosocial relationship that predates it. Tennyson goes on to proclaim of Hallam, “My spirit loved and loves him yet, / Like some poor girl whose heart is set /On one whose rank exceeds her own” (Tennyson, IM, LX 2-4). By feminizing his narrative self, Tennyson constructs an image that simultaneously reproduces and subverts heterosexual norms of affection. This sense of homoromantic desire is further echoed through the rhythmic structure of the poem as a whole: Tennyson’s use of iambic tetrameter lends In Memoriam an organic, bodily cadence that underscores the poem’s foundations of passion.

The queer undertones present in this reading of In Memoriam are simultaneously complicated and informed by Tennyson’s regressive treatment of gender in his other works. The Princess takes on a particular relevance through its status as an oddly subversive, yet ultimately antifeminist text; although varied and nuanced discourses surrounding gender take place throughout the narrative, The Princess fundamentally devalues the feminist principles it discusses through its narrative prioritization of heterosexual male desire and emphasis on female submission. The treatment of gender within The Princess is nevertheless uncommonly nuanced; in her 1990 book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler writes, “…gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (Butler, 7). This notion of gender as a fluid and in some senses performative construct emerges repeatedly throughout The Princess: many of the poem’s male characters are coded feminine, with the protagonist himself described as, “Of temper amorous, as the first of May / With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a girl” (Tennyson, TP, I 2-4). Furthermore, in the course of the narrative, the Prince and his companion assume women’s clothing in order to gain access to the Princess’s exclusively female spaces. Through Tennyson’s description of this subversive action, the binary notion of gender is simultaneously transgressed and reinforced: the ability of the Prince and his companion to pass as women emphasizes the performative nature of gender, but also underscores the vast differences between the men and women of the text. By the end of the poem, the success of these masculine efforts is evident in the romantic submission displayed by the Princess. In light of this, although it seems to occasionally examine gender as a mutable state of performativity, The Princess ultimately fortifies, rather than disrupts, the oppressive structures it seeks to address. The poem as a whole is irrefutably male-centric, introducing elements of feminist discourse, but undercutting them through the events of the narrative. As Donald Hall asserts, “In The Princess we find enacted a zero-sum game of gender and power; men can only regain consciousness and, by implication, potency, when the empowered woman is subdued and male ability exalted” (Hall, 55).

The relation of gender identity and antifeminism in The Princess to the politics of sexuality in In Memoriam is primarily observable in the complex reading of Victorian masculinity that both poems offer. In The Embodiment of Masculinity, western masculinity in is observed as being “defined in opposition to all things feminine” (Mihskind, 103). This ideal naturally entails the disavowal of queerness in men, as compulsory heterosexuality would categorize sexual or romantic attraction to men as the provincial territory of the female. Sociologist R.W. Connel explains that, “To many people, homosexuality is a negation of masculinity, and homosexual men must be effeminate… hegemonic masculinity was thus redefined as explicitly and exclusively heterosexual” (Connell, 736). When read through a cultural lens of heterosexual male hegemony, then, Tennyson’s writings involve a self-contradicting performance of masculinity: the poet rigidly reinforces systems of gendered subjugation in works such as The Princess, even as latent homoerotic desire forms the perpetual subtext of his most famous work. In this fashion, the undertones of In Memoriam, coupled with the narrative of The Princess, form an intricate nexus of desire and power that characterizes the gendered and sexual ethos of Tennyson’s work: compellingly queer and irredeemably antifeminist, the two poems shed light upon the contradictions and complications of subversive masculine identity within Victorian England.

Works Cited

Connell, R. W. “A Very Straight Gay: Masculinity, Homosexual Experience, and the Dynamics of Gender.” American Sociological Review 57.6 (1992): 735-51. JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov. 2015.

Hall, Donald E. “The Anti-Feminist Ideology of Tennyson’s “The Princess”” Modern Language Studies 21.4 (1991): 49-62. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards A Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.

Mishkind, Mark E., Judith Rodin, Lisa R. Silberstein, and Ruth H. Striegel-Moore. “The Embodiment of Masculinity: Cultural, Psychological, and Behavioral Dimensions.” The American Body in Context: An Anthology. By Jessica R. Johnston. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001. 103-20. Google Scholar. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Nunokawa, Jeff. ““In Memoriam” and the Extinction of the Homosexual.” ELH 58.2 (1991): 427- 38. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5.4, Women: Sex and Sexuality (1980): 631-60. JSTOR. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.

