A Feminine Difference

New COMPARISON
A Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies
Number 22 Autumn 1996
A Feminine Difference?
New Comparison is published twice yearly (Spring and Autumn) by the BRITISH COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION. Members of the BCLA receive New Comparison as part of their membership of the Association (see last page for details). The Journal is also available by subscription: Individuals: 14.00 p.a.; UK Institutions: 27.00 p.a.
EDITORS Leon Burnett

(Department of Literature, University of Essex)
Howard Gaskill
(Department of German, University of Edinburgh)
Holger Klein
(Department of English and American Literature, University of Salzburg)
Maurice Slawinski
(Department of Italian Studies, University of Lancaster)
Editorial Assistant Mary Mills (Department of Literature, University of Essex)
EDITORIAL BOARD Susan Bassnett, (Comparative Cultural Studies, Warwick) Theo Hermans (Dutch, University College, London) Philip Mosley (Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State) Robert Pynsent (Slavonic and East European Studies, London) Brigitte Schultze (Slavonic Studies, Mainz) Alison Sharrock (Classics, Keele) Christopher Smith (Mod. Lang. and European History, East Anglia) Arthur Terry (Literature, Essex) Shirley Vinall (Italian, Reading) Peter Zima (Comparative Literature, Klagenfurt)
ADDRESSES FOR CORRESPONDENCE

Editorial and Administrative: Dr Leon Burnett, Department of Literature, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK. Email Burne@essex.ac.uk Diary: Mr Maurice Slawinski, Department of Italian Studies, Lonsdale College, Lancaster University, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YN, UK. Email M.Slawinski@lancaster.ac.uk Production: Dr Howard Gaskill, Department of German, University of Edinburgh, David Hume Tower, George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JX, UK. Email H.Gaskill@ed.ac.uk Reviews: Prof. Holger Klein, Institut fr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitt Salzburg, Akademiestrasse 24, A-5020 Salzburg, Austria. Email Kleinhol@at.sbg.eduz
Copyright: the authors
ISSN 0950-5814
Printed at the University of Essex
The British Comparative Literature Association:
New COMPARISON
A Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies
Number 22: Autumn 1996
CONTENTS
A Feminine Difference Edited by ELAINE JORDAN
ELAINE JORDAN Introduction: A Feminine Difference? ROBERT IGNATIUS LETELLIER Prophetic and Realistic Voices in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish and Madame de Lafayette M. A. SEABRA FERREIRA Alejandra Pizarniks Acerca de la Condesa Sangrienta and Angela Carters The Lady of the House of Love: Transgression and the Politics of Victimization FRANCESCA COUNIHAN Shifting Sands: Gender and Identity in the Writing of Marguerite Yourcenar GINA WISKER Aboriginal Womens Writing: Charting the Dreamtime
p. 3
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27
58
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Articles P. M. WETHERILL Fantasy Cities, Seecret Gardens R. K. BRITTON Civilization and Barbarism: A Reassessment of the Political and Cultural Debate in Modern Spanish American Thought and Literature ABDULLA AL-DABBAGH Orientalism, Literary Orientalism and Romanticism
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139
Reviews
DORIS DOHMEN, Das deutsche Irlandbild: Imagologische Untersuchungen zur Darstellung Irlands und der Iren in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Heinz Kosok), p. 157; E. D. KARAMPETSOS, The Theater of Healing (Kenneth Payne), p. 159; PHILIP MOSLEY, ed., Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays (Clive Scott), p. 161; DAVID MEAKIN, Hermetic Fictions. Alchemy and Irony in the Modern Novel (Natalya Todd), p. 163.
Contributors to New COMPARISON 22
Diary
Forthcoming BCLA Activities BCLA Publications Other Events of Interest to Comparatists 166 167 170
Elaine Jordan
INTRODUCTION: A feminine difference?
In what sense do women write as women, and does that make a difference? My plan was to devote a whole issue of this journal to writing by women, to consider the different cultural and historical conditions in which it has become significant. Some writing by women has become central to a literary canon, for example Lady Murasakis Tale of Genji in Heian Japan (794-1186), or the novels of Austen, the Brontes , or George Eliot in nineteenth-century England. Particular roles have been significant, for example in pious writing, or writing about social problems, in translating, or in popularising scientific work, as in eighteenth-century Europe. We should not forget the significance of women in passing on culture orally. Their role as tellers of folk and fairy tales was sadly forgotten by Walter Benjamin in his essay in Illuminations, The Storyteller, which thinks only of the seafarer and artisan, but womens work as singers of songs and tellers of tales has been richly recognised in editing, anthologies and scholarly work by, for example, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Marina Warner, Jack Zipes. Consideration of when, where and how women have emerged as significant writers is a necessary kind of comparative study if we are to address the question of whether there is a specific femininity in writing (and if so would it be exclusive to women?), and how far particular circumstances determined the emergence of women as writers, and as writing in particular ways. When Hlene Cixous first wrote, in the 1970s, about the possibility of an criture feminine and claimed that women had hitherto written as men, or merely within the terms of patriarchy, how far was that affected, not only by the use of the terms masculine and feminine in psychoanalytic writing, but also by the relative disappearance of significant women writers (apart from George Sand, who was so exciting to English women poets and novelists) in nineteenth-
New Comparison 22: p. 4
Jordan: A Feminine Difference?
century France? 1 As George Eliot noted, women had been important in French literature from the seventeenth century at least, and Mme de Lafayette, in La Princesse de Cleves (1678), recalled the earlier tales of Marguerite of Navarre. 2 Eliot clearly thought the cultural balance between English and French women writers was quite other than it now appears: writing by French women didnt become nationally and internationally important again until the odd couple of Colette and Simone de Beauvoir in the twentieth century. Maybe Cixous was merely responding to the different qualities and limitations of Colette and Beauvoir, when she claimed that hitherto women had written as men? Colette wanting to be richly and perversely feminine in a way men (and women) would find warm and stimulating, Beauvoir wanting a position in the line of critical and truth-telling philosophes, but putting herself and other women second: one seductive, one rivalrous? The situation was rather different in England, and countries such as the US. And elsewhere, what? Women writing in Northern European, Protestant, and Anglophone modern contexts, with some emphasis on black women writers of the US, are possibly the most studied cases. They deserve study, but from a comparative and larger perspective are over-studied at the expense of other work so it appears to me. It would be interesting to know more about other instances and situations, in their own right, and comparatively. What of Catholic women scholars and writers, in the pre-modern and New Worlds, from Hildegard von Bingen to Sor Juana de la Cruz? And what of other cultures than those with which my education has made me most familiar? I hoped to use Arab, Indian, Persian, Brazilian, and many more examples here, but was disappointed in the range of work I received (as well as what did not arrive!), and the lack of any common understanding of what I was asking for: an exploration of what conditions, or what character and quality in the writing, made certain women figure as writers, at different times, in different places. My hope is that the articles I have been able to bring together in this section, though fewer and less wide-ranging than I might have wished, will draw more answers to New
See HLENE CIXOUS, The Laugh of the Medusa, translated in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1:2 (Autumn 1976), and Castration or Decapitation, in Signs, 7:1 (Autumn 1981). Selections from both in Feminist Theory: A Reader, ed. Mary Eagleton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed., 1996), pp. 320-325 Women in France: Madam de Sabl, in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 52-81. The reference to Marguerite of Navarre is in Part 2 of La Princesse de Cleves, during the dauphines conversation with the princess about Anne Boleyn. NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS uses Marguerites tales for comparison, in discussing the different pleas made on behalf of men and of women condemned for homicide, in Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press, 1987).
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Comparison maybe critical, corrective and antagonistic argument also, but I wanted to set up this issue or section in order to be better informed, and to have a richer, more diverse, range for comparative thinking and understanding. The interest of the topic is indicated by Janet Gartons Women in Context series. 3 But this is European and modern in emphasis (from the beginnings of the major struggle for emancipation until the present day, as the advertising material announces). Undoubtedly Mary Wollstonecraft, and Ibsens Nora, were important for feminist writing, thinking and practice from Turkey to Japan , as well as in Europe, but the currently interesting comparisons must be pre- (or early) modern, as well as modern; and not just European or North American. Much work exists, or is in progress, on Jewish women writers, on Native American and Chicana women in the US, and Farzaneh Milani discusses the emerging voices of Iranian women writers in Veils and Words. 4 These are samples of how rich this set of questions can be for comparative studies. How far back can we go? Or forward? How different are the conditions, the psyches, the qualities and the politics? What do we mean when we speak of the feminine and the masculine, their mixing or transcendence, or the queer, in writing? Are they all outdated categories? How differently have they been, can they be, inflected, and appreciated? In this section we have contributors from England, France, Ireland, and Portugal, discussing writers from Argentina, Australia, England and France who range from the more to the less privileged. I was unable to include an article from Dr Elham Al Bassam in Kuwait, because of translation difficulties, but the topic of this article the experimental modernist poetry of Nazik Al-Malaikah, and the resistance from classicists to her work in introducing free verse to Arabic poetry (influenced by English Romantics, and modernist poets such as T.S.Eliot, while teaching in Baghdad, Basra, and Kuwait) suggests further possibilities in comparative and cross-cultural study. 5 For this introduction I have also drawn on work by an MA student, Yuko Hamamoto, on Japanese women writers of the Heian (794-1186), Meiji (1868-1912), and Taisho (1912Already in print are JANET GARTONS own Norwegian Womens Writing 18501990 (1993); SHARON WOOD, Italian Womens Writing 1860-1994 (1995); DIANA HOLMES, French Womens Writing 1848-1994 (1996). Forthcoming are Swedish Womens Writing 1850-1995 by Helena Forsas-Scott, and volumes on Spanish writing by Catherine Davies and on German writing by Chris Weedon and Franziska Meyer. All published from London by the Athlone Press.
4 5 3
FARZETH MILANI, Veils and words (Syracuse University Press, 1992).
Nazik Al-Malaikah, ed. A.H. Al Mhana (Kuwait: Shareekt Al-Rabaeeain Lil-Nashr Wal-Tawzeea, 1985)
1926) periods. In the Heian period of aristocratic culture, the customs of the Japanese court in marital and other sexual relations positively encouraged writing by women, in a womans hand , a feminine writing which preserved the native spoken language, distinct from the Chinese, or Sino-Japanese, of scholars, priests and officials. The encouragement to women to show their skills and sophistication within the gendered sexual politics of the court, in ways not entirely official, produced narrative fictions, diaries and poetry of great interest and recognised distinction: by Murasaki Shikubu, by Fujiwara Michitsuna no Haha (her Gossamer Diary was one of the earliest in this form), by Izumi Shikubu, Sugawara Takasue no Musume, Ono no Komachi, and Sei Shonagon. 6 Murasaki and Sei Shonagon also read and wrote Chinese (prefiguring nineteenth-century Englishwomen who sought the scholarly credentials denied them by lack of grammar school, public school, and university education). Murasaki was acid about Sei Shonagon presumptuously scattering abroad her imperfect writing in Chinese; no female solidarity there! Similarly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who translated Aeschylus, was mocked for errors in Greek translation which would not have been made by a grammar school boy; she lacked that rgime, being privately tutored. Although this wave of Japanese women writers was later overwhelmed by more warlike, and also more bourgeois and popular cultural forms, their intimate passion was revived by Yosano Akiko in the Meiji era, along with more directly political writing, often resistant to imperialism, in association with various groups and movements, such as Hiratsuka Raichos magazine Seito (Bluestockings, 1911-16). Classical Heian writing has produced modern imitations such as the Scottish writer Alison Fells The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro (1994). This appreciative hybrid or pastiche uses some characteristics and circumstances of Heian writing to explore modern womens desire, lack of self-esteem, and rivalry. Its pretence of being an edited translation convinced the acceptance committee for the Booker Prize: they refused it, as a translation not an original work of fiction. Japanese readers may well object to its anachronistic fictionality, and perhaps to its overt eroticism, joining the classically poetic with the pornography so prevalent in modern
For translations and studies in English see EARL MINER, An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford University Press, 1968); Japanese Poetic Diaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton University Press, 1985); IVAN MORRIS, trans., The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan (Oxford University Press, 1967); EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER, trans., The Gossamer Years (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle and Co., 1987), and The Tale of Genji (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981).
Japan. 7 Is its in-between character postmodern or feminist? Or feminine? Or an improper appropriation? Yosano Akikos work in Meiji Japan resisted the role of women as passive objects and entertainments for men, which had been prevalent in the Edo period (1603-1868). Her first collection of poems, Midaregami (Tangled Hair, 1901) passionately and skilfully articulates her desires and disappointments. Her 1904 poem to her younger brother, fighting in the Russo-Japanese war, also resonates with later feminist protests against imperial and military dominance:
I am crying for you you, do not die! Born youngest, Most loved by parents With a sword in your hand To kill people and die; Have they raised you to tell you that For a good twenty-four years?
This loving and indignant poem, quoted in Yuko Hamamotos translation, goes on to speak of the brothers expected succession to the family business: war is not his business, nor is the Emperors engagement in this war a personal activity. Indeed he had promised peace to the grey-haired mother:
Oh brother, in this war, You, do not die! Last autumn saw our fathers death. Mother, in this time of mourning, This time had her son called up 8
The first essay in this section on feminine difference in writing is on the work of Margaret Cavendish and Madame de Lafayette; like the Japanese women, they are writing from and for an aristocratic or high bourgeois society. Dr Letellier contrasts the political and cultural contexts in England and France in 1660-1685, and studies two writers who are vastly different in the character of their writing (Cavendish exuberantly
7
ALISON FELL, The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro ( London: Serpents Tail,
1994). New translation by YUKO HAMAMOTO, in Descendants of the Sun Goddess: The Literary Roots of Japanese Feminism (University of Essex: MA dissertation, 1996), p.32. For a translation of YOSANI AKIKO, Midaregami see Tangled Hair, trans. Sanford Goldstein and Shinoda Seishi (Rutland,Vermont and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle and Co., 1987).
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demanding, Lafayette working within the chaste limitations of neoclassicism) and in the esteem in which they are held in their national cultures. Nevertheless he shows how both are concerned with asserting intellectual freedom, and with enabling women. His references for Cavendish could be supplemented by the discussion of her life and work in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Elspeth Graham et al.. This critical anthology reprints Cavendishs True Relation of My Life, which was printed with Natures Pictures (1656) but withdrawn from the second edition in 1671. This is a poignantly simple correlative to her more fantastic and scientific work, and suggestive about gendered styles, discussing the fertile and the barren, and military ordering, in ways of thinking and writing, in a way which prefigures the work of Virginia Woolf on sexed identities and their transcendence. This anthology puts Cavendishs writing in relation to writing by lower middle-class, and sometimes even more adventurous, women: Quaker missionaries, prophets like Anna Trapnel, con-artists like the German Princess Mary Carleton, as well as writers of Protestant confessions. The introduction to the anthology interestingly discusses what is feminine, or feminist, or context-and-discourse-bound, in these writings sometimes dictated to, and managed by, ministers, at times posthumously (Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, not included here, did not want to publish because, she wrote, it seemed that the qualification for a lady writer was to be dead). Lack of education and writing skills was important to prophets who inveighed against corrupt university learning: they were empty vessels through which the voice of God could speak, or, in the evocative title of one of Anna Trapnels works, what they said was The Cry of a Stone. 9 There has been more critical and theoretical interest in Dr Letelliers other author, Madame de Lafayette, who plays a central role in French literary history and thought, but was exiled from Ian Watts account of the rise of the novel for being too stylish to be authentic. 10 From a feminist perspective, Nancy K. Miller has argued that La Princesse de Cleves is a protest against the existing stories that can be told about women, while deploying the currently understandable conventions; and both Joan DeJean and Anne Green have discussed how Lafayette played the contemporary game of anonymous and questionable authorship, in La Princesse de Cleves and other works. The style distinctive to Madame de Lafayette is knowing and ironically discreet, in comparison to Margaret
Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London and NY: Routledge, 1989).