Ricks, Christopher. Tennyson. New York: MacMillan, 1972. Google Scholar. Web. 16 Nov. 2015.

Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Ed. Christopher B. Ricks. Harlow: Longman, 1989. Print.

Psychologies of Childhood in the Works of George Eliot

The theme of childhood occupies an evocative position in both Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede: the nuanced and remarkably perceptive psychological elements of George Eliot’s writing are evident in her narrative treatment of children and their relation to the larger social world of the novels. Eliot’s literary insights on childhood incorporate the relevance of memory, temporality, and the notion of the self, and function as thematic signifiers for the respective characterizations of multiple protagonists in both novels. The narrative treatment of children and childhood in The Mill on the Floss and Adam Bede has a particular impact upon the psychological representation of characters in each respective text, but the form of this impact differs significantly in relation to each novel. In The Mill on the Floss, a rich psychological portrayal of the complexity and passions of childhood provides the foundation upon which Maggie’s troubling but sympathetic character is formed. In contrast, Adam Bede achieves a sinister psychological impact through its striking representational absence of children, but evokes a disappointingly shallow depiction of youth in the characterization of Hetty Sorrel. This notion of childhood, whether as a temporal vacuum of spiritual harmony or as a site for base selfishness, emerges as a primary recurring theme in both novels, but is used to a far greater effect in The Mill on the Floss.

Early in the narrative of The Mill on the Floss, the narrator intones, “There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs” (Eliot, MF, 160). Evoking an image of harmony between the self and the outside world, these ruminations upon childhood in The Mill on the Floss illustrate a precedent to the psychological state later described in the works of psychoanalyst such as Jacques Lacan. In Lacan’s paper The Mirror Stage as Formative to the Function of the ‘I,’ identified by Alison Bechdel in the autobiographical Are You My Mother?, a peculiar compromising of the notion of the self occurs when one first encounters a mirror. The conception of the self essentially begins to form in response to the visible world around it: for upon seeing one’s own reflection, Bechdel explains, “…you can see that you’re separate from everything else” (Bechdel, 232).

This dissonance between the private self and outside world, specifically in terms of the conflict between Maggie’s private yearnings and social consciousness, occurs repeatedly throughout The Mill on the Floss, but becomes increasingly relevant as Maggie matures. For as Sally Shuttleworth observes in George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science, neither the past nor the self is unified in The Mill on the Floss: the narrative structure of the novel echoes this sense of fragmentation as it operates between the discursive meditations of the narrator and the linear cohesion of the story (Shuttleworth, 52). This style of narration correlates to Maggie’s own ever-developing psychology: caught between the compulsions of her social conscience and the allure of her own longings, “…Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done” (Eliot, MF, 70). In a story riddled with desire and decision, the protagonist’s perpetual awareness of the immutable past is particularly significant. Maggie’s prismatic worldview underscores a conception of memory and time that deeply informs and complicates her character—it is precisely this sense of retrospect and self-awareness that will fold back upon itself in the “One supreme moment” (Eliot, MF, 542) wherein Maggie’s death creates a tragic but thrillingly cathartic final respite from the ambivalence and fragmentation of her social existence.

Childhood in Adam Bede, on the other hand, is symbolized most often through its own absence. Josephine McDonagh discusses the macabre thematic significance of child murder in Adam Bede, writing, “In a covert way the text is preoccupied with the very processes of forgetting. Hence the novel’s dominant motif—burial—specifically child murder-by-burial. Paradoxically, the figure of forgetting is also the bearer of those memories that must be forgotten, so that to forget means also to remember” (McDonagh, 145). In accordance with this notion, representational absences in Adam Bede (‘forgetting’) are as important as representational presences (‘remembering’), with neither providing a complete depiction of the narrative reality, but both providing valuable insight into the psychological nature of the text. In other words, the general lack of (living) children within Adam Bede carries is own thematic relevance. Largely as a result of this, Hetty Sorrel’s murdered child is never described or named: it is formless, selfless, and genderless, and yet its murder propels forms the primary narrative catalyst in the novel. The violent absence of the child dramatically alters the manner of the narrative—the specter of its death haunts the text as a whole, and comes to symbolize not the idyllic past of The Mill on the Floss, but a precarious and terrifying future.

While the representational absence of children in Adam Bede has its own keen psychological impact, however, its representational presence is far more simplistic, and at times even underdeveloped. This is most evident in the character of Hetty who, despite her age, is described as being “almost a child herself” (Eliot, AB, 167). In this context, the notion of a child indicates something simple, vulnerable, and foolish: starkly juxtaposing the psychologically complex child character of Maggie in The Mill on the Floss. When the trauma of the death of her own child is projected outwards through Hetty’s arrest and trial, the event deeply impacts the more multidimensional characters, such as Adam, within the broader community of the novel, but manifests in Hetty as a calculated sense of self-preservation. Indeed, the character of Hetty appears to be nearly devoid of all maternal love: using the term “it” to describe her child, she does not name or even take note of its sex (Eliot, AB, 491). By viewing the child as as a symbol of shame rather than a person worthy of a name or even a gender pronoun, Hetty demonstrates—even in light of her dire circumstances—a profound lack of empathy for a vulnerable human life.

In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot’s rich, nuanced treatment of the psychology of children allows Maggie’s history to provide a necessary foundation for literary transcendence of the controversial decisions that characterize her adult narrative: Maggie’s passionate, though not always sensible tendencies are knitted together in the many facets of an imperfect and deeply engaging psyche. Adam Bede ultimately emerges as the weaker of the two texts, demonstrating characterizations that further the conception of a childlike, psychologically one-dimensional woman who is near irredeemable not only in the selfishness of her actions, but also in the sheer uselessness of her narrative presence. Ultimately, the text of Adam Bede seems to hold too much in common with the androcentric realm of human psychology, with its extensive academic history of presupposing the simplistic, dimensionless natures of its female subjects. In both novels, however, the literary treatment of children manifests as a primary force behind the trajectory of each respective narrative, underscoring the relevance of the complex psychologies of childhood upon which Eliot’s successful conception of sympathetic and engaging protagonists is largely contingent.

Works Cited

Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print.

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Ed. A. S. Byatt. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Eliot, George, and Margaret Reynolds. Adam Bede. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

McDonagh, Josephine. “A Nation of Infanticides: Child Murder and the National Forgetting in Adam Bede.” Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2003. 123- 53. Google Scholar. Web. 8 Nov. 2015.

Shuttleworth, Sally. “The Mill on the Floss: The Shadowy Armies of the Unconscious.” George Eliot and Nineteenth-century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 51-77. Google Scholar. Web. 9 Nov. 2015.

The Gendered Discourse of “Middlemarch”

In the vibrant world of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, an intimate web of social relations dictates the trajectory of the narrative. Fragmented interpretations of the relationships between men and women pass frequently between the characters of the novel: gossip infuses every margin and gap in the social world of the text. In Theories of Discourse as Theories of Gender, Mary Bucholtz identifies gossip as “a site of political struggle in which ideologies of gender are cross-cut by faultlines based on age, tradition, and political power”(Bucholtz, 60). In accordance with this notion, the fervent circulation of rumors throughout Middlemarch contains a particular gendered significance: in both its overt and allegorical forms, gossip in Middlemarch informs the plot by generating tensions within the romantic lives of the protagonists, and functions as a primary thematic site upon which the impact, merits, and detriments of the Victorian gender hierarchy can be observed. This in turn lends insight into a number of political elements within Eliot’s novel: discourse between the genders in Middlemarch becomes a discourse on gender itself, ultimately exposing the broader feminist ethos of the text.

Relationships between the characters of Middlemarch are distinguished by a convoluted allocation of knowledge: Eliot’s description of the world as “…a huge whispering-gallery” (Eliot, 412) evokes a space wherein information is characterized by the covert or misled nature of its distribution. The men and women of Middlemarch rarely communicate directly with the opposite gender: both parties rely instead on gossip, receiving much of their information secondhand. The concentrated effect of gossip upon the community of Middlemarch is observable in James Chettam’s misguided conviction that Dorothea Brooks will accept his marriage proposal. Upon learning of the rumor, Dorothea denies any romantic inclination towards Chettam and chides her sister for listening to “such gossip” (Eliot, 36). Even so, the damage has been done: in the earliest chapters of the text, the socially ingrained tendency to gossip almost exclusively with members of one’s own sex has already resulted in a serious misunderstanding between Dorothea and Chettam. In this manner, gossip in Middlemarch is portrayed as a detrimental force that convolutes truths and misinterprets the romantic desires of Middlemarch’s inhabitants, resulting in a fractured social discourse between the men and women of the community.