10 9
IAN WATT, The Rise of the Novel, (London, Chatto and Windus: 1957), p. 30.
Cavendishs extravagant utopianism, but effectively raises the question of authorial power. 11
But I hope my readers will not think me vain for writing my life, since there have been many that have done the like, as Caesar, Ovid and many more, both men and women, and I know no reason I may not do it as well as they. But I verily believe some censuring readers will scornfully say, why hath this lady writ her own life? Since none cares to know whose daughter she was, or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived, or what humour or disposition she was of? I answer that it is true, that tis no purpose to the readers but it is to the authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs. neither did I intend this piece for to delight, but to divulge; not to please the fancy, but to tell the truth. Lest after-ages should mistake, in not knowing I was daughter to one Master Lucas of St Johns near Colchester in Essex, second wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle; for, my lord having had two wives, I might easily have been mistaken, especially if I should die and my lord marry again. 12
The final paragraph of the Duchess of Newcastles True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life is equal to the finest moments of literature, in its affirmation and its poignancy, the way its argument moves, rises, falls, both naively local and universalisable. It would be a mistake to think of it as historical rather than literary in its import and interest. Margaret Cavendish also eulogises her heroic, suffering and affectionate mother, at the time of the English Civil War or Revolution; whereas the guidance given to the fictional Princess of Cleves by her mother is utterly complicit with court politics, and, quite contrarily, with Jansenist religion: do what is socio-politically necessary for the glory of our family, and also reject the world. As Nancy K. Miller argued, Madame de Lafayettes most famous novel or rcit calls in question the stories that can be told about women. This revisionary writing can be connected to more modern or postmodern writing: a famous example is Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which rewrote Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre from the perspective of the rejected Creole wife. Other examples of this beginningagain, against familiar stories and images, are Angela Carters rewritings of folk and fairy stories, and famous literary figures from Shakespeare and Defoe to Poe, Baudelaire and Colette, in The Bloody Chamber (1979) and
NANCY K. MILLER, Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities, PMLA 96, 1981; reprinted in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (London, Virago: 1986), pp. 339-360. See also Joan DeJeans Lafayettes Ellipses: The Privileges of Anonymity, PMLA 99:5, 1984 pp. 884-902; ANNE GREEN, Ambiguous Anonymity, in The Body and the Text, ed. Helen Wilcox et al. (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 87-97; ELAINE JORDAN, Likely Stories (University of Essex: Working Papers of the Centre for Theoretical Studies I, June 1994).
12 11
Her Own Life, cit., pp.98-99
Black Venus (1985). One of these is The Lady of the House of Love (1979), discussed here by Dr Seabra Ferreira in comparison to the work of the Argentinian writer Alejandra Pizarnik, writing her story about monsters and victims a decade earlier.Pizarnick and Carter were both strongly influenced by the surrealist movement in France, and both choose the bloodlust of the aristocratic female vampire, or mass-murderess, as the topic of their stories.However, whereas Carter wants to redeem her image of the femme fatale from ancestrally-imposed lust (her death proves her mortal, therefore, however sadly, capable of human life and love), Pizarnicks story seems closer to the ambitions of the feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ, who wanted, among other things, to represent a really frightening female, a monster not a victim:
This book is written in blood. Is it written entirely in blood? No, some of it is written in tears.. Are the blood and tears all mine? 13
Unease in relation to traditional and modern cultures (which can be placed in too simple an opposition), and the positive or negative sense of new possibilities, in the writing of Pizarnik and Carter, are discussed by Dr Seabra Ferreira in relation to the emergence of the horrific, or perverse, or monstrously grotesque, woman, in recent films and fiction (for example the professional woman as atavistically desirous and dangerous, as in Fatal Attraction). I disagree with her about the young Briton on the bicycle, in Carters story he didnt become a vampire, only he redeemed the young lady from having to be one and then went on to become a victim of the black rose he couldnt bear to throw away, the bloody blossom of a European culture which combined militarism and romanticism. As so often in Carters writing, it is the cultural captivation serving imperial and totalising political power excessively rationalised, dogmatically or sentimentally ideologised, but nevertheless captivating which is exposed. In her experimental fiction the vampire lady got free of having to figure as the femme fatale by dying; the cyclist who innocently sucked her blood seemed to be free of it all, but not quite. The grotesque, perverse or monstrous may offer subversions of the existing orders of gender and sexuality, and alternatives, but how they are read, and what interests they
JOANNA RUSS, The Female Man (NY: Bantam Books, 1975; London: Womens Press: 1985), p. 95; see also Part II, I, p. 19. The steel-clawed female ghoul Jael, or J. L. (depending on whether you take her as scriptural or US) first emerges in Part II, and in the end challenges the female, feminine, and feminist identities of her co-heroines, Janet, Jeannine and Joanna; Judith could be another name to bring to bear from the Hebrew and European tradition, but is probably included in Jael.
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are made to serve, can differ, for example from the perspectives of feminist but heterosexual desire, of lesbian feminism, and gay or queer theory, as well as more conservative positions. 14 There have been many women writers who did not want to be perceived as writers who were specifically women, including Marguerite Yourcenar, discussed in Francesca Counihans essay. Other examples from the early to mid-twentieth century include Simone de Beauvoir and the Australian Christina Stead (a great writer still insufficiently recognised). In an unrecorded conversation a year before her death the Marxist literary critic and scholar, Margot Heinemann, from much the same generation, said Of course we didnt want to be with the women, we thought they were boring. We wanted to be with the boys, the ones who were really writing and thinking and doing things. Its easy to understand that attitude, given the modern English success of Joanna Trollope and the Aga-Saga novel: a bit more classy than womens romance. Angela Carter for one preferred to walk on the wild side, though unlike Beauvoir and Stead who preferred eating and entertaining in restaurants, and living in hotels she could cook and didnt mind giving her recipe for potato soup which she didnt think so very different from trying to say how you wrote your sort of story. 15 Francesca Counihan acknowledges Yourcenar (1903-87) as wanting to belong to the writers who, in their writing at least, transcend their particular embodiment and socialisation as women. Yourcenars female characters are as stereotyped as those produced by male writers: her perfect woman is passive out of wisdom and not out of weakness; her instinctual, unthinking and violent woman cant be persuaded, any more than an object, a tool or a weapon could be persuaded. On another tack, she explained why she did not make women her central characters by saying that their lives had been too limited to cope with a full range of
Recent fascination with vampires in lesbian and queer theory and criticism is exemplified in SUE-ELLEN CASE, Tracking the Vampire, in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3:2 (1991), pp.1-20. See also the fiction of Pat Califia and Poppy Z. Brite. The film of Anne Rices Interview with the Vampire, which Dr Seabra Ferreira mentions, is however more homophilically gay than feminist; it is even a bit misogynist. The Aga is a kind of oven, a cooking and heating system, which is an object of envy in glossy magazines about fashion and homes. The Aga-Saga is discussed by Deborah Philips in Women: A Cultural Review 7:1 (Spring 1996), pp. 48-54. Considered worthy of literary review, unlike Mills and Boon or Harlequin romances, the Aga-Saga characteristically presents a mild outbreak by the wife and mother, who then returns to be better appreciated. For the construction of women as writers and readers in England between 1690 and 1760 (through a distinct invitation of readers letters, and contributions which have led on to Womens Pages in modern newspapers) see KATHRYN SHEVELOW, Women and Print Culture: the construction of femininity in the early periodical (London and NY: Routledge, 1989).
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activities. Men can transcend their human embodiment, their gender; women can rarely do so. Women are wise, or else heroically or badly immune to rational argument; and they may be passive because they are wise or because they are inexperienced in significant areas such as politics and war. All these assertions can be found in Counihans account of Yourcenars writings and interviews. She attached herself more to her fathers gender than she did to her mothers, and felt herself to be a special case (as did George Eliot and E. B. Browning). Counihan argues that, nevertheless, Yourcenars writing, and especially her male characters, show feminine characteristics.This raises the whole question of what a feminine, or masculine, writing, or subjectivity might be as a matter of the writing and reading subject rather than the obvious generic oppositions of womens romances and spy thrillers, or cowboy stories. Many women enjoy boys stories, in detective fiction the honours are about equal, and boys have been known to read womens magazines, especially the problem pages. Indeed the distinction between reading for girls and boys, the address to male or female readers, may have been created, in England, by publishers at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). 16 Whether or not we want to go on thinking and writing in these terms, Im sure we need to go on thinking (comparatively) about how they influence previous writing. Counihan suggests that Yourcenars way of writing is doubtful about subjective identity, and that this doubt is represented in her male characters, with whom (the emperor Hadrian in particular) she identifies.She relates this to feminist theories about women having less sense of a separate autonomous individuality than men.Paradoxically, this quality, or lack, may be evidenced in Yourcenars identification with men, and distancing of herself from women. Counihan notes the widely divergent positions of Yourcenar and of the influential French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray, but also notes some convergence. Curiously enough, when Luce Irigaray was asked (in an unrecorded conversation c.1990), she was uneasy at being asked what contemporary women writers she read, but said that she enjoyed reading Yourcenar. I took this to mean that she liked writing by a woman that assumed knowledge and power, whereas Cixous tendency may be more therapeutic (more addressed to writing out the violence and oppresion women encounter, specifically as women). The fragmented subject on shifting sands, and waves the subject explicated as a resistance to the unified individual of Enlightened Western thought, practice, and violently imposed power, or at least as his failure has been claimed as the feminist writing position, whether or not it derives from a feminine psyche. But it has also been claimed for modernist, postmodernist, black, lesbian,
16
See KATE FLINT, The Woman Reader 1837-1914 (Oxford University Press, 1993).
gay, queer, and postcolonial cultural practice, quite generally. So is it a feminine subjectivity, and can it be claimed for an exclusively feminist politics, or feminine cultural practice? Margaret Cavendish wrote her True Relation (1656) to affirm her own particular existence, while caught within the conventions of her time and class. Mid- to late-twentieth century writers of new literatures (or post colonial literatures) are more explicitly caughtup in the politics of individual and community identities, and how writing from these may be received. This is the topic of Gina Wiskers essay on writing by women of aboriginal Australian origin, which also discusses the difficulty of finding writing by those who do not belong to a central tradition, or not to one generally recognised in the 1990s. A comparable case is that of Asian women writers in Britain. A workshop was funded by the Greater London Council, and produced an anthology in 1988. A successful writer thus enabled, Leena Dhingra, later expressed her bitterness at having to be labelled Asian woman. This could seem ungrateful and contradictory, but when another member of this collective
was asked if she thought British Asian women writers would ever be looked at, first and foremost, as writers, she replied, not in my lifetime; they will always be looked at as Asian or as women first. This is true as long as their works remain focused explicitly on negotiating ethnic [or sexed/gendered?] identity. June Jordan, a black American poet and essayist, sums up the dilemma [...]: when we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions. 17
This, together with Gina Wiskers essay, returns us to the question of what we are looking for when we read and criticise and judge, and what we are trying to do when we write, creatively or to a formula. There are certainly differences in the way women have come to reading and writing, and these are complicatedly mixed with masculinity in psyches, places, and histories. What are the relations between what is recognised as distinguished in a literary way, and writing whose interest may be primarily socio-historical, or committed more to community culture than to any individual achievement? And how does the question of a particular feminine difference, considered alongside manifest disadvantaging of women and femininity, look now?
In MIRIAM TICKTIN, Contemporary British Asian Womens Writing: Social Movement or Literary Tradition?, Women: A Cultural Review 7:1 (1996), pp. 66-77.
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Robert Ignatius Letellier
PROPHETIC AND REALISTIC VOICES IN THE WRITINGS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH AND MADAME DE LAFAYETTE
The period 1660-1685 was one of extraordinary stimulus and excitement in the histories of England and France. On 25 May 1660 Charles Stuart reclaimed the Crown of England, marking the end of twenty years of interregnum when Parliament, Puritanism and republicanism had consolidated their victory over Crown, Lords and Church in the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. 1 Less than a year later, on 10 March 1661, the young Louis XIV assumed full control of his Kingdom in France following the death of his great minister, Cardinal Mazarin, who had run France during Louis's minor years, vanquishing the alliance of nobles and the Paris Parlement during the years of the Fronde (1648-1653). 2 Both events were to usher in periods of consolidation and brilliance in their respective countries, periods in which a new sense of national identity would stimulate fresh artistic impulses in a resurgence of social and cultural dynamism, marking a highpoint in the history of European culture. 3 After
A sympathetic vindication of Charles II is provided by Sir ARTHUR BRYANT, King Charles II (London: Longman, Green & Co., rev. ed., 1955). See also K. H. D. HADLEY, "Charles II", The Historical Association, General Series 63 (1966). For an understanding of the psychology of LOUIS XIV, nothing can surpass his own Mmoires (Eng. trans., Memoirs of Lewis the Fourteenth, Written by Himself and Addressed to His Son, 2 vols, 1806). There are many French editions of this work. See PHILIPPE ERLANGER, Louis XIV (1965; Eng. trans., London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970) and JOHN B. WOLF, Louis XIV (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968). These assumptions of royal power were to mean radically different things in both countries. In England the restoration of the Stuart family did not mean the resumption of full royal prerogative: the short-lived hegemony of Parliament had nontheless meant the effective curtailment of royal power, and in spite of the challenge
3 2 1
Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette
the dark days of Puritan repression of the theatre, London came to life again in the glitter and wit of the Restoration stage and the music of Purcell. After the political severity of Mazarin's rule, France found a new sense of identity in the person of the young king: the poverty, humiliation, cold and hunger of Louis' youth were transfigured in the splendour of the Sun King's court where Racine, Molire and Lully held artistic sway. 4 The role of the arts in this brilliant age is a sign of contradiction in many ways since it represented a voice of freedom which was not expressed in the politics of either country. Charles II saw himself as a liberator, and in many ways certainly was. 5 But in spite of the euphoria of the new liberty, legislation placed strict limits on the press and public assembly, and the 1662 Act of Uniformity created controls over education. The King's independence was subjected to irksome limitations. His efforts to extend religious toleration to his Non-Conformist and Roman Catholic subjects were sharply rebuffed in 1663, and throughout his reign the House of Commons was to thwart the more generous impulses of his religious policy. Indeed it ironically seemed as though freedom itself had become the target of enforcement. The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion attempted to force a political unity so that all names and terms of distinction may [...] be put to utter oblivion. Anyone who shall presume maliciously to call or allege, or object against any other person any name or names, or other words of reproach tending to revive the memory of the late differences or the occasions thereof would be punished by fines. As usual in government
of James II after Charles II's death in 1685, the process of constitutionalism, which would be consolidated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was irresistibly set in motion. In France it was different: Louis's assumption of power was the King's personal triumph over Paris, the nobility and the common people. His own concept of a dictatorship by divine right was his original perception leading to the consolidation of Absolutism, with Versailles as its enduring symbol. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 became the tragic expression of the negative effects of such power: France as a consequence lost some of its most valuable citizens in a calamitous corruption of power which would find its logical demise in 1789. A popularized but well-researched treatment of Le Grand Sicle is provided by PIERRE GOUBERT, Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (London: Allen Lane, 1970). Already in April 1660 Charles had issued his Declaration of Breda in which he expressed his personal desire for a general amnesty, liberty of conscience and equitable settlement of land disputes. However, the unconditional nature of the settlement that eventually took shape between 1660 and 1662 owed little to Charles's intervention. He was bound by the concessions his father had made in 1640 and 1641, and the Parliament elected in 1661 was determined on an uncompromising Anglican and Royal settlement. See JOHN MORRILL, Seventeenth-Century Britain, 1603-1714 (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), and ANTONIA FRASER, Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1979).