But despite repeatedly emphasizing its tendency to complicate and even impede the romantic interpersonal relationships of Middlemarch, Eliot also identifies the necessity of gossip in maintaining the social fabric of the community. In chapter 71 of the novel, Eliot describes a scene in which “…there was no material object to feed upon, but the eye of reason saw a probability of mental sustenance in the shape of gossip” (Eliot, 715). The language of this passage underscores gossip’s function as a form of “mental sustenance” within Middlemarch, providing nourishment and gratification to the close-knit community. Similarly, although gossip can prove detrimental to romantic relationships in the text, it can also prove vital to their contentment and longevity. For instance, Lydgate’s reluctance to engage fully with the community of Middlemarch, which is necessarily a culture of gossip, draws the ire of both the citizens of Middlemarch and his wife, and ultimately emerges as a primary destructive force in his marriage. Despite its multitude of interpersonal consequences, gossip in Middlemarch remains a socially compulsory act; and in this manner, certain gendered connotations of gossip become apparent as well. The ongoing replication of gender norms within the community of Middlemarch, though stifling and toxic to various romantic pairings throughout the text, remains a necessary part of maintaining a given social structure. In this instance, the culture surrounding gossip functions as an overt reflection of the culture surrounding gender in Middlemarch: in some ways its norms are neither practical nor desirable, but they nevertheless become necessary by virtue of their own incessant repetition.

In addition to its complex and evident thematic presence, gossip is represented in Middlemarch through two primary recurring symbols. The first of these, the notion of echoes, occurs repeatedly throughout the text. In chapter 16, while describing one of the scenes of courtship between Lydgate and Rosamund, Eliot writes, “…And so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter” (Eliot, 161). In this passage, echoes are represented as forms of sound that become increasingly dissociated from their point of origin; in other words, although an echo may begin as a precise replication of an “originating activity,” an interpreter can distort or obscure its meaning. Eliot’s description of the link between echoes and the human soul draws parallels to the nature of indirect social discourse as it is depicted throughout the text: although reliable pieces of information circulate amidst the rumors and gossip of Middlemarch, their value is most often compromised by the variety of interpretation. The second symbolic manifestation of gossip within Middlemarch, the theme of the web, is the more prolific of the two: in chapter 15 Eliot ruminates, “I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” (Eliot, 141). This metaphor of the web within Middlemarch is multifaceted and profound: in its simplest form, the web of Middlemarch often seems to represent the basic social connections that bind members of the community to each another. But the web, like an echo, later becomes inextricably linked to the romantic engagement of human souls, as Eliot writes,

“Young love-making—that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust” (Elliot, 346).

Of course, the image of the web contains a multitude of potential interpretations throughout Middlemarch, but its interpersonal connotations in this passage are explicit. Just as echoes symbolize the fractured sense of discourse that resonates through the novel, Eliot’s web becomes a strikingly similar visual allegory for the role of gossip within the text: each time a string is impacted, reverberations move, like echoes in a whispering- gallery, across the web.

Whether or not Middlemarch as a whole constitutes a “feminist text” is, perhaps, too ambitious a question for one essay—as Anne E. Patrick discusses, George Eliot did not necessarily have access to the type of vocabulary through which we might identify a work as “feminist discourse” in contemporary analysis (Patrick, 224). Nevertheless, a feminist reading of Middlemarch is not only possible, but also of considerable merit. In the conception and publication of Middlemarch, Eliot presents a vivid world that is starkly divided along gendered lines. Gossip serves as the primary lens through which Eliot’s treatment of gender can be analyzed; it is therefore unsurprising that the politics of discourse and gossip in Middlemarch would parallel the broader observations upon gender that appear throughout the text. Just as gossip provides vital, informative, and conversational links between the characters of the text, it also proves deeply divisive: impeding efforts to negotiate satisfactory romantic relationships in the lives of multiple characters. Just as echoes can entail precision and connection, they also become distorted as their interpretation strays further from its point of origin. Just as the social web entails the various points of intersection and human intimacy between the inhabitants of Middlemarch, it can also symbolize a terrifying potential for captivity. In other words, in none of her allegories does Eliot discredit the merit of gender in maintaining social order in Victorian communities; nevertheless, she examines the considerable limitations and shortcomings of gendered roles and stereotypes through a deeply critical lens.

Eliot begins the 69th chapter of Middlemarch with the Biblical excerpt: “If thou hast heard a word, let it die with thee” (Eliot, 693). The line itself, in the context of the novel, seems to refer quite explicitly to the town’s culture of gossip and rumor, expressing cautionary opposition to the community’s reckless and misguided distribution of information. Considering gossip’s status as an overt symbol of gender division within Middlemarch, Eliot’s narrative decisions and inclusion of the aforementioned quote can therefore be read not only as a critique of capricious or misguided social opinions, but also as an observation of the manner in which rigid gender stereotypes impede the capacity for intimate relationships and personal fulfillment within a social world. Nowhere is this sentiment more evident than in the final pages of the text, wherein Eliot asserts, “But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know” (Eliot, 838). As the reader nears the final lines of the text, Eliot refers directly to the “daily words,” or strategies of discourse, through which communities such as Middlemarch destroy the potential for romantic and personal fulfillment in women like Dorothea. It stands to reason then, that Eliot’s narrative treatment of gossip, though circumspect, is ultimately an indictment upon a society that willingly partakes in the free and reckless distribution of rumors. Furthermore, considering gossip’s thematic relationship to the broader political notions of gender, Eliot’s Middlemarch can be read as a criticism of the rigid stereotypes and hierarchies between men and women in Victorian England; thereby allowing the novel to function as a feminist text in its critical examination of the relevance of gender within its narrative.

Works Cited

Bucholtz, Mary. “Theories of Discourse as Theories of Gender.” The Handbook of Language and Gender. By Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003. 43-68. Web.

Eliot, George, and Rosemary Ashton. Middlemarch. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Patrick, Anne E. “Rosamond Rescued: George Eliot’s Critique of Sexism in “Middlemarch””. The Journal of Religion 67.2 (1987):220–238. Web.

In That Quiet Earth

The Navigation of Physical Space Within “Wuthering Heights”

While paranormal hauntings and an enigmatic landscape lend Wuthering Heights its sense of gothic terror, the actions of characters such as Heathcliff extend beyond the merely horrific: their total disregard for convention and civility render elements of Brontë’s text virtually inaccessible to the socialized being. Thematically and symbolically, Wuthering Heights is riddled with margins: images of windows, doorways, thresholds, and gateways heavily inform the text. Traditionally, these symbols entail division, restriction, and change, both in the literal sense and as allegories for the socially constructed parameters of civilization. But the narrative power of Wuthering Heights is largely contingent upon the ways in which Brontë’s characters navigate these physical and metaphorical boundaries: the volatile landscapes and complex architecture within the novel are repeatedly linked to the human body, and can often be read in coded sexual terms. So as the characters of Wuthering Heights engage with the physical spaces they occupy, and specifically with liminal areas such as windows and doorways, they encounter an observable nexus of social and sexual taboos: the characters of Heathcliff and Lockwood respectively embody two opposite responses to this half- civilized world.

Mysteriously orphaned as a child, and described by Brontë as “A dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” the character of Heathcliff is socially and racially divided from his childhood community of Wuthering Heights. The resulting sense of financial and ethnic separation from the communal masses is reflected clearly in the voyeuristic physical spaces that Heathcliff often occupies. In Chapter VI of Volume I, when the Linton’s dog bites Cathy at Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff later explains to Nelly: “I refused to go without Cathy…. The curtains were still looped up at one corner, and I resumed my station as spy; because, if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million of fragments, unless they let her out” (Brontë, 51). The “great glass panes” in this scene clearly represent a degree of physical separation between Heathcliff and the object of his desire, with the glass creating a tangible but transparent boundary between himself and the world of Thrushcross Grange. But perhaps more notably, the scene demonstrates the way in which physical and social othering can manifest specifically as the realized sense of voyeurism that is routinely experienced by Heathcliff. Identifying himself as a “spy” in the scene, Heathcliff, rather than Nelly narrates this passage: from his isolated positioning behind the window, Cathy is reduced to an object of his gaze, and even when Nelly recounts the story to Lockwood, the language and visual perspective of the scene belong to Heathcliff. The passage is also one of Heathcliff’s earliest experiences with what Pauline Nestor refers to as an “endless deferral of satisfaction” (Brontë, Introduction, XXV), a characteristic of his voyeuristic social positioning with several physical and social consequences. Although he considers shattering the glass, and thereby breaching both the physical and moral boundaries in Thrushcross Grange that separate him from Catherine, Heathcliff ultimately remains passive. In what will prove to be a formative moment in his life (as Cathy meets Edgar Linton, the man who eventually marries her) he remains a perpetual outlier both physically and symbolically, yet clings to this position in order to experience a limited, one-sided satiation of his fixation upon Cathy. Heathcliff, as spectator, retains the ability in this chapter to covertly view an object of his desire, thereby satisfying an emotional need for closeness without ever directly experiencing physical satisfaction or intimacy of any form: a circumstance later echoed in Chapter XX of Volume II when he notes, “My Soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself” (Brontë, 333).