5 4
attempts to regulate language, the legislation did not work, partly because it was rarely enforced. 6 Only on the stages of the newly restored playhouses would there be an expression of new freedom from restraint, as a whole new world of pleasure, intrigue and licence was opened to the public. The tone was established by Charles himself who declared that God will never damn a man for allowing himself a little pleasure; he claimed his share and produced fourteen illegitimate children for a string of mistresses. In the end though it was his relaxed tolerance, especially in religious matters, that contributed more to the stability of his reign than was lost by his shifty insincerity and its effects on society. Finally he was able to conclude his reign in the kind of tranquil prosperity he always sought. In France, Louis' accession to power had important consequences for personal liberty, and most especially for writers. Attempts by the Church and Government to control public opinion, which were relentlessly sustained, bear an obvious relation to the spread of a desire for freedom of thought. Soon after he assumed power, Colbert proposed that the King should grant pensions to a number of men of letters, the first being made in 1662. 7 These annual awards continued for about twenty years and coincided therefore with the period of Louis's greatest political and artistic prestige, ceasing after 1680 when the increasing austerity of Louis's religious outlook and growing financial restraints made life less brilliant. This system of privilege, coupled with the restriction on the number of printers, a stringent police censorship, and curbs on the importation of foreign publications, made it more difficult to get books published, and writers were naturally careful to avoid saying anything which would jeopardize their possibility of publication. 8 Greater political stability and the enjoyment of social life, for which the Court of Versailles set the
See NIGEL SMITH, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 1. This was. of course, part of his general policy for the establishment of order and for unifying France under himself as absolute monarch. See G. PAGS, La Monarchie d'ancien rgime en France (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1946, 4th ed.), p. 134 and E. LAVISSE , Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu' la Rvolution, 9 vols (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1903), vol. VII.i, pp. 267-274, still the recognized authority on French and international matters of the period of Louis XIV. For a survey of the wider effects of Louis's policies in regional France, see William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge University Press, 1988). See J. DE LA CAILLE, Histoire de l'imprimerie et de la librairie (Paris: Jean de la Caille, 1689); P. CLMENT, La Police sous Louis XIV (Paris: Didier et Cie, Librairies diteurs, 1866), and H. D. MACPHERSON, Censorship under Louis XIV, 1661-1715 (New York, 1929), p. 6.
8 7
example, helped to turn minds away from controversy. 9 The everpresent control, however, had other far-reaching results which quite offset any immediate benefits to Louis and the Church: it encouraged ill-feeling against authority and would eventually lead to direct rebellion. As the regime grew stricter, so intellectual obedience became more and more burdensome. So how did these political situations influence the particular literary backgrounds of the period 1660-1680 in England and France? The consequences of the Civil War and Commonwealth were to have deeply significant effects on the literature of England. In the mid-17th century literature underwent a series of revolutions in genre and form, as a direct consequence of the 1640's with its attendant political upheaval. Literature itself was at the heart of this crisis: never before had so much been written or published, or literature played such an important role in public affairs. It was a war of words, or an information revolution. 10 Genres and forms (letters, sermons, pamphlets, broadsheets, lyrics, satire, epic, romance) perfectly mirrored the great themes of the Civil War and the Commonwealth liberty, freedom, authority, tyranny, salvation, deliverance giving them an intellectual role in the social process. Genre has the capacity for transformation as well as representation, and helped to define the parameters of public debate, the nature of change, and the means for comprehending that change. Generic interaction became the literary counterpart of social and political difference. The possibilities of literary production went right down the social scale, so that even the poorest suddenly had the possibility of authorship. The English Revolution in fact extended the possession of words even more thoroughly than it redistributed property. 11 Whereas in France censorship, restrictions on publishing, and tight control of the import of literature, resulted in even
Religious speculation, leading only to dispute, was best left alone. Catholicism was accepted as the established and socially approved religion. Louis's policy for the control of literature may have contributed to this sense of social unity and the discouragement of dispute, but not in the long-term. Both James I and Charles I had attempted to control or stifle the expansion of communications in the 1620-1630's, especially if this involved criticism of the regime. But the network of communications had provided an incentive to moral and political debates, and had posited a fight over communications and authority which would be disputed until the end of the century. The very established structures of the external world - the Crown, the Lords, the Church - had all been called into question and had crumbled in a seething exchange and clash of ideas. Never before had the active potential of a text been more evident in its capacity to affect a reader, even stimulating action or resulting in social transformation. NIGEL SMITH, Literature and Revolution cit, p. 6. More generally, consult STEVEN N. ZWICKER, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 16491689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993).
11 10 9
more oppressive attempts at limiting literary freedom, in England large scale social transformation had a dynamic literary consequence. Between 1640 and 1740 instability in social categories had its repercussions in generic instability which ultimately resulted in the rise of the novel in consolidation of growing middle-class economic pre-eminence. 12 In France during the first 25 years of Louis XIV's reign, the situation was less dramatic, less complex in the role played by genres and forms in the emergence of social change. Politically the situation was the converse of England's: far from moving into new forms and expressions of constitutionalism, the constraints of absolutism were becoming ever more manifest and oppressive. Changes were not so evident in the structures of society as in modes of thought, in intellectual non-conformity. This type of dissent found expression in new ideas, shared by groups centred, for example, around the Court of the Prince de Cond at Chantilly, 13 and the salons held by the members of the Mancini family, Nenon de Lenclos, Mme Deshoulires and the Socit du Temple. 14 The mental milieu in which these new ideas took shape and were communicated were loosely known as libertinage. It did not imply the holding or rejection of any particular doctrines, and was not exclusively defined in relation to Christian orthodoxy. 15 It was fundamentally an indocilit, a general restiveness of the mind. While this might have taken on particular doctrinal forms in different centuries, in the 17th century libertinage meant primarily a desire to be free from authority, particularly religious authority; a libertin was thus someone anxious to throw off the yoke of religion, to defy the laws of the Church, and to become intellectually and morally a law unto his- or herself. This restiveness under restraint, this desire for revolt, confined as
See IAN WATT, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957; 1976), pp. 38-54; also M ICHAEL MCKEON, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 20.
13 14 12
Cf. H. MALO, Le Grand Cond (Paris: 1937).
Cf. R. PICARD, Les Salons littraires et la socit franaise 1610-1789 (New York: Brentano's, 1943). Cf. H. BUSSON, La pense religieuse franaise de Charron Pascal (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrins, 1922) and La Religion des classiques, 1660-1668 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). Libertinage could mean the refusal of obedience to political and social as well as religious laws. Instability, profession of epicurianism and fatalism, ridicule of the Christian articles of faith were characteristic, although open profession or revolt against religious beliefs and the moral restraints which go with it, was confined to a small number of persons. Where religious belief was not ridiculed, it was often very shallow and held in conjunction with incompatible philosophical and scientific opinions. As the King's control became more and more strict, and as moral standards declined, so demands for freedom of thought became more consistent. Faith and reason, belief and conduct, were becoming separated in men's thoughts.
15
it was in its open expression to few people, was later to play an important part in the movement of ideas when it came into the open and found brilliant defenders like Rousseau and Voltaire. It has significance for the history of ideas because it set minds against moral authority. Often irrational and extravagant and limited as a literary movement, it was, however, important for the attack which it made on the non-rational, but deeply rooted, causes of men's belief. 16 The social and intellectual contexts in England and France were therefore essentially different and moving in opposite directions in the respective processes of constitutionalism and absolutism. In both, however, the search for intellectual freedom remained a dominant concern, even if the libertinism of the Restoration stage and the libertinage of the Parisian salons were rather different ways of addressing the search for liberty. Out of this context emerge two of the most interesting literary figures of the age, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and MarieMadeleine, Comtesse de Lafayette, who both in their own ways, help us to understand the very different natures of their respective milieux, especially in their uniquely feminine perspectives. 17 They were born within eleven years of each other, Margaret Lucas in 1623, Marie-Madeleine de la Vergne in 1634, and died within a year of each other, the latter in 1693 and the former in 1694; both would produce their respective masterpieces within eleven years of each other, Margaret Cavendish The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World in 1666, 18 and Mme de Lafayette La Princesse de Clves in 1678. 19 The latter was translated into English immediately in 1679, again in 1688, with many other editions following
Cf. F. T. PERRENS, Les Libertins en France au 17e sicle (Paris: Lon Chailley, 1896). Books on Margaret Cavendish include a condensed biography by S. H. MENDELSON in The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1987), and two full-length studies: D. GRANT, Margaret the First (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1957) and K. JONES, The Life of Margaret Cavendish (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). Studies of Mme de Lafayette. include H. ASHTON, Mme de La Fayette: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Cambridge University Press, 1925); C. DDYAN, Madame de Lafayette (Paris: Socit d'dition de l'Enseignement Suprieure, 1955) and R. DUCHNE , Madame de Lafayette (Paris: Fayard, 1988). Two modern editions of this work have appeared recently, ed. respectively by PAUL SALZMAN, An Anthology of Seventeenth Century Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1991) and KATE LILLEY (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992; reprinted in Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1994). Modern English translations are by A. ASHTON (1925); NANCY MITFORD (1950), rev. L. TANCOCK (1978), and ROBIN BUSS (1992) (the last three for Penguin Classics); and T. CAVE (Oxford: World's Classics, 1992).
19 18 17 16
until 1777. Both ladies came from comfortable circumstances, Margaret from a rich Essex family, Marie-Madeleine from a Parisian background, her father being a mathematician and scientist in government service. Both were closely associated with members of their royal families, Margaret being a maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, following her into exile in Paris in 1644; Marie-Madeleine became the close confidante of Henrietta of England, daughter of Charles I and wife of Louis XIV's brother, Philippe d'Orleans. Both were to be decisively influenced by the deaths of their respective fathers, Margaret's dying when she was two, Marie-Madeleine's when she was fifteen. In both instances the effects would be of enduring psychological significance: Margaret was to learn an early and continuing example of female independence from her mother; Marie-Madeleine was to experience grief and betrayal of confidence in the loss of her father and her mother's sudden remarriage to the man destined for her own hand, RenRenaud de Svign. She was never to trust anyone blindly again, and was resolved to remain completely independent. 20 The marriages of both once more have similarities. In 1644, while exiled in Paris, Margaret met and married William Cavendish, the widowed Marquis, later Duke, of Newcastle, thirty years her senior, commander of Charles I's forces in the north, and well-known as a patron of arts and letters. This marriage was socially and intellectually advantageous, and committed her to a life governed by the fortunes of the Royalists. In 1655 Marie-Madeleine met and married Jean-Franois Mortier, Comte de Lafayette, eighteen years her senior, a marriage which gave her a name, security and two sons. The couple were never very close, but seemed to understand each other in their mutually modest expectations from marriage; he gave her equal rights in the disposal of her possessions, and was nearly always absent in the Auvergne, leaving her free to pursue her social and literary ambitions in Paris. Margaret Cavendish launched her career during her exile in Antwerp between 1651 and 1653: she was to write and publish copiously for the rest of her life, which in quality and variety was unprecedented among earlier English women writers. 21 In all of this she was supported by her husband's active encouragement and financial backing. On their return to England after the Restoration, Cavendish self-consciously portrayed herself as a
20
This is the opinion of Roger Duchne in his recent biography. See note 17
above. See PATRICIA CRAWFORD, "Women's Published Writings 1600-1700" in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 1500-1800 (London: Methuen, 1985). For women's writing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see E. V. BEILIN, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 1987).
21
singular, somewhat fantastical woman, dressing idiosyncratically in a combination of masculine and feminine elements, and occasionally making highly theatrical public appearances. Pepys, who thought she was mad, observed of her that the whole story of this Lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic (Diary, 11 April 1667). Enjoying her own financial independence, Mme de Lafayette did not have her husband's active support for her writing, but found masculine guidance and encouragement from her stepfather, Ren-Renaud de Svign, who introduced her into literary circles and to the world of political intrigue, from the poet and scholar Gilles Mnage, and from the nobleman and aphorist Franois, Duc de Rochefoucauld. But her public role in the world of literature was centred principally on her famous salon which she established in Paris in 1658 on her return from Vichy, 22 and which became a meeting point for the literary movement known as the prcieuses, 23 and one of the centres of intellectual libertinage. Situated in the Faubourg de Vaugirard, it attracted writers as well as friends; Racine and Bossuet met her at Madame's court at the Palais-Royal, to which she belonged until the Queen Mother's death in 1670. Boileau expressed his approval of her ability, and La Fontaine sent her some verses as a mark of his friendship. Mnage, Bishop Huet of Avranches and Segrais were also in her circle. 24 Her own literary output, compared with that of Margaret Cavendish, was small, her few novels appearing at long intervals: La Princesse de Montpensier (anonymously, 1662), Zayde (under the name of Jean de Segrais, 1669), La Princesse de Clves (1678). The lives of the two women show many similarities as well as distinct differences, but are one in their presentation of a highly intelligent woman caught up and hampered by the social and political circumstances of the times. Margaret Cavendish, especially, was directly involved in the vicissitudes of the Civil War and influenced by her husband's leading role as a member of the landed establishment. Cavendish's own reactions to her effective exclusion from political power and citizenship helped to form the basis of her feminine critique. Even her social position was challenged by her exile and her sense of woman's unrecognized potential. Indeed, her whole relationship to the sources of power and authority was ambivalent: she was the socially inferior wife of a defeated and displaced Royalist leader; her education was minimal; she was lady-in-waiting to a deposed
22 23
See PICARD, Les Salons cit., p. 116.
The prcieuses, typified by Mme de Scudry, were concerned with the minute analysis of the psychology of love, rules for social behaviour and the niceties of language.
24
Cf. A. VIOLLIS, La vraie Mme de La Fayette (Paris: Bloud & Gay, n.d.), pp.
87- 89.
queen; the youngest of a large family; her circumstances were financially straitened and her health damaged by the Civil War. For twenty years she lived in exile in France and Holland. 25 Although she visited the male preserve of the Royal Society in London, 26 she was never able to achieve a full sense of membership, whether politically, socially or literarily. With Mme de Lafayette, the situation was similar: she had money and status, but through marriage. Both society and marriage imposed roles that affect men and women differently and unfairly. Her literary ambition contributed virtually nothing to her standing in society. Indeed, she not only consequently denied authorship of her novels, but had to bear her authorship being ascribed to others Mnage for La Princesse de Montpensier and La Rochefaucould for La Princesse de Clves. The latter was even thought to be a group product, the English translation of 1679 being advertised as the most famed Romance written in French by the greatest Wits of France. Through her social position and financial independence, her literary salon and her relations with the Court, she possessed an extraordinary degree of influence and power for a woman of her time but always through men rather than in her own right. The question now remains as to how these authors came to transpose their feminine critique into an aesthetic medium. What narrative strategies did each call into play? Margaret Cavendish's elaborately produced books were published under her own name and at considerable expense, this in itself being a most radical and deliberate challenge to, even infringement of, contemporary proprieties. Added to this was the overtly secular nature of her writing, its polemical tone and experimental nature. She was fascinated with modes, forms and genres. And if what Nigel Smith says is accurate (You are your genres, in so far as genre is a refraction of identity and a means through literary structures of exploring potentials and acknowledging limitations in relation to the world) 27 then it means that the forms chosen by both authors posit a vital aspect of their world view. Cavendish's preoccupation with form is part of the general degree of generic inventiveness and eclecticism among women writers between 1640 and 1700: they were discovering for themselves the voices of authorship. Her works include orations, letters, scientific speculation, utopian fiction, biography, poetry and closet drama. In Nature's Pictures drawn by Fancy's Pencil to the Life (1656), she includes stories comical, tragical, tragi-comical, poetical,
See KATE LILLEY, Introduction to The Blazing World and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994), p. xv. See S. I. M INTZ, "The Duchess of Newcastle's Visit to the Royal Society", Journal of English and Germanic Philology (1952), pp. 168-76.