Of course, Heathcliff’s status as voyeur cannot naturally grant him access to the desired physical spaces that Cathy and Edgar occupy: when he enters these spaces at last, he does so in acts of physical and social transgression. In Chapter XV of Volume 2, after acquiring possession of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff “…made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he was master, and availed himself of the master’s privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word” (Brontë, 285). Heathcliff is depicted frequently throughout Wuthering Heights as a bestial, even devilish figure: in accordance with this Gothic imagery, there may be an underlying vampiric, and therefore rape-like, element to such casual and unwanted invasion of feminine- occupied spaces. It is unsurprising, then, that these psychologically violent infringements upon a physical space within Wuthering Heights are routinely accompanied by grotesque disfigurations of the body: of course, this is first hinted at much earlier in the text, when the Changeling representing Cathy’s ghost attempts to breach Lockwood’s bedroom window, but the even more frightening scene occurs in Chapter XV, when Heathcliff violates Cathy’s grave. Heathcliff’s actions, which are fueled by dissonant and perverse bodily desire, are explained in full as he tells Nelly:

“…In the evening I went to the churchyard…. Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—“I’ll have her in my arms again!” …I got a spade from the tool-house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down” (Brontë, 289).

In this scene, the effort of opening the coffin, and especially the action of actually breaking the wood with his bare hands, demonstrates Heathcliff’s efforts towards total physical destruction of a barrier between his body and Catherine’s. Furthermore, the act of breaching the coffin is socially as well as physically transgressive: in addition to violating the clear separation that cemeteries establish between living bodies and corpses in human civilization, Heathcliff’s language may even indicate an ongoing sexual desire for Cathy. In other words, Heathcliff may not only harbor desire for Cathy as he remembers her, but also for her present state in the novel, as a corpse: his use of the term “my object” can be read as referencing Cathy’s corpse as an object of affection, or of desire, while his desperation to “have her in my arms again” is an unsettlingly physical and even romantic sentiment to demonstrate towards a lifeless and decaying body. In this scene, Brontë’s diction and Heathcliff’s stated desires both contain a borderline implication of necrophilia: among the most appalling of social taboos. Thus, as Heathcliff begins to engage more aggressively with the physical space around him, he abandons more carelessly the norms and standards of the society that constrained him: the anticlimactic frustration of his voyeurism gives way to a tendency towards transgression, and his bodily desires grow increasingly perverse.

A novel of lingering tensions and oftentimes of profound horror, Wuthering Heights functions, in some ways, as a haunted text. The human tragedy and supernatural horror of the narrative besets the audience—but some of its poison is released through the telling. One of the great paradoxes of Wuthering Heights is the simultaneous necessity and limitations of both physical social boundaries: while Catherine’s strict adherence to societal convention arguably destroys both Heathcliff’s life and her own, the total lack of regard for the parameters of civilized society that Heathcliff demonstrates has horrific consequences of its own. Lockwood, on the other hand, hovers on the threshold between the conventional and the primitive: although a civilized man, he is repeatedly drawn to the seclusion and enigmatic wilderness of Wuthering Heights. Neither rejecting nor wholly embracing conventional society, Lockwood’s consolation in the face of Wuthering Heights’ tragic history is achieved through acts of communication with the character of Nelly. Lockwood often misinterprets what he sees at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly occasionally embellishes or omits information in order to fit her internalized opinion of each character; nevertheless, through lengthy narration the two characters are ultimately able to piece together an imperfect but nuanced understanding of the occupants of Wuthering Heights. In this way, they begin to exorcise the fraught history of the landscape from their own souls. These acts of healing are reflected by the newfound ability of the characters to navigate the physical thresholds of the house: in the first scene of the novel, Lockwood attempts to enter through the gateway of Wuthering Heights, but is apprehended (Brontë, 3). By the end of the novel, having fully recounted the place’s history to the reader, Lockwood is able to enter easily, stating, “I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock, it yielded to my hand” (Brontë, 307). The ability to navigate the physical thresholds of the landscape seems to parallel the redemptive and cleansing quality of verbalizing and communicating the tragic history of Wuthering Heights; thus, in the souls of both Nelly and Lockwood, the terrors of a haunted past are comprehended, and ultimately mitigated through mutual acts of translation.