27 26 25
SMITH, Literature and Revolution cit., p. 5.
romancical, philosophical and historical (so advertised on the title page) in both prose and verse. The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World (1666) combines elements of romance and utopia; the imaginary voyage is linked to a romance plot of abduction and sexual assault. The effect is a hybridization, a promiscuous mixture of romancical, philosophical and fantastical elements (as she describes them in her prefatory To the Reader). In the exploration of fresh ideas and expanding boundaries of speculation typical of the newly found liberty and openness of the Restoration, she tried to express original thoughts in new perceptions of form. For Mme de Lafayette the situation was more controlled. Her novel Zayde was an attempt at conventional romance, but it opens an interesting perspective on genre in the preface by Pierre-Daniel Huet who sought to invest the novel with greater respectability by tracing its origins back to classical epic poetry. It is further the opinion of Robin Buss that her other novels suggest comparison with drama rather than earlier prose fiction: he sees the characters, the moral universe, the unity of action and especially language as recognizably of the same cultural milieu as the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. 28 The clarity and immediacy of her chosen form relate directly to the simplicity of her central theme. Even those structural features which suggest proliferation or generic extension, like the three interpolated episodes in La Princesse de Clves, all work together towards a single wider significance: Mme de Chartres's story of the Duchess of Valentinois (Book 1), the stories of Mme Tournon and Anne Boleyn (Book 2), and the story of the Vidame de Chartres (Books 2 and 3), each enrich the narrative in historical background and provide a pertinent point about the relationships between men and women. There is no moral but an underlying message about the perils of sexual love. 29 All contributes to an amplification of the characters' and readers' general situation. How then is this this generic purposefulness put to use? The Blazing World, written in imitation of Lucian's philosophical voyage, depicts the effortless, magical rise of a woman to absolute power. It is in fact about the liberty of the female soul in the context of the infinite possibilities of utopian speculation. A young woman, abducted by a foreign merchant, passes beyond the pole to a new unknown world where, honoured for her innate and enterprising merit, the Emperor of this realm makes her his wife and gives her complete power to rule. The story is fantastical, speculative, and by its nature in the mode of wish-fulfilment. The basic outline of the narrative is in fact reiteratedly enriched in the
See ROBIN BUSS, Introduction to The Princesse de Clves (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 14.
29 28
Ibid., 15.
extravagant text which self-consciously presents every kind of opulence, ornament, novelty and variety in a rhetoric of description and recounting. Each stage of the Empress's progress is characterized by an itemization of costume, materials, colours and the accoutrements of power. It is as though there is an overwhelming desire for consumption, a reparation or restoration at various levels: aesthetic, economic, sexual, ideological and epistemological, as if the text were infused with a sense of loss or denial which is restored and made good in luxurious imagination. 30 The state of knowledge is similarly surveyed and appropriated. The Empress's rise to power is authorized by men, but her transfiguration or blazoning by the female narrator, identified as Cavendish herself and called Margaret the First, is a description and demonstration of the Empress's total control over her male subjects. What occurs is a prophetic rapture, an empowering by disguise or assumption, allowing a woman to excel in a masculine role (emperor, viceregent, general, legal advocate, heir, son). All things are made excitingly new in the infinite possibilities of a world freshly restored. For Mme de Lafayette the situation is very different. Far from a world of extravagant, almost science-fictional speculation, she presents a precise, chastened world of historical evocation and personal sobriety. The Court of King Henri II is conjured up not for its own sake, or for national prestige, but ironically as the circumstance of bitter conflict and the foil for tragic destinies. She concentrates on a single problem, a moment of adventure within an apparently happy and successful partnership. The Princesse de Clves is contentedly married and has a dutiful respect for her husband, but becomes involved in a mutual passion for the Duc de Nemours, which, while it never finds physical expression, has all the torrential power of sexual obsession. Because of the constraints of her position as wife, consort and courtier in the rigid social systems of court and society, she must either succumb to illicit secrecy and deception, or liberate herself by a gesture of total independence. She decides on the latter action, and out of honour tells her husband of her passion. This upright intent is turned to her ruin because unknown to husband and wife Nemours is by chance outside the window and overhears all. Since he does not keep the secret to himself, both parties feel betrayed by the other, and the Prince dies unhappily. Even though the Princess is now technically free, when her would-be lover declares his passion, she acknowledges a reciprocity, but at the same moment turns away from it, so asserting her personal liberty and freedom to choose. The novel is full of psychological analysis and interior voices, with disturbing insights like the danger associated with sexual love, and the concept of love being inseparable from anguish. Men and women are equally subject to passion, but suffer
30
See LILLEY, Introduction cit., p. xxvi.
unequally from the effects, especially because of the roles that society and marriage impose on them. For the Princesse de Clves, renunciation, which in its negative consequences is a form of death, is embraced as the only path that allows her to keep control of her fate. With a smile which is bought at the price of a terrible lucidity, the [female] victim triumphs over the man who is pursuing her, over her own misery, over her social role, over her fate. 31 The insight, born of romantic love, is profoundly antiromantic and concedes that passion can bring only pain. Erotic love is at the same time accepted and rejected in the interests of personal freedom. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this astonishing act of independence is that it has nothing to do with conventional Christian morality, or even basic notions of right and wrong, but remains an existential decision of personal choice freely embraced. Conventional virtue which people proclaim is seen to be not necessarily beneficial to individuals and society: the dictates of absolute morality are repeatedly shown to be uncertain guides in the real world where the best of virtues may lead to the worst of outcomes as in the death of the Prince de Clves following on his wife's honesty to him about her feelings, and the mistake that led the heroine's mother, Mme de Chartres, to seek out a suitable match for her daughter in order to protect her from the pitfalls of love. For her mother the only way for a woman to survive in society is to love her husband. It is the daughter's insight that a woman must either preserve the divide between her public face and private thoughts, or perish. It is not morality nor sincerity, but a balanced separation between public and private being that enables a woman to achieve an ideal state of self-containment or tranquillity what the novel calls repos. She achieves this only through an abnegation which is mortal in its effects and consequences. Mme de Lafayette attests to the feelings which her heroine must renounce, because of her lucid and realistic insights that these feelings cannot endure in the unfair social circumstances in which a woman must act. Such insights and perception of freedom of action identify the author as a true libertin spirit. Margaret Cavendish and Mme de Lafayette thus both present two distinctly different aspects of the same period, the former in terms of the extravagance, colour and imaginative licence of the English Restoration, the latter in terms of the lucid neo-classicism of the early brilliant years of Louis XIV's reign. Both, living so close to one another, sharing so much in common in their lives and artistic insights, provide a fascinating example of two of the earliest modern women authors. Their views of society and the disadvantage to women inherent in the very fabric of their civilization, remain of enduring value and of increased interest to an age which has
See ROBIN BUSS, Introduction, La Princesse de Clves (Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 8.
31
begun a sustained study of women and their writing as never before. Margaret Cavendish presents a rhapsodic and fanciful dream which is a type of apotheosis of the feminine critique, and sees the triumph of women through, in spite of and over a masculine world, which is transformed into a blazing world of hope and new vision. Mme de Lafayette remains with her feet firmly rooted in the realities of history, society and cultural convention, but is as determined, even more ruthlessly than Margaret Cavendish, to provide her heroine with the courage and strength of self-empowerment to independence and freedom of soul, even if this must mean renunciation and death. She shows herself deeply responsive to the intellectual drama of her age in which thinkers sought for their freedom in the very face of an evermore repressive absolutism. The fact that the Princesse de Clves chooses her freedom above and beyond the call of virtue and religion is a critique of the most radical kind, which in its serene indifference to orthodox Christianity, gives her an isolated poignancy and freedom of thought that is nothing short of revolutionary. Both writers shared in a ministry of prophecy and realism, and speak to us now perhaps more powerfully than ever before in the last 300 years.
M. A. Seabra Ferreira
ALEJANDRA PIZARNIKS ACERCA DE LA CONDESA SANGRIENTA AND ANGELA CARTERS THE LADY OF THE HOUSE OF LOVE: TRANSGRESSION AND THE POLITICS OF VICTIMIZATION
Although literature and mythology have always been crowded with images of feminine evil, there has been, for the last two or three decades, a proliferation of horror fiction written by women. This trend extends to film as well, the cinematographic industry having lately produced an impressive array of films which feature powerful, domineering women who often reverse expected sex roles. This essay is concerned with the examination and comparison of two short stories by women who come from very different countries and backgrounds, Argentina and England, but who address surprisingly similar issues: Alejandra Pizarnik and Angela Carter. Both writers experienced a similar attraction for the same historical figure, a sixteenth century Transylvanian Countess who became famous for her criminal acts, and both composed works inspired by her. Acerca de la condesa sangrienta 1 , by the Argentine Surrealist writer Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72), was first published in Spanish in 1968, while Angela Carters The Lady of the House of Love appeared in 1979. 2 Both Acerca de la condesa sangrienta and The Lady of the House of Love can be related to the same historical character, the sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a mass-murderess accused of torturing and killing over six hundred virgin girls and of bathing in their blood, in the conviction that
ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, The Bloody Countess, transl. Alberto Manguel, in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. Chris Baldick (Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 466-477. ANGELA CARTER, The Lady of the House of Love, in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).
2 1
Seabra Ferreira: Pizarnik and Carter
virginal blood would grant her eternal life and youth. The Lady of the House of Love, developed from the radio play Vampirella (1976), makes explicit the connections of the vampire Countess with the Countess Bathory. As the Countess says in Vampirella: Among my terrible forebears, I number the Countess Elizabeth Bathory; they called her the Sanguinary Countess. She used to bathe in the blood of girls to refresh her beauty; she believed these lustrations would keep old age at bay. 3 . Both tales touch on vampirism, violence, sadism, sexuality and death, themes which have experienced a resurgence of interest and which have been analysed afresh. This renewed attention to crime and monstrosity associated with woman is of course symptomatic of a changing society and of new patterns of thought and behaviour which are constantly emerging and being represented in artistic mediums. Susan Bassnett points out that it is significant that a great many women writers and artists are concerned with exploring archetypes, and with rewriting the story of some of the most prominent archetypal figures in western cultural history. 4 This is indeed the case of Alejandra Pizarnik and Angela Carter, whose work teems with women characters often drawn from mythology or fairy tales, redefined or reconfigured to express different messages from the original, which at times is also simply amplified and elaborated on, to bring out distinct angles and perspectives. Bassnett further suggests that:
Reconsideration and re-evaluation of female archetypes from the Hellenic tradition, from Christian tradition (Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary etc.) from folktales and from fairy tales is more noticeably part of feminist artistic practice than part of feminist critical practice, where emphasis has tended to be placed on literary archetypes and Prawers named personages. 5
The literary representation of named personages Prawer refers to is one of the five distinct subjects of investigation he distinguishes in a chapter of his Comparative Literary Studies devoted to themes and prefigurations. 6 Bassnett remarks that Prawer insists upon the significance of thematic study as a means of showing not only how a theme might appear and disappear across cultures as part of a study of literary history, but also as a
ANGELA CARTER, Vampirella, in Come Unto These Yellow Sands (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1985), p. 101. SUSAN BASSNETT, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 117
5 6 4 3
Ibid, p. 118
SIEGBERT PRAWER, Comparative Literary Studies: An Introduction (London: Duckworth, 1973), ch. 6.
means of attempting to unravel why that process might have taken place. 7 Drawing on a certain iconography of the monstrous woman as vampire and hysteric, Pizarnik and Carter are recovering a long-standing tradition of these archetypal figures of grotesque and fear-inspiring women, of female sexual deviance and transgression. Mary Russo notes precisely this aspect when she argues:
Naming represents a particularly vivid way of recalling the persistence of those constrained codings of the body in Western culture which are associated with the grotesque: the Medusa, the Crone, the Bearded Woman, the Fat Lady, the Tattooed Woman, the Unruly Woman, the Hottentot Venus, the Starving Woman, the Hysteric, the Vampire, the Female Impersonator, the Siamese Twin, the Dwarf. 8
Both writers work, especially Carters, teems with such grotesque characters, exemplified in the tales under consideration by the Bloody Countess and the vampire of The Lady of the House of Love. The concern of Mary Russo and Susan Bassnett with rewriting archetypes is echoed by Nina Auerbach, who analyses the central female paradigms that presided over the Victorian imagination and structured its apprehensions, abandoning domestic confinement to unfurl their awesome capacity for self-creation. As she goes on to affirm:
Seen together, these interdependent and mutually sustaining character types infuse restrictive social categories with the energy of the uncanny. Once we restore the integrity of these types, we see that they intensify power rather than limiting it. The very rigidity of the categories of victim and queen, domestic angel and demonic outcast, old maid and fallen woman, concentrates itself into a myth of transfiguration that glorified the women it seemed to suppress.
Thus, Auerbach maintains, the taboos that encased the Victorian woman contained buried tributes to her disruptive power. 9 It is some of these taboos that Pizarnik and Carter powerfully illustrate in their work, and particularly in the short stories under investigation here. Monstrous, grotesque figures arouse fear through their very difference and strangeness, embodying thus a particularly disturbing mixture of otherness which includes sexuality, class, gender and race, amongst their
7 8
BASSNETT, Comparative Literature, cit., p. 116.
MARY RUSSO, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York and London: Routledge, 1994, 14. NINA AUERBACH, Woman and the Demon: the Life of a Victorian Myth.(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). pp. 8-9.
9
more salient characteristics. Monsters are especially disruptive and provoking because they are situated still within the limits of the human, but at the very boundary, they appear as both anthropomorphic and animalesque. The proliferation of monsters at this turn of the century can be considered symptomatic of an acute feeling of unease that permeates contemporary societies, uncertain of their own humanity, confronted with new challenges, the ambiguity of sex roles and the gradual empowering of women, perceived as threatening and wreaking havoc with established institutions. On the other hand, this very multiplication of monstrous creatures could be read as a greater willingness to accept difference into the conventional mainstream, of increasingly tolerating the Other with his/her idiosyncrasies. The confrontation with what one is not, forces one to rethink who and what we are, since what Baudrillard so aptly described as the hyperreality that submerges us on all sides endangers the stability of ones traditional reference points, the artificial signposts that engulf us constitute a menace to ones sense of identity, which can easily appear to us fragmentary and under siege. In a sense, the problematic of monstrosity forces one to face and define the Same, in order to accept the Other. The deregulation of behavioural norms can thus lead to a being characterized by his/her excesses, transgressions, deformities, perversions. The forces of the abject that place monstrous creatures at the outer limits of the human clearly differentiate them from the others who abide by societal rules, at the same time as they provoke unease and curiosity, a sense of extended possibilities that by their very distorted perversity hint at forbidden regions of the human psyche, at untapped, volatile, convoluted areas of the unconscious, liable to come to the surface unbidden, at any time. The study of teratology has thus come to assume a fundamental importance for contemporary critics. Both Pizarniks The Bloody Countess and Carters The Lady of the House of Love deal with the monstrous feminine and perverse sexual impulses in a disturbing fashion. The connection between the lust for blood and the bestial, namely, are made quite apparent in the two tales. Indeed, the characters of the two Countesses are constructed as particularly disturbing and perplexing due to the confusion and apparent lack of welldefined frontiers between human and animal. What makes these tales specially disquieting is the fact that both protagonists are women, thus representing paradigmatic and to a certain extent unusual images of female evil. The question of whether there is a feminine difference as far as the perpetration and artistic representation of feminine evil seems pertinent here. I would argue that although the rich mythological and iconographic corpus of fearsome female creatures may appear to attest to the contrary, perversity and criminal behaviour,
particularly of a sexual nature, have been predominantly associated with men. As Jane Gallop sustains:
Perversion [...] is a thorny problem for feminism [...] large sectors of the feminist movement stand in violent opposition to perversion which is understood to be male. The pervert child molester, rapist, porno fan, fetishist, voyeur, exhibitionist, sadist, masochist, etc. is seen as symptom of an aggressive, male sexuality that is inherently perverted and a primary enemy of feminism. 10
This vexed issue has persistently concerned thinkers in various spheres of knowledge. As Bram Dijkstra emphasizes, one of the first female vampires in literature was Carmilla, in Sheridan Le Fanus eponymous tale:
Carmilla marks one of the first appearances, center stage, of a female vampire in modern fiction. Previous vampire narratives, such as Polidoris The Vampyre, Maturins near-vampire Melmoth The Wanderer, the gruesome and endless potboiling nastiness of Varney the Vampire, had all still featured male predators, and even Gautiers Clarimonde had to be satisfied with playing second fiddle to the schizophrenia of her living lover Romuald. Carmilla, however, was born right on schedule among the daughters of the household nun. As a creature of moonlight, she, like most of the late nineteenth-centurys crop of female vampires, is not permitted any direct vampire power over men. 11
Indeed, both Carmilla and Pizarniks Countess victimize only women, thus staying outside the Symbolic Order of the Phallus which, however, overtakes and punishes them in the the end. On the other hand, although Carters vampire woman only sucks the blood of young men, thus reversing this traditional scenario and becoming a paradigmatic femme fatale, she moves nevertheless within a phallocratic, patriarchal sphere, for she is forced to follow in her ancestors footsteps and to commit horrendous, vampiric crimes, which she hates and wants to disentangle herself from. Rather than being the evil woman of tradition and legend, she wants to step out of her predetermined role and find love in the world of sunlight and conventional society, in many ways like Tennysons Lady of Shalott, imprisoned by the curse patriarchy has inflicted on her in her tower of shadows.
JANE GALLOP, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 107. BRAM DIJKSTRA, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-deSicle Culture (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 341.
11 10
A particularly conspicuous phenomenon at the end of the XIX century consisted precisely in the dualism between the Angel in the House and the femme fatale, which found explicit externalization in a strong reaction against the forces of evil embodied in the monstrous woman. It is this prejudiced vision that a contemporary commentator, Nicholas Francis Cooke, puts forward in 1870 when he writes:
The temperament of woman exposes her to the most singular inconveniences and inconsistencies. Extreme in good, she is also extreme in evil. She is inconstant and changeable; she will and she wont. She is easily disgusted with that which she has pursued with the greatest ardor. She passes from love to hate with prodigious facility. She is full of contradictions and mysteries. Capable of the most heroic actions, she does not shrink from the most atrocious crimes. 12
Cooke concludes that, bloodthirsty than men, protagonists of the tales embody those prejudiced emphatically states:
indeed, women are more merciless, more a perception which perfectly fits the female we are going to examine, who, like Carmilla, representations of women. As Bram Dijkstra
By 1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership, and money. She symbolized the sterile hunger for seed of the brainless, instinctually polyandrous--even if still virginal--child-woman. She also came to represent the equally sterile lust for gold of woman as the eternal polyandrous prostitute. 13
Mario Praz, in The Romantic Agony, similarly stresses the fact that in the second half of the nineteenth century the vampire becomes a woman while in the first part of the century the fatal cruel lover is invariably a man. 14 Thus, both Pizarnik and Carter draw on and expand on this tradition of the female vampire as cruel lover. Across continents we find women writers repeatedly engaging with this theme, a fact which is in many ways indicative of a new, more active and transgressive kind of sexuality which is erupting in literature and other art forms in a significantly numerous array of distinct manifestations. 15
NICHOLAS FRANCIS COOKE, Satan in Society (1870; by a Physician, Cincinnati: C. F. Vent, 1876), pp. 280-81.
13 14 12
BRAM DIJKSTRA, Idols of Perversity, cit., p. 351.
MARIO PRAZ, The Romantic Agony, transl. Angus Davidson (Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 79. Significant examples are Anne Rices vampire books Interview with the Vampire (1977) and The Vampire LEstat (1985). Lesbian and queer theorists and
15
Both Pizarniks and Carters tales share a substantial convergence of subject-matter and imagery. They conduct a profound reflexion about the relationship between sexuality, violence and death, themes which were also profusely explored in films of the 70s, mainly through the character of the female vampire, who was explicitly associated with a voracious sexual desire and an exacerbated aggressiveness. 16 Both Countesses, on the other hand, as vampire women, set out to effectively deconstruct with their sexuality the traditional opposition between man and woman. As Catherine Belsey sustains: both male and female vampires penetrate their victims, but only after they have been penetrated by another vampire; meanwhile, it is the passive victim who provides the vital fluid. 17 Both Countesses, indeed, subvert patriarchal norms of sexual behaviour. In the case of Pizarniks Countess, her homo-sexuality and her torturing of women are deeply disturbing, while the passive victims of Carters female vampire are always men, in a clear inversion of androcentric rules. However, Carters Countess is also simultaneously a passive victim of a male myth. Indeed, The Lady of the House of Love, like all the stories in The Bloody Chamber, subverts male and traditional fantasies and myths. In the case of this particular story, it is the male fantasy of the femme fatale that is subverted. Thus, while the Countess is descended from the Bloody Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, she does not imitate her in her extreme perversion and unimaginable crimes against women. Nevertheless, both Pizarniks Countess and Carters are punished in the end at the hands of patriarchal powers, which thus reestablish the androcentric regulations that keep unruly women within proper boundaries. Pizarniks Gothic and Surrealist tale, like Carters, dramatizes what I would call, after Barbara Creed, the monstrous-feminine, 18 represented by such images as the witch, the vampire woman, the possessed monster, the bad archaic mother and the monstrous womb. Indeed, both tales are dominated by monstrously repugnant women characters. The Condesa lived deep within an exclusively female world and there were only
authors have taken up the figure of the vampire as an instance of the loosening of rigid boundaries of sexuality, theirs being represented as a non-reproductive but sociable sexuality. ANDREW TUDOR, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 64-65, mentions such films as Sex and the Vampire and Shadow of the Werewolf, suggesting the possibility of a relationship between the womens liberation movement and a generalized fear of a more aggressive expression of feminine sexuality. CATHERINE BELSEY, Postmodern Love: Questioning the Metaphysics of Desire, New Literary History 25 (1994), pp. 683-705, p. 697. BARBARA CREED, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psycho-analysis ( London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 1.
18 17 16
women during her nights of crime (p. 472). In addition, she is helped by nasty old crones to perpetrate her horrendous acts: Her old and horrible maids are wordless figures that bring in fire, knives, needles, irons; they torture the girls, and later bury them. With their iron and knives, these two old women are themselves the instruments of a possession, grotesque creatures escaped from a painting by Goya; the dirty, malodorous, incredibly ugly and perverse Dorko and Jo Ilona (pp. 466-677). The Bloody Countess is also aided by a witch, Darvulia, who corresponds with precision to the representation of such creatures in the popular imagination:
Darvulia was exactly like the woodland witch who frightens us in childrens tales. Very old, irascible, always surrounded by black cats, Darvulia fully responded to Erzebets [i.e. the Countess Elizabeth Bathory] fascination: within the Countesss eyes the witch found a new version of the evil powers buried in the poisons of the forest and in the coldness of the moon. Darvulias black magic wrought itself in the Countesss black silence. She initiated her to even crueller games; she taught her to look upon death, and the meaning of looking upon death. She incited her to seek death and blood in a literal sense: that is, to love them for their own sake, without fear. (p. 474)
The universe of Carters tale is also predominantly feminine: An old mute looks after her, to make sure she never sees the sun, that all day she stays in her coffin, to keep mirrors and all reflective surfaces away from her in short, to perform all the functions of the servants of vampires (p. 127). The physical appearance of both women is strikingly similar, as well as their attire. Pizarniks Countess is extremely beautiful: the sinister beauty of nocturnal creatures is summed up in this silent lady of legendary paleness, mad eyes, and hair the sumptuous colour of ravens. (p. 466) Carters female vampire, similarly, is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. (p. 125) In addition, they both wear white dresses with blood stains. The Condesa waits for the girls in the torture chamber dressed in white upon her throne (p. 468), a dress which later is said to turn red (p. 477), while Carters Countess lies in her coffin all day in her nglig of blood-stained lace [...] her mothers wedding dress (p. 128). When the young English officer, enticed to her castle by one of her maids, first sees the lady of the House of Love, he feels profoundly touched by her beauty, allied, however, to a great vulnerability:
With her stark white face, her lovely deaths head surrounded by long dark hair that fell down as straight as if it were soaking wet, she looked
like a shipwrecked bride. Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full, prominent lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. (p. 134)
This metaphor of the dreaded vagina-dentata associated with the vampire woman will recur at several stages of the tale, pointing to the threatening sexuality attributed to women in general and female vampires in particular. Julia Kristevas theory of the abject seems particularly pertinent to analyse Pizarniks and Carters tales, which can be described as powerful illustrations of the workings of abjection. Thus, Kristevas definition of the abject in Powers of Horror sheds considerable light on and fitly applies to the story of the Hungarian Countess and Carters female vampire. Kristeva points out that it is
not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a saviour ... Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility... Abjection ... is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you... 19
Both tales swarm with images of abjection: corpses, blood, putrefying flesh and other bodily wastes, like vomit, tears, saliva, sweat. Mutilated and putrefying bodies litter the cellars and vaults of the bloody Countesss castle. The witch and the vampire, as Barbara Creed notes, are also ancient figures of abjection, 20 as are werecreatures who signal the undifferentiation of borders, the ambiguity of the human and animal states, which is a crucial aspect pertaining to the abject. The bloody Countess, surrounded by witches, can herself be described as one, while at the same time partaking of the categories of the vampire and the werewolf. As Barbara Creed explains: The witch is defined as an abject figure in that she is represented within patriarchal discourses as an implacable enemy of the symbolic order, 21 a point also stressed by
JULIA KRISTEVA, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.
20 21 19
CREED, The Monstrous-Feminine, cit., p. 10. Ibid., p. 76.
Catherine Clment in her essay The Guilty One. Creed goes on to assert that the witch
is thought to be dangerous and wily, capable of drawing on her evil powers to wreak destruction on the community. The witch sets out to unsettle boundaries between the rational and the irrational, symbolic and imaginary [...] The witch is also associated with a range of abject things: filth, decay, spiders, bats, cobwebs, brews, potions and even cannibalism. 22
It is this trespassing of boundaries which makes of the two Countesses morbid and perverse characters, whose definition sidesteps conventional models of behaviour. They do not belong anywhere in traditional societal structures. As Catherine Belsey maintains:
Vampires are the un-dead; they do not belong with the living; they spend their days in their coffins and inhabit the night; they have no proper place. Vampires have a material existence and they bring about material effects, but at the same time they cast no shadow and are not reflected in mirrors: they exceed the alternatives of presence and absence. 23
Pizarniks Countess shares some characteristics of the vampire: she moves permanently in an isolated, darkened, tomblike world, dominated by the search for her victims and the shedding of blood: bodily wounds and transgression of societal rules. The female vampire, and particularly the homosexual one, is an especially sinister figure of abjection. The lesbian vampire, indeed, radically crosses boundaries closely bound up with tradition and embodies the main forces of abjection linked with blood, the aging process and bodily decay. In the Countesss case, this transgressing of borders, a key concept in the theory of abjection, relates primordially to the exploding of the thin boundaries between human and werecreature, life and death as well as the breaching of sexual taboos, 24 aspects which also apply to the Lady of the House of Love. As Barbara Creed points out:
the female vampire is abject because she disrupts identity and order . . . . The lesbian vampire is monstrous for another reason, one which is directly related to her sexuality and which offers a threat of a more abject nature. Like the male, the lesbian vampire also causes womans
CATHERINE CLMENT and HLNE CIXOUS, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 76.
23 24 22
BELSEY, Postmodern Love, cit., p. 697.
In her stimulating analysis of Tony Scotts film The Hunger (1983), CREED, The Monstrous-Feminine, cit, pp. 67-72, points out that it is partially based on the story of the Countess Bathory.
blood to flow. Given the abject status of womans blood within religious and cultural discourses, bloodletting alone constitutes a prime case of abjection. Lesbian vampirism, however, is doubly abject because woman, already more abject than man, releases the blood of another woman. 25
These characteristics are conspicuous in the two tales under examination. Blood, and particularly blood drinking, can be seen as erotic in the context of vampire imagery, which inevitably includes biting and penetration. Furthermore, another prominent issue, addressed here and still related to blood, consists in the barrenness of the two Countesses, their disinclination to procreate, which makes them once more doubly subversive and transgressors of the patriarchal order. Another aspect mentioned by Kristeva as a paradigmatic example of abjection and which is exemplified in the two tales, is the blurring of frontiers between human and animal. The animality of the two Countesses, their kinship with wolves, is stressed in several stages of the narratives. The coat-of-arms of the family of Pizarniks Condesa displayed the teeth of a wolf, because the Bathory were cruel, fearless, and lustful (p. 470). During her erotic seizures, the Countess would hurl blasphemous insults at her victims. Blasphemous insults and cries like the baying of a shewolf were her means of expression as she stalked, in a passion, the gloomy rooms (p. 469). Carters Countess also exhibits all the characteristics of a creature who is partly animal, partly human. During her predatory nocturnal adventures, the Countess would go to the garden:
When the back door opens, the Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. Delicious crunch of the fragile bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed speed; she will creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks. She pours water from the ewer in her bedroom into the bowl, she washes her face with the wincing, fastidious gestures of a cat. . . . The eyes of this nocturnal creature enlarge and glow. All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges. (p. 127)
However, now that the Countesss has grown up, she is no longer satisfied just with animals: The Countess wants fresh meat. When she was a little girl, she was like a fox and contented herself entirely with baby rabbits that squeaked piteously as she bit into their necks with a nauseated
25
Ibid., p. 61.
voluptuousness [...] But now she is a woman, she must have men (p. 128). On the other hand,
She loathes the food she eats; she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them on lettuce, pet them and make them a nest in her red-and-black chinoiserie escritoire, but hunger always overcomes her. She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all the nourishment with a small cry of both pain and disgust. And it is the same with the shepherd boys and gipsy lads [...] A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates she is inconsolable. She would like to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. (p. 128)
Indeed, Carters Countess would like to be human and feels a horrible reluctance for the role of vampire (pp. 126-27). This is one of the fundamental differences between the two Countesses. In spite of the multiple echoes and resonances that crisscross both stories, one of the key distinctions between the two Countesses is that Pizarniks character does not evince the slightest sign of repentance or humanity, while Carters dreams of becoming human, of leaving behind for ever her nocturnal life as a vampire, to which she is bound by her family tradition: her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania (p. 126). The ambivalent, uncertain state of Carters Countess is further stressed in the tale: She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-mans land between life and death, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, Nosferatus sanguinary rosebud. The beastly forebears on the walls condemn her to a perpetual repetition of her passions. (p. 138). She is also a Sleeping Beauty figure who, however, instead of being awakened to everlasting happiness by Prince Charming, in the shape of a young British officer, dies because of his supposedly lifegiving kiss which, causing him to drink her blood, transforms him into a vampire. This is then an ironic and profoundly subversive version of the Sleeping Beauty story. The tradition that forces her to carry out the crimes she abhors will only be broken when a virgin English soldier is lured into her castle:
in his youth and strength and blond beauty, in the invisible, even unackowledged pentacle of his virginity, the young man stepped over the threshold of Nosferatus castle and did not shiver in the blast of cold air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior. (p. 132)
The climactic scene that follows had already been announced when for the first time the Countess dealt the card called Les Amoureux from her Tarot pack: it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I thought, perhaps, you might irradiate it (p. 137). Indeed, the Countesss well-rehearsed and often repeated performance is disrupted when, already in her room with the handsome soldier, she inadvertently drops her glasses while trying to take off her mothers wedding dress: and this unexpected, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the wicked spell in the room, entirely. She gapes blindly down at the splinters and ineffectively smears the tears across her face with her fist. What is she to do now? (p. 140). The whole predetermined logic of her life is then upset and the impossible happens. When she cuts herself in the splinters of glass, she sees her own blood for the first time, which exercises upon her an awed fascination (p. 141), a feeling compounded with even more complex thoughts when the young soldier drinks her blood, in a complete inversion of the primitive scenario:
Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery; in himself, by his presence, he is an exorcism. He gently takes her hand away from her and dabs the blood with his own handkerchief, but still it spurts out. And so he puts his mouth to the wound. He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done (p. 141).
In a further subversion of the roles allotted to a vampire, the Countess dies, while the soldier wakes up in the morning alive and well. However, in another sombre twist in the tale, the Countesss influence will pursue him in the shape of a rose which he takes with him to the trenches, in France, where he is summoned after leaving the Countesss castle. It was a dark, fanged rose which the Countess plucked from between [my] thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave. (p. 143) The symbolism of the rose that the soldier takes with him to the war in France soon becomes apparent, signalling his death in combat. The vampire Countesss demise could not go unavenged:
When he returned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatus roses drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour. Next day, his regiment embarked for France. (pp. 143-144).
The influence of the vampire woman appears impossible to avoid, even beyond her death. As Melinda G. Fowl maintains:
When the Countess dies, she dies as a vampire. To the Countess, humanness offers freedom from gothic timelessness, its repetition of oppressive patterns, of victimisation, unsatisfied hunger, perfect beauty, loneliness, silence and eternal youthfulness. . . . She ceases to exist as a vampire when blood flows out, not in. The presence of blood and the work of birth links her, ultimately, to the human community she was exiled from as a vampire--the community of women. Before the soldier arrived at the chateau, the Countess experienced her life as a victim of the cycle she perpetuated--itself, a cycle of victimisation. When the soldier releases her from this cycle, he becomes the new vampire. 26
The rose is a powerful, recurring symbol in The Lady of the House of Love. The black rose which the Countess plucks from her thighs is overdetermined with ambivalent symbolism: on the one hand it spells out sexuality, on the other emanations from a grave, death, which the soldier will meet in the War. As Robert Rawdon Wilson suggests:
One may infer that the narrative is about death in a wider sense than seems evident at first. The vampire kills passing shepherds and lustful, but careless, young men who wander through the deserted village, and she herself dies, but her narrative also implies the more massive, and the more significant, deaths that occurred in the War. The very class to which the young Englishman belongs was wiped nearly out. His own death in the war, implicit in the conclusion, may represent the much larger national catastrophe, or, at least, the reader may draw this inference. The fruit of that War, for England as well as for the Continent, was the decimation of an entire generation and a social class.
The black rose asserts the tales historicity, its recognition of the bleak forwardness of human temporality. 27 In related fashion, the charged symbolism of the rose garden that leads up to the Countesss castle, with its connotations of a deep sensuality, is also indicative of the dangers that its ambiguous sexuality carries:
MELINDA G FOWL, Angela Carters The Bloody Chamber revisited, Critical Survey 3:1 (1991), pp 71-79, pp. 77-78. ROBERT RAWDON WILSON, SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out? In the PostModern Nexus, Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,1993), pp. 109-123, p. 119.
27
26
A great, intoxicated surge of the heavy scent of red roses blew into his face as soon as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lined the path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge congregations of plush petals somehow obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle. (p. 131)
The implications insinuated by the roses are those of imminent danger connected by men with feminine sexuality. The thorny roses, with their suggestive whorls, crenellations and thorns/teeth, are strongly reminiscent of Freuds description of the vagina dentata, so powerfully illustrated in Carters tale, a connotation made particularly explicit when the rose the Countess leaves for the soldier is said to have been plucked from between [my] thighs, like a flower laid on a grave (p. 143, cp. p. 136). The dread caused in men by the supposedly castrating effect of the sight of the female genitals spans the most diverse cultures. 28 As Barbara Creed pertinently comments:
The myth about woman as castrator clearly points to male fears and phantasies about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces. The vagina dentata is the mouth of hell--a terrifying symbol of woman as the devils gateway [...] The vagina dentata also points to the duplicitous nature of woman, who promises paradise in order to ensnare her victims. 29
Another aspect mentioned by Creed which seems tailor-made for Carters tale consists in the association established between the fairy-tale Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose and the symbol of the vagina dentata, represented by the briar roses which bar the way of the young Prince to the sleeping Princess. As the narratorial voice reminds us: One kiss, however, and only one, woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (p. 138). The vampire womans garden is described as an exceedingly sombre place, which bears a strong resemblance to a burial ground and all the roses her dead mother planted have grown up into a incarcerates her in the castle of her inheritance (p. 127). 30
See CREED, The Monstrous-Feminine, cit., p. 105, and WOLFGANG LEDERER, The Fear of Women (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), pp. 44-47.
29 30 28
CREED, The Monstrous-Feminine, cit., p. 106. Ibid., p. 107.
The theme of the dangerous pathway and entrance to Sleeping Beautys castle is powerfully dramatized in The Lady of the House of Love. The barriers placed between the young English soldier and the Countess are manifold and difficult to transpose:
He could almost have regretted accepting the crones unspoken invitation; but now, standing before the door of time-eroded oak while she selected a huge iron key from the clanking ringful at her waist, he knew it was too late to turn back and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies. The old lady unlocked the door, which swung back on melodramatcally creaking hinges, and fussily took charge of his bicycle, in spite of his protests. He felt a certain involuntary sinking of the heart to see his beautiful two-wheeled symbol of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion [...] But, in for a penny, in for a pound in his youth and strength and blond beauty, in the invisible, even unacknowledged pentacle of his virginity, the young man stepped over the threshold of Nosferatus castle and did not shiver in the blast of cold air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior. (pp. 131-32)
The connection established between the entrance to the Countesss castle and, significantly, the mouth of a grave, points to the repeatedly suggested web of associations between the entrance of Nosferatus castle, and the Countesss mouth, which is also the mouth of a grave, or her dangerous vagina [p.136].. Wolfgang Lederer comments specifically about these interrelated issues that:
the door of the girls house may kill all those who enter; it may be a door that quickly opens and closes of its own accord, comparable to the terrifying rocks, the Symplegades, through which the Argonauts had to pass, and which, whenever a ship attempted to pass between them, drove together and crushed it; it may be guarded by dangerous animals; or again, the symbolism may be that of gigantic bivalves which crush whoever may get caught within them. 31
A similar kind of symbolism is also at work in Acerca de la condesa sangrienta. The Countess Bathorys crimes are carried out in the seclusion and secrecy of her isolated castle, in her underground kingdom [...] within the walls of her torture chamber, and the chamber within her medieval castle (p. 466), an inner world of criminal passions and depravity, reminiscent of the innards of the earth and of a mortal womb:
31
LEDERER, Fear of Women, cit. p. 47.
The Countesss room, cold and badly lit by a lamp of jasmine oil, reeked of blood, and the cellars reeked of dead bodies. Had she wanted to, she could have carried out her work in broad daylight and murdered the girls under the sun, but she was fascinated by the gloom of her dungeon. The gloom which matched so keenly her terrible eroticism of stone, snow and walls. She loved her maze-shaped dungeon, the archetypical hell of our fears; the viscous, insecure space where we are unprotected and can get lost (p. 475).
This description is eerily similar to the configuration of the womb and of the symbolic fears it frequently embodies in horror fiction and films. As Barbara Creed points out, the connections between the womb and hell go back to Classical art, where the uterus was often represented with horns to stress its presumed links with the devil, while Margaret Miles notes how in Christian art the womb was frequently associated with hell, a lurid and rotten uterus where sinners would be tortured as a punishment for their crimes. The monstrous nature of the womb as the place where a criminal individual commits her or his infamies is highlighted in Pizarniks tale in uncannily graphic detail. Referring to horror films, Creed describes these sites of horror as intra-uterine settings [which] consist of dark, narrow, winding passages leading to a central room, cellar or other symbolic place of birth, an interior labyrinth which corresponds closely to the subterranean architectural maze of the Countesss castle. 32 The connotations of blood in Pizarniks tale are paradoxical. If, on the one hand, womans blood can represent fertility and birth, on the other it still implicitly retains its potential symbolic association with the shedding of blood in killing. The barren, hellish, bloody nature of the womblike vaults in the Countesss castle evoke primordially the latter connotation while by analogy hinting at the cruel absence of the former. In this connection Kristeva comments:
Blood, indicating the impure, takes on the animal seme of the previous opposition and inherits the propensity for murder of which man must cleanse himself. But blood, as a vital element, also refers to women, fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a fascinating
CREED, The Monstrous-Feminine, cit., pp. 43, 53; MARGARET R. MILES, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 147. ROLAND BARTHES, in his analysis of the Sadeian oeuvre, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), also notices the particular setting where the libertines orgies are carried out: these are usually deep cellars, crypts, tunnels, excavations located deep within the chteaux, the gardens, the pits [...] the solitary place is a rip into the bowels of the earth (pp. 16-17).
32
semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection, where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together. 33
Barbara Creed similarly mentions the deadly nature of womans womb: Womans womb is a site of terror because it bleeds; it is the blood which flows from the inside to the outside of womans body that is viewed as abject. 34 Bram Dijkstra addresses the same problem when he writes that for men of the second half of the nineteenth-century:
the womb of woman was the insatiable soil into whose bottomless crevasses man must pour the essence of his intellect in payment for her lewd enticements. The hunger of the beast was in her loins, and the hunger of the beast was for blood. Womans bestial couplings, her tendency to atavistic reversion, brought out the beast in man. The conjoining of bestial woman with the remnant of the beast in man could only spawn human animals, evil creatures from the distant past coming back to haunt civilization: hungry, half-human sphinxes, winged chimeras--blood-lusting vampires all. 35
These remarks might well be exaggerated, but they sum up a widespread conviction that there was something threatening about the womb. All these images are strongly reminiscent of the negative and macabre view associated with noble ladies and their castles. They entirely correspond to the grotesque figures of monstrous women that peopled mens imagination. Mary Russo points out, referring to the word grotesque:
The word itself [...] evokes the cave the grotto-esque. Low, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral. As bodily metaphor, the grotesque cave tends to look like (and in the most gross metaphorical sense be identified with) the cavernous anatomical female body. These associations of the female with the earthly, material, and the archaic grotesque have suggested a positive and powerful figuration of culture and womanhood to many male and female writers and artists [...] This view valorizes traditional images of the earth mother, the crone, the witch, and the vampire and posits a natural connection between the female body (itself naturalized) and the primal elements, especially the earth. It is an easy and perilous slide from these archaic tropes to the misogyny which identifies this hidden inner space with the visceral.
33 34 35
KRISTEVA, Powers of Horror, cit., p. 96. CREED, The Monstrous-Feminine, cit., p. 66. DIJKSTRA, Idols of Perversity, cit., pp. 334-335.
Blood, tears, vomit, excrement all the detritus of the body that is separated out and placed with terror and revulsion (predominantly, though not exclusively) on the side of the feminine--are down there in the cave of abjection. 36
Another aspect which pertains to characteristic representations of the womb consists in the fact that its enclosed space can be said to offer extra protection and secrecy to the criminal mind, a place removed from the outside world by several protective barriers. The Countess can be read as representing an avatar of the fearful archaic, phallic mother, who stands defiantly outside the scope of morality and the law, an interpretation corroborated and strengthened by Creeds list of the signs of the archaic mother, which are all found in the description of the Countesss castle: the small, enclosed village; the pathway through the forest that leads like an umbilical cord to the castle; the central place of enclosure with its winding stairways, spider webs, dark vaults, worm-eaten staircases, dust and damp earth. Paradoxically, however, the Countess is a barren figure, who on the one hand partially deflates the fears inspired by the archetypical figure of the archaic mother, but simultaneously calls attention to another character invoked in popular iconography as equally monstrous: the infertile woman, who is perceived as non-woman and therefore dangerous. In an insight which can profitably be applied to the Countess Bathory, Creed notes how the mythological figure of woman is represented within patriarchal signifying practices [...] as a negative figure, one associated with the dread of the generative mother seen only as the abyss, the allincorporating black hole which threatens to reabsorb what it once birthed.
37
In her provocative analysis of Sades oeuvre, Angela Carter similarly suggests that some of the infamous practices carried out by the Sadeian libertine can be read in the light of a regression to infancy and to the protection of the womb. As she observes:
Even the pursuit of the vilest of all passions, the murderous passions, lead them back to the cradle in the end; they have not acquired these tastes in the process of maturing. They had only forgotten them. Now, freed from all adult restraint, they remember them again. It may be assumed that the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery
36 37
RUSSO, The Female Grotesque, cit., pp. 1-2.
CREED, The Monstrous-Feminine, cit., pp. 20, 27. The observation relates to the discussion of the signs of the archaic mother in the Dracula variant of the vampire film, in ROGER DADOUN, Fetishism in the horror film Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: BFI, 1989), pp. 39-61, pp. 53-57; but can be extended through narrative analogy to Pizarniks tale.
and appears at a period of sexual life at which the genitals have not yet taken over their later role, suggests Freud. The shamelessness and violence of the libertines is that of little children who are easily cruel because they have not learned the capacity for pity which the libertines dismiss as childish because the libertines themselves have not yet grown up enough to acknowledge the presence of others in their solipsistic world. 38
This is also the sphere in which the Countess moves, profoundly isolated, enisled, in which she establishes her own rules irrespective of the outside world. Immured in the impunity granted her by her aristocratic name, an illustrious one from the very early days of the Hungarian Empire and in the power of which Erzebet believed, as if it were an extraordinary talisman (p. 470), the Condesa moves beyond the Law, considering herself immune to mens rules, defiantly flaunting that impunity to commit the most horrendous crimes and instituting her own ritualistic, perverse rules in a feminine world, a microcosm at the margins of society. The Countesss transgressive and perverse sexuality, her eroticism coupled with sadism, radically subvert the traditional view of women and balance of power, freeing her to carry out her atrocities without being penalized. She creates her own order within the Symbolic Order which she to some extent mimics, by taking the place of the Father/Phallus in the patriarchal law, while at the same time carrying out a profoundly corrupt and barbaric subversion of it doubly so since the Countess is a woman and a criminal. The perverse ambiguity that according to Kristeva pertains to the abject, finds a sinister illustration in the Countesss deeds. By incorporating the abject, so closely associated with the feminine and placed in opposition to the Symbolic Order, the Countess can be seen as creating her own, perverse order, outside the phallocentric one, since the abject, as Kristeva stresses, disturbs identity, system, order. 39 Closely related to the fear suggested by a potentially ambiguous and transgressive feminine sexuality, with its implicit connotations of fear and domination, is the fact that both Pizarniks and Carters narratives are primordially about the exercise of power and its prerogatives. As Robert Rawdon Wilson remarks of The Lady of the House of Love:
the castle of vampires itself, one might observe, contains not merely decay, but relationships of subordination and subservience. Carters narrative concerns power. It is marginally about the power of a feudal
ANGELA CARTER, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1992), p. 148.
39 38
KRISTEVA, Powers of Horror, cit., p. 4.
class over peasants and servants. It is made quite clear that the relationship of the castle to the village is a feudal one.
He adds that the narrative shows that it is about more than the sad fate of vampires, more even than the sad fate of empires and armies. It is also about the fate of women in a patriarchal world. 40 The same can be said about Pizarniks Condesa sangrienta and her aristocratic domination over her feudal world, while the tale carries out a profoundly disturbing meditation on the nature of perversity and of sexual difference as far as the Countesss homosexual proclivities are concerned. Like many other doubles in fiction such as Stevensons Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Oscar Wildes Dorian Gray, the Bloody Countess leads a double life, occupying herself during the day with all the little details that rule the profane order of our lives (p. 476), diverting suspicion away. As Arnold Heumakers remarks, it is of course absolutely necessary to look respectable in order to be able to commit crimes with impunity [...] Not for nothing do libertines choose remote estates, inaccessible castles, and subterranean vaults for their most uninhibited orgies. 41 The ambivalent fascination which both repels and attracts, exerted by the various manifestations of the abject on the Surrealists, links Pizarniks work with theirs. Indeed, her main affinities lie with Surrealist or protoSurrealist writers such as Lautramont or Bataille, part of a French tradition which has in the Marquis de Sade one of its more important representatives and theorists. Cristina Pia also notes the prominent influence of Julio Cortzar, with whom Pizarnik had [una] honda relacin de afecto y coincidencia intelectual and of Lautramont, quien sera uno de los poetas ms importantes para la configuracin de la esttica de Alejandra, y aquel que se inscribe en su poesa hasta el poema que se supone fue el ltimo escrito por ella y anotado en su pizarrn de trabajo. 42 Significantly, Cortzar also wrote a book based on the story of the infamous Hungarian Countess: 62. Modelo para armar (1968), 43 itself influenced by a work by the French Surrealist writer Valentine Penrose, Erzsbet Bthory, la comtesse sanglante, published in Paris in 1962, during the time Pizarnik spent in that city, which she left to return to Buenos Aires
40 41
ROBERT RAWDON WILSON, SLIP PAGE, cit., pp. 119, 121.
ARNOLD HEUMAKERS, De Sade, a pessimistic libertine, From Sappho to de Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality, ed. Jan Bremer (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 108-122, p. 118.
42
CRISTINA PIA, Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991), pp. 108Developed out of the 62nd chapter of Cortzars novel Rayuela (1963).
109.
43
in 1964, and to which Pizarnik draws our attention right at the beginning of her own version of the Countesss story. Pizarniks intense attraction to the character of the Transylvanian noblewoman signals her fascination with the contiguity between sexuality and death, a theme with permeates her tale as well as the work of Sade, Lautramont and Bataille. 44 Death is a keyword in Pizarniks poetics, but it is in Acerca de la condesa sangrienta that the articulation between sexuality and death first becomes apparent. In her essay The Pornographic Imagination, Susan Sontag refers explicitly to this aspect, when she stresses, in connection with Bataille, 45 that he understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isnt sex but death. She goes on to point out that not every pornographic work speaks, either overtly or covertly, of death. Only works dealing with that specific and sharpest inflection of the themes of lust, the obscene, do. Its toward the gratification of death, succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every truly obscene quest tends, an insight that seems tailor-made for Pizarniks tale. As Sontag points out, Bataille shares with Sade the same ultimate identification of sex and death. 46 The attraction exerted on the Surrealists and on Pizarnik by the Hungarian Countess, this female de Sade, is easily explained by the disquieting elements that make up her story and which find such powerful echoes in the Surrealist oeuvre: her transgression and utter circumvention of all moral codes, the nature of her horrific crimes, her lack of any sense of moral judgement, her almost complete impunity with respect to the law (however, the noblewoman is also caught and punished through incarceration in her castle, as de Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille). Moreover, as Susan Sontag maintains, what authors like Sade, Lautramont and Bataille have hinted at, is that
the obscene is a primal notion of human consciousness, something much more profound than the backwash of a sick societys aversion to the body. Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, a highly questionable phenomenon, and belongs, at least potentially,
Luis Gregorich, a literary friend of Pizarnik, remembers the recurrence in their conversations around 1966 of the figure of the Countess Bathory. Another friend, Juan Esteban Fassio, shared her fascination for the character of the Countess. He was a real expert on the Transylvanian noblewoman, having managed to acquire for his personal library all the existing materials about her. See CRISTINA PIA, Alejandra Pizarnik, cit. 178-179. Ibid., p. 171. Pizarnick believed that she and Bataille exchanged knowing glances, as she followed him around the Paris streets. SUSAN SONTAG, The Pornographic Imagination, A Susan Sontag Reader, ed. Elizabeth Hardwick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 224-25.
46 45 44
among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity. Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of ones consciousness, for death itself. 47
Pizarniks tale finds its place squarely in the tradition mentioned above, going back to Sade, with its stress on the examination of the workings of the forces of abjection, perversion and power. 48 Indeed, as Caroline Ramazanoglu points out, engaging with Foucaults work on sexuality and power:
Foucault joined Bataille in celebrating Sade as reviving the possibility of happiness in evil [...] with both divorced from moral contexts and diverted to the aims of pure self-fashioning. The call is radical. Foucaults challenge, no less than Sades, is issued to man after God died to retrieve the power to shape the self. Selffashioning is to be undertaken without any of the customary preconstraints. Thus Foucaults support for the criminal, the insane, the women and children, is less a classical liberal posture than a demand for liberation from all restrictions on pleasure and power. 49
The Surrealists and particularly Batailles influence on Pizarnik are indeed decisive in shaping her work. Nadia Choucha explains some of the most important tenets of the Surrealist philosophy:
The surrealists [...] believed that unbridled eroticism leads to excess, blasphemy and the release of violent emotion. It is thus a subversive force, for it can transform the individual and consequently society. Georges Bataille declared that eroticism was inseparable from the idea of transgression, the breaking of taboos. This may have been derived from de Sade, who accentuates the erotic violence by making the characters who enact them worthy members of society, and especially nuns and priests. Bataille believed that desire could only be truly fulfilled by breaking taboos whether religious, economic or social. Thus eroticism is
47 48
Ibid., pp. 221-22.
DEBORAH CAMERON and ELIZABETH FRAZER, Lust to Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (Cambridge University Press, 1987) situate the starting point of a series of conceptualizations of murder at about the time of the French Revolution, dealing at length with the works of the Marquis de Sade, while referring in passing to the Gothic tradition. CAROLINE RAMAZANOGLU, Ed., Up Against Foucault: Explorations of some tensions between Foucault and Feminism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 229.
49
not simply creative and positive but potentially destructive and negative [...] It is the negative and anti-social qualities that enhance the pleasure of the sexual act, Bataille suggests. 50
In this respect, Jane Gallop sustains that Perversion must be denied as deviation from a norm, but Sade, according to Pierre Klossowski, thinks perversion to be already implicit in all the normal instruments of society. Sades deviation is his explicitness: he creates a scandal by exposing what is universal, yet covert. As Richard Dyer similarly stresses, with respect to vampires and werewolves in films: Robin Wood, and a number of other writers on the horror film, have suggested, adapting Freudian ideas, that all monsters in some measure represent the hideous and terrifying form that sexual energies take when they return from being socially and culturally repressed. 51 Indeed, Pizarniks condesa sangrienta represents the acme of everything that is abject and perverse. Kristeva aptly establishes the explicit connection between these two concepts in Powers of Horror. 52 Bataille himself wrote profusely about transgression and taboo. He maintains that The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it, a statement pertinent to the acts of the Bloody Countess, whose life consists in breaking taboos and the perpetration of subversive deeds. In relation to this issue, Bataille emphatically sustains:
Once the obstacle is overthrown what outlasts the transgression is a flouted taboo. The bloodiest of murderers cannot ignore the curse upon him, for the curse is the condition of his achievement. Transgression piled upon transgression will never abolish the taboo, just as though the taboo were never anything but the means of cursing gloriously what it forbids. In the foregoing proposition there is a basic truth: taboos founded on terror are not only there to be obeyed. There is always another side to the matter. It is always a temptation to knock down a barrier; the forbidden action takes on a significance it lacks before fear widens the gap between us and it and invests it with an aura of excitement. There is nothing, writes de Sade, that can set bounds to licentiousness [...] The best way of enlarging and multiplying ones desires is to try to limit
50
NADIA CHOUCHA, Surrealism and the Occult (Oxford: Mandrake, 1991), p.
83. GALLOP, Thinking Through the Body, cit., p. 5; RICHAR DYER, Children of the Night: Vampirism as Homosexuality, Homosexuality as Vampirism, Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction, ed. Susannah Radstone (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), pp. 47-71, p. 54.
52 51
KRISTEVA, Powers of Horror, cit., p. 15.
them. Nothing can set bounds to licentiousness [...] or rather, generally speaking, there is nothing that can conquer violence. 53
These words illuminate in many ways the macabre acts of Pizarniks Countess. As Susan Rubin Suleiman stresses, alluding to Bataille: The experience of transgression is indissociable from the consciousness of the constraint or prohibition it violates; indeed, it is precisely by and through its transgression that the force of a prohibition becomes fully realized. 54 Similarly, Nadia Choucha notes that in surrealism the theme of blasphemy has a dual function: to celebrate unleashed desire and the dominance of the pleasure principle, and to criticize the dogmas and hypocrisy of religion, 55 issues which are dramatized with particular vehemence in Pizarniks tale and in Angela Carters work, who provocatively wrote with respect to this issue: If its not blasphemous, why bother to make it? 56 Angela Carters links with the Surrealists, like Pizarniks, were close. During her stay in Japan, where she lived between 1969 and 1972, Carter discovered, around 1970, two books by Ado Kyrou, which decisively influenced her: Surralisme et cinma (1953) and Amour-rotisme et cinma (1957). Her novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), written in Japan, is clearly inspired by the Surrealist movement, as Susan Rubin Suleiman shows. 57 In 1978, Carter herself wrote an essay on Surrealism, The Alchemy of the Word, where she clarifies her ideas about the movement founded: Surrealism celebrated wonder, the capacity for seeing the world as if for the first time which, in its purest state, is the prerogative of children and madmen, but more than that, it celebrated wonder itself as an essential means of perception. Using words that could serve as epigraph to almost all her books, she adds: It
GEORGES BATAILLE, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1994), pp. 63, 48.
54 55 56 53
RUBIN SULEIMAN, Subversive Poetics, cit. p. 75. CHOUCHA, Surrealism and the Occult, cit., p. 83.
Interview with John Engstrom, Boston Globe, 28 October 1988, p. 62. Carter was here referring specifically to Martin Scorseses film The Last Temptation of Christ, which she decided not to see because it was not blasphemous. I mean, this is 1988, you know! , she explained. See SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN, Subversive Poetics: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 242 n 64. Shortly before she died, Carter wrote a profoundly polemic, blasphemous and provocative piece for television entitled The Holy Family Album. See RUBIN SULEIMAN, The Fate of the Surrealist Imagination in the Society of the Spectacle, Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 98-116, pp. 98-99.
57
was also a way of life; of living on the edge of the senses; of perpetual outrage and scandal, the destruction of the churches, of the prisons, of the armies, of the brothels. Such power they ascribed to words and images. A poem is a wound; a poem is a weapon. Although she felt disappointed with, and to a certain extent excluded from, Surrealism for being a woman, Carter nevertheless reiterates her faith in the Surrealist ideals, which she still finds worth fighting for. As she remarks in The Alchemy of the Word:
When I realised that surrealist art did not recognise I had my own rights to liberty and love and vision as an autonomous being, not as a projected image, I got bored with it and wandered away... So does the struggle continue? Why not. Give me one good reason. Even if the struggle has changed its terms. 58
Susan Rubin Suleiman comments:

A woman Surrealist, in other words, cannot simply assume a subject position and take over a stock of images elaborated by the male imaginary. In order to innovate, she has to invent her own position as subject and elaborate her own set of images different from the image of the exposed female body, yet as empowering as that image is, with its endless potential for manipulation, disarticulation and rearticulation, fantasizing and projection, for her male colleagues. 59
In related vein, Susan Bassnett suggests: Just as the Marquis de Sade became a Surrealist hero, so the Countess Bathory is a Surrealist heroine: not because of any approval of their crimes, but rather because they represent the ultimate subversion, and their actions challenge every established social rule known to mankind. 60 Pizarniks tale is indeed, however paradoxically in view of its depiction of the horrific details of the tortures and death the Countess
In spite of her admiration for the Surrealists, Carter expressed certain reservations: The surrealists were not good with women. That is why, although I thought they were wonderful, I had to give them up in the end. They were, with a few patronised exceptions, all men and they told me that I was the source of all mystery, beauty, and otherness, because I was a woman and I knew that was not true. I knew I wanted my fair share of the imagination, too. The Alchemy of the Word, Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 67-73, p. 73).
59 60 58
RUBIN SELEIMAN, Subversive Poetics, cit., p. 26.
SUSAN BASSNETT, Speaking with many voices: The poems of Alejandra Pizarnik, Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America, ed. S. Bassnett (London and New Jersey: Zed Books Ltd., 1990), pp. 36-51, p. 45.
inflicted on hundreds of women, a cautionary tale against absolute freedom and the total refusal of any restraints advocated by the Surrealists. Josephine McDonagh, referring to the book Lust to Kill, by Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, notes that through murder, flouting the law, and imposing ones will so that it has direct and unmediated effect, one has the possibility of becoming a totally free individual, existing outside and unhindered by the realm of culture, 61 a perception which Pizarniks tale to a great extent confronts and contests. As Pizarnik writes at the end of The Bloody Countess about the Countess Bathory: She is yet another proof that the absolute freedom of the human creature is horrible (p. 477). The Countesss infringement of the rules that regulate society, her tyrannical domination over her victims and her imposition of her own depravities on her unsuspecting prey, her cannibalistic and perverse sexuality, her devilish practices in which only the self exists, are taken to diabolical, Sadeian extremes, in an infernal cycle only broken by the eventual visitation of the Law. Her life, like that of the Sadeian libertines, thus dramatizes in an exemplary way Carters stress on the violently inhumane side of the Sadeian erotic search for solipsistic pleasure at the margins of the law: Sexuality, stripped of the idea of free exchange, is not in any way humane; it is nothing but pure cruelty. Carnal knowledge is the infernal knowledge of the flesh as meat 62 Reflecting on the aesthetics of murder as predominantly a male act, Josephine McDonagh notes that some
feminist writers, like Angela Carter, have re-read Sade to reclaim for women the potential liberation of his transgressive moment, thereby laying themselves open to the claims of radical feminists that they glory in and thus perpetuate patriarchal violence. However, for Angela Carter, Sades work encapsulates a radical transgression of values which suggests the possibilities for women to transcend the oppression that is deeply embedded in patriarchal social and cultural practices. 63
a point of view which I fully endorse. Finally, I would like to suggest, in the light of Kristevas theory of abjection, that Pizarniks tale daringly carries out a confrontation with many of the forces that make up the abject, while at the same time, by means of that very exploration, the narrative suggests that to a certain extent the fractured and deeply frightening boundaries between the human
JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH, Do or die: problems of agency and gendering the aesthetics of murder, New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 222-237, p. 225.
62 63 61
ANGELA CARTER, The Sadeian Woman (London: Virago, 1979), p.141 JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH, in New Feminist Discourses, cit., p. 228.
and non-human are made whole again through the intervention of the Law, which chastises the Countess for her boundless perversion. Thus the Countess, the main site and conflation of the powers of evil and an incarnation of abject forces, is finally destroyed, while the borders by which society is regulated are reestablished. However, the proliferation of works and films dealing with the monstrous feminine and with the relaxing of all sorts of borders, attests to the eternal fascination with the duality of woman as angel and demon and those in-between states embodied in such characters as vampires, witches and werecreatures. This trend points to the profound ambiguity of the abject in itself, forcefully stated by Kristeva and Bataille, which both repels and attracts, needing to be expelled in order to keep the unity of the subject, while simultaneously always already unavoidably there. Pizarniks tale never loses sight of this aspect. Bataille helps us look for a possible explanation of the reprehensible and unjustifiable acts of Pizarniks Countess and Carters vampire woman, of their macabre and transgressive side which held such appeal for the Surrealists, and for both Pizarnik and Carter:
Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Juliette should not be wholeheartedly abominable. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are bound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. But there remains this question. Would it be possible wholly to avoid the denial of humanity implicit in these instincts? May this denial perhaps depend on external factors, a sickness not essential to mans nature that could be cured, for example, or on individual or collective groups that in theory could and should be suppressed in short, on elements that could be cut out of human kind? Or does man bear within himself the stubborn and persistent denial of the quality, call it reason, utility or order, upon which humanity is based? Is our being ineluctably the negation as well as the affirmation of its own principle? 64
These vexed questions probe deeply into the nature of the problems raised by Pizarniks and Carters tales. Timo Airaksinen, reflecting on the meaning of perversion, argues that a pervert is either sick or incapable, and accordingly he [sic] suffers from a condition he cannot prevent or deflect. 65 We can thus say that Pizarniks Countess, like Carters, is in a way doomed to perversity, due to the blood that runs in her veins.
64 65
BATAILLE, Eroticism, cit., pp. 183-84.
TIMO AIRAKSINEN, The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 28.
Indeed, the vampire woman in The Lady of the House of Love is perceived by the British officer as :
a doll [...] a ventriloquists doll, or, more, like a great, ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless. This idea that she might be an automaton, made of white velvet and black fur, that could not move of its own accord, never quite deserted him. (p. 136) 66
There are, however, significant differences between the two Countesses. While Pizarniks aristocrat sadistically enjoys the atrocities she guiltlessly commits, Carters is a victim of her lineage, forced against her will to perpetuate her ancestors crimes, performing a role she hates and wants to discard. She wants love, she wishes to recover her reflection in the mirror, in a word, to be human. Indeed, one line of investigation that could be pursued here is the failure of narcissism in both tales. As Timo Airaksinen maintains, there is no narcissism without a persons self-image on a reflecting surface. 67 In Carters tale, the only mirror is a cracked mirror suspended from a wall [which] does not reflect a presence (p. 124). Furthermore, the Countess, instead of developing her own personality, is forced to repeat the acts of her ancestors, instead of building her own self: she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. (pp. 124-125) Airaksinen argues that narcissism is an understandable personal project. It is part of a persons attempt to retain his own individuality by refusing to receive a definition from the outside, 68 a strategy which is barred to the Countess.
In ANNA KATSAVOS, An Interview with Angela Carter, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:3 (1994), pp. 11-17, p. 16, Carter explains that The Lady of the House of Love partly derives from a movie version that I saw of a story by Dostoyevsky. And in the movie, which is very good, the woman, who is a very passive person and is very much in distress, asks herself the question, Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song? Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs? Its very important that if we havent, we might as well stop now. Can the marionette in that story behave in a way that shes not programmed to behave? Is it possible? The issues brought up here by Carter are powerfully dramatized in The Lady of the House of Love, where the question Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song? (p. 125), referring specifically to the imprisoned vampire woman, chained to the laws of her ancestors, raises the vexed question of freedom from societys conventions, free-will and the development of a well integrated personality: questions which only apply to Carters Countess in the sense that, because of the blood that runs through her veins, becoming human for her means dying.
67 68 66
AIRAKSINEN, The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, cit., p. 175. Ibid., p. 184.
Interestingly, in Vampirella the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a forebear of the present Lady, is specifically given a voice, in the satirical, parodic register of the tale, which expresses a thwarted narcissism, the only kind available to her, since no mirror could project her image. As the Countess explains, referring to the portrait of Elizabeth Bathory: She looks rather like [...] an icon [...] but an icon of unholiness. It shows her looking in a mirror, do you see; but, of course, she couldnt see her own reflection. She is peering and peering in the mirror for her face but she will never find it, never. Later in the tale, the Countess Bathory herself is allowed to express herself:
ELIZABETH BATHORY. The Sanguinary Countess laved her white, exquisite body in the blood she tapped from the gross veins of peasant girls who had too much blood for their own requirements. So she kept her wrinkles at bay; she knew how much the preservation of her fabled beauty was worth. Her servants never betrayed her, in spite of torture; they were in such deep complicity with her they urged her to renewed infamies as though her beauty and wickedness were properties of themselves and the more beautiful and wicked she became, the more they, too, were enhanced. The young girls who became me when they washed me with my awful sponges were as much my victims as those whom I immolated. Yet only in their admiring faces could I see the wonderful results of my magic baths for my piercing eye had broken every mirror in the castle. When I looked at them, I saw how wonderful I was, and how terrifying. If they had ceased to be afraid of me, I would have ceased immediately to be beautiful. I was a great lady and my portrait shows me crusted almot entirely in gold. 69
Unlike the Lady of the House of Love, Elizabeth Bathory appears to have an unmistakable and swollen ego, an autonomous will that, as Airaksinen points out, with reference to de Sade, is beyond narcissism. 70 On the other hand, the oscillation of the narratorial voice from third person to first person, in the Countesss speech, might also indicate an ego which, after all, lacks perfectly defined boundaries, and is at the mercy of tyrannical will. The Sanguinary Countess of Pizarniks story similarly evinced a great deal of vanity, an exacerbated wish to stay young and she
69 70
CARTER, Vampirella, cit., pp. 102, 106. AIRAKSINEN, The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, cit., p. 187.
would spend her days in front of her large mirror; a famous mirror she had designed herself. . . . We can suppose that while believing she had designed a mirror, Erzebet had in fact designed the plans for her lair. And now we can understand why only . . . the cellars flooded with human blood, could spark something resembling life in her perfect face. Because no one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors. (p. 472)
This is therefore no common mirror, nor is the Bloody Countess a narcissist in the usual sense of the word. Although, as Airaksinen says of the Sadean person, he/she may look, to start with, like the supreme narcissists, they soon move beyond narcissism for they would never agree [...] that they are moral winners and fit to be loved. As he further explains: In Sades case, however, the person walks right through the looking-glass in order to find a new indescribable world. Indeed, Sade offers a view to nowhere through the mirror, or everywhere beyond human thought and motivation. 71 As Pizarnik comments at the end of her tale: Like Sade in his writings, and Gilles de Rais in his crimes, the Countess Bathory reached beyond all limits the uttermost pit of unfettered passions. (p. 477), 72 moving beyond all definitions of a moral being as she embodies the myth of the monstrous woman so prevalent throughout the centuries and spanning all cultures. Carters Countess, on the other hand, while still incarnating the fantasy of the femme fatale, subverts it by means of her unappeased longing to be made whole by human feelings, thus rewriting the myth of the vampire woman in a provocatively transgressive way.
71 72
Ibid., pp. 186-88.
In Vampirella, the room to which the British soldier is taken has a handsome portrait of Gilles de Rais over the fireplace [...] Are the whole damn clan related to every vampire that ever lived! (CARTER, Come Unto These Yellow Sands, cit., p. 104).
Francesca Counihan
SHIFTING SANDS: GENDER AND IDENTITY IN THE WRITING OF MARGUERITE YOURCENAR 1
In 1981, Marguerite Yourcenar (1903 - 1987) became the first woman ever to be elected to the Acadmie Franaise. As this is the highest official honour available to French writers, her election was hailed by many as a victory for her sex, and as evidence that the literary establishment was finally beginning to acknowledge the worth of women writers. However, closer examination of the literary work for which this signal honour was awarded leads one to suspect that, in choosing this particular candidate, the establishment was allowing its presuppositions to be challenged less than would initially appear to be the case; that, in fact,the members of the Acadmie chose the woman writer who was perhaps least likely to disrupt certain conservative ideas, particularly in relation to women themselves. This is particularly true in terms of the way in which women characters are represented in Yourcenar's work. At a time when, following on the women's movements of the 1970's, women writers in France were concentrating on giving a voice to women's experience and to women's points of view, and on creating a specific medium of expression for this "woman-centred" content, Yourcenar wrote, as she had always written, in a somewhat traditional and distinctly un-feminist mode. The bulk of her work (and certainly the work for which she is best known, both within and outside France) consists of what may loosely be called historical novels, in that the action is usually set in a historical period, the details of which have been very carefully researched. The main texts to which I shall refer here are: Memoirs of Hadrian, which is presented as the autobiography of the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian; The Abyss, the life of a fictional sixteenth-century philosopher and alchemist, Zeno, who falls foul of the Inquisition because of his
An earlier version of this article appeared in the U.C.G. Womens Studies Centre Review (University College Galway; Vol. 2, 1993, pp.111-124).
1
Counihan: Shifting Sands
unorthodox views on science and religion; and An Obscure Man, set mainly in seventeenth-century Holland and centring on the life of Nathanal, the obscure man of the title, whose low social status and various professions allow him to observe the society of his time with detachment and a dream-like indifference, until his solitary death. I shall also draw on several less well-known texts: Coup de Grce, the story of an ill-fated relationship between a White Russian officer, and his friend's sister Sophie, whom he rejects; A Coin in Nine Hands, set in the Fascist Italy of the 1930's, and centring on an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Mussolini; and Fires, an unusual work where re-tellings of Greek myths, including the stories of Achilles, Clytemnestra, and Antigone, alternate with short lyrical prose poems, some intensely personal in tone. 2 In most of these works, as in those not mentioned here, the story focuses on a male central character, and the events of the narrative are seen from his point of view. These male characters are generally strong, complex individuals who are distinguished by the lucidity with which they perceive and analyse their situation. In contrast, women rarely appear as central characters in Yourcenar's work, and even when they do, are portrayed in very limited and stereotypical terms, lacking the depth and complexity that would allow them to be convincing to the reader. Yourcenar herself explains this dearth of female central figures in her work in terms of a conscious choice :
Why not make her [Plotina in Memoirs of Hadrian] the central character of a book ? Quite simply because the lives of women, in this as in every other period, have been too limited in their manifestations. To take Plotina as heroine and as narrator would have meant leaving out the direct experience of war, the direct experience of the corridors of power, and many others [...] With Plotina, we would, despite everything, find ourselves in the restricted, closed female sphere [] where most women have lived. 3
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, A Coin in Nine Hands, trans. Dori Katz (London: Black Swan, 1984), original edition Denier du rve (Paris: Grasset, 1934; revised edition Gallimard, 1959); Fires, trans. Dori Katz (Henley-on-Thames: Aidan Ellis, 1982), original edition Feux (Paris: Gallimard, 1936); Coup de Grce, trans. Grace Frick (London: Harvill, 1992), original edition Le Coup de Grce (Paris: Gallimard, 1939); Memoirs of Hadrian, trans. Grace Frick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), original edition Mmoires dHadrien (Paris: Plon, 1952); The Abyss, trans. Grace Frick (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1976), original edition LOeuvre au Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); An Obscure Man, (with Anna, soror..., and A Lovely Morning), trans. Walter Kaiser (London: Harvill, 1992), original edition Un homme obscur (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). PATRICK DE ROSBO, Entretiens avec Marguerite Yourcenar (Paris: Mercure de France, 1972), p.88 (my translation).
3
It seems that part of what Yourcenar is doing here is claiming the right to intervene in spheres other than those traditionally reserved for the female author; such a claim can be seen in a positive light, in that it refuses to accept that a writer's subject matter can or should be limited by their gender. 4 Such a choice may enable the author to broaden the scope of her writing and to explore areas otherwise inaccessible to her. 5 It may also be part of a strategy aimed at reinforcing an authority, which, in common with many women writers, the author feels to be fragile or inadequate. 6 However, there remains the matter of how the female characters are dealt with when they do occur. And here, one begins to suspect that Yourcenar's reasons for eschewing female central characters may be more (or other) than she cares to admit; that a key factor in this omission may be the way in which she herself perceives women. If we examine the representation of women in her work, we find that most of her female characters appear in minor roles, and are seen through the eyes of men. They are generally sketchily portrayed, lacking the complexity that would make them interesting to the reader, and, in marked contrast to the male protagonists, seem mostly devoid of self-awareness and of the capacity to analyse their situation. Furthermore, as regards characterisation, they appear as a series of stereotypes, in that they either embody a particular (female) characteristic or represent a natural element (favourites being
Simone de Beauvoir relates a similar experience: When I started to write, many women authors refused to be classed in precisely that category. The critics at the time often used the title Ladies work for the columns where they dealt with our books, which annoyed us. They wanted to enclose us within the narrow limits of a world reserved for our sex: house, home, children, with occasional openings towards Nature or the cult of Love. We rejected the idea of womens writing because we wanted to speak on equal terms with the men of the entire world, cited in ANNE OPHIR, Regards fminins (Paris: Denol-Gonthier, 1976), Introduction, p. 11 (my translation). The French term ouvrages de dames contains a play on words which is difficult to reproduce in English, as ouvrages in this phrase can refer both to embroidery, needlework, (specifically ladies ouvrages) and literary works (the broader sense of the term). CHRISTOPHER ROBINSON, Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexualities in French Literature (London: Cassell, 1995), pp.226-32, suggests for example that Yourcenars particular use of male central characters allows her to explore male homosexual experience, and the possibility of a male-based androgyny. I have dealt more fully with this aspect of Yourcenars writing in COUNIHAN, Marguerite Yourcenar et lautorit littraire, Ecriture et fminisme, Actes du Colloque International de Saragosse (13-18 november 1995), (University of Saragoza, forthcoming). For a more general discussion of this aspect of womens writing, see SANDRA GILBERT and SUSAN GUBAR, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), Chapters 1 & 2, pp.3-104 ; SUSAN LANSER, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Chapter 1, pp.3-24; CHRISTINE PLANT, La petite soeur de Balzac: essai sur la femme-auteur (Paris: Seuil, 1989).
6 5 4
Earth and Water, the traditionally female elements). Thus women characters are variously portrayed as personifying wisdom and detachment, like the Plotina of Memoirs of Hadrian, or Donna Valentina in Anna, soror...; as creatures of passion, capable only of feeling, never of reason, like Sophie, in Coup de Grce, whose defection to the enemy is motivated by her disgust with the story's hero, Eric, and Catherine in The Abyss (who kills her master out of unrequited passion for Zeno, the novel's hero, who recoils in disgust); or as being impelled, inspired by a force beyond them (but still incapable of reason) like Marcella in A Coin in Nine Hands, whose doomed attempt to assassinate Mussolini leads to her death. Other female characters are shown to be defined and condemned by a single negative characteristic, like Angiola , the film star of A Coin in Nine Hands, who is vanity incarnate, or Martha, Zeno's half-sister in The Abyss, who is damned by her love of money, which ultimately prevents her from rescuing her brother from the Inquisition. Natural stereotypes occur both in interviews where Yourcenar comments on her work, and within the novels themselves. The writer describes several women characters as incarnations of natural elements: for example, all the women in A Coin in Nine Hands, apart from the frivolous Angiola, are essentially earthy, 7 Marcella is seen by another (male) character as the earth, the powerful Italian earth that survived the chaos of whatever regime; 8 Dida the old flower-seller is the earth in its roughest, most rugged form 9 and her great age is conveyed by saying that, whereas in youth, she had looked like a flower, now she looked like a tree trunk. 10 The Sophie