Through its characters’ engagements with the literal and metaphorical boundaries of their social spaces, Wuthering Heights demonstrates the ambiguous line between civilized and animalistic, the dissatisfaction of forced and othered voyeurism, the terrifying distortions of the transgressive body, and the catharsis of narrative. Interestingly, though, the reader is placed in a peculiar position by the end of the novel. For while Nelly tells the story to Lockwood, and Lockwood to the audience, the story is not ours to tell—we have no such purgative ability. The audience then becomes the perpetual voyeur, experiencing the novel in a profoundly visceral fashion, while never quite entering the novel’s inaccessible world. The story then lingers with a strange and almost supernatural beauty that the reader consumes, yet struggles to translate. This is perhaps the most extraordinary literary achievement of Emily Brontë’s narration within Wuthering Heights. She creates a world whose history must be told over and over again—leaving our souls affected, our slumbers unquiet.

In That Quiet Earth

The Navigation of Physical Space Within “Wuthering Heights”

While paranormal hauntings and an enigmatic landscape lend Wuthering Heights its sense of gothic terror, the actions of characters such as Heathcliff extend beyond the merely horrific: their total disregard for convention and civility render elements of Brontë’s text virtually inaccessible to the socialized being. Thematically and symbolically, Wuthering Heights is riddled with margins: images of windows, doorways, thresholds, and gateways heavily inform the text. Traditionally, these symbols entail division, restriction, and change, both in the literal sense and as allegories for the socially constructed parameters of civilization. But the narrative power of Wuthering Heights is largely contingent upon the ways in which Brontë’s characters navigate these physical and metaphorical boundaries: the volatile landscapes and complex architecture within the novel are repeatedly linked to the human body, and can often be read in coded sexual terms. So as the characters of Wuthering Heights engage with the physical spaces they occupy, and specifically with liminal areas such as windows and doorways, they encounter an observable nexus of social and sexual taboos: the characters of Heathcliff and Lockwood respectively embody two opposite responses to this half- civilized world.

Mysteriously orphaned as a child, and described by Brontë as “A dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” the character of Heathcliff is socially and racially divided from his childhood community of Wuthering Heights. The resulting sense of financial and ethnic separation from the communal masses is reflected clearly in the voyeuristic physical spaces that Heathcliff often occupies. In Chapter VI of Volume I, when the Linton’s dog bites Cathy at Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff later explains to Nelly: “I refused to go without Cathy…. The curtains were still looped up at one corner, and I resumed my station as spy; because, if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million of fragments, unless they let her out” (Brontë, 51). The “great glass panes” in this scene clearly represent a degree of physical separation between Heathcliff and the object of his desire, with the glass creating a tangible but transparent boundary between himself and the world of Thrushcross Grange. But perhaps more notably, the scene demonstrates the way in which physical and social othering can manifest specifically as the realized sense of voyeurism that is routinely experienced by Heathcliff. Identifying himself as a “spy” in the scene, Heathcliff, rather than Nelly narrates this passage: from his isolated positioning behind the window, Cathy is reduced to an object of his gaze, and even when Nelly recounts the story to Lockwood, the language and visual perspective of the scene belong to Heathcliff. The passage is also one of Heathcliff’s earliest experiences with what Pauline Nestor refers to as an “endless deferral of satisfaction” (Brontë, Introduction, XXV), a characteristic of his voyeuristic social positioning with several physical and social consequences. Although he considers shattering the glass, and thereby breaching both the physical and moral boundaries in Thrushcross Grange that separate him from Catherine, Heathcliff ultimately remains passive. In what will prove to be a formative moment in his life (as Cathy meets Edgar Linton, the man who eventually marries her) he remains a perpetual outlier both physically and symbolically, yet clings to this position in order to experience a limited, one-sided satiation of his fixation upon Cathy. Heathcliff, as spectator, retains the ability in this chapter to covertly view an object of his desire, thereby satisfying an emotional need for closeness without ever directly experiencing physical satisfaction or intimacy of any form: a circumstance later echoed in Chapter XX of Volume II when he notes, “My Soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself” (Brontë, 333).

Of course, Heathcliff’s status as voyeur cannot naturally grant him access to the desired physical spaces that Cathy and Edgar occupy: when he enters these spaces at last, he does so in acts of physical and social transgression. In Chapter XV of Volume 2, after acquiring possession of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff “…made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he was master, and availed himself of the master’s privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word” (Brontë, 285). Heathcliff is depicted frequently throughout Wuthering Heights as a bestial, even devilish figure: in accordance with this Gothic imagery, there may be an underlying vampiric, and therefore rape-like, element to such casual and unwanted invasion of feminine- occupied spaces. It is unsurprising, then, that these psychologically violent infringements upon a physical space within Wuthering Heights are routinely accompanied by grotesque disfigurations of the body: of course, this is first hinted at much earlier in the text, when the Changeling representing Cathy’s ghost attempts to breach Lockwood’s bedroom window, but the even more frightening scene occurs in Chapter XV, when Heathcliff violates Cathy’s grave. Heathcliff’s actions, which are fueled by dissonant and perverse bodily desire, are explained in full as he tells Nelly:

“…In the evening I went to the churchyard…. Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—“I’ll have her in my arms again!” …I got a spade from the tool-house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down” (Brontë, 289).

In this scene, the effort of opening the coffin, and especially the action of actually breaking the wood with his bare hands, demonstrates Heathcliff’s efforts towards total physical destruction of a barrier between his body and Catherine’s. Furthermore, the act of breaching the coffin is socially as well as physically transgressive: in addition to violating the clear separation that cemeteries establish between living bodies and corpses in human civilization, Heathcliff’s language may even indicate an ongoing sexual desire for Cathy. In other words, Heathcliff may not only harbor desire for Cathy as he remembers her, but also for her present state in the novel, as a corpse: his use of the term “my object” can be read as referencing Cathy’s corpse as an object of affection, or of desire, while his desperation to “have her in my arms again” is an unsettlingly physical and even romantic sentiment to demonstrate towards a lifeless and decaying body. In this scene, Brontë’s diction and Heathcliff’s stated desires both contain a borderline implication of necrophilia: among the most appalling of social taboos. Thus, as Heathcliff begins to engage more aggressively with the physical space around him, he abandons more carelessly the norms and standards of the society that constrained him: the anticlimactic frustration of his voyeurism gives way to a tendency towards transgression, and his bodily desires grow increasingly perverse.

A novel of lingering tensions and oftentimes of profound horror, Wuthering Heights functions, in some ways, as a haunted text. The human tragedy and supernatural horror of the narrative besets the audience—but some of its poison is released through the telling. One of the great paradoxes of Wuthering Heights is the simultaneous necessity and limitations of both physical social boundaries: while Catherine’s strict adherence to societal convention arguably destroys both Heathcliff’s life and her own, the total lack of regard for the parameters of civilized society that Heathcliff demonstrates has horrific consequences of its own. Lockwood, on the other hand, hovers on the threshold between the conventional and the primitive: although a civilized man, he is repeatedly drawn to the seclusion and enigmatic wilderness of Wuthering Heights. Neither rejecting nor wholly embracing conventional society, Lockwood’s consolation in the face of Wuthering Heights’ tragic history is achieved through acts of communication with the character of Nelly. Lockwood often misinterprets what he sees at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly occasionally embellishes or omits information in order to fit her internalized opinion of each character; nevertheless, through lengthy narration the two characters are ultimately able to piece together an imperfect but nuanced understanding of the occupants of Wuthering Heights. In this way, they begin to exorcise the fraught history of the landscape from their own souls. These acts of healing are reflected by the newfound ability of the characters to navigate the physical thresholds of the house: in the first scene of the novel, Lockwood attempts to enter through the gateway of Wuthering Heights, but is apprehended (Brontë, 3). By the end of the novel, having fully recounted the place’s history to the reader, Lockwood is able to enter easily, stating, “I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock, it yielded to my hand” (Brontë, 307). The ability to navigate the physical thresholds of the landscape seems to parallel the redemptive and cleansing quality of verbalizing and communicating the tragic history of Wuthering Heights; thus, in the souls of both Nelly and Lockwood, the terrors of a haunted past are comprehended, and ultimately mitigated through mutual acts of translation.

Through its characters’ engagements with the literal and metaphorical boundaries of their social spaces, Wuthering Heights demonstrates the ambiguous line between civilized and animalistic, the dissatisfaction of forced and othered voyeurism, the terrifying distortions of the transgressive body, and the catharsis of narrative. Interestingly, though, the reader is placed in a peculiar position by the end of the novel. For while Nelly tells the story to Lockwood, and Lockwood to the audience, the story is not ours to tell—we have no such purgative ability. The audience then becomes the perpetual voyeur, experiencing the novel in a profoundly visceral fashion, while never quite entering the novel’s inaccessible world. The story then lingers with a strange and almost supernatural beauty that the reader consumes, yet struggles to translate. This is perhaps the most extraordinary literary achievement of Emily Brontë’s narration within Wuthering Heights. She creates a world whose history must be told over and over again—leaving our souls affected, our slumbers unquiet.

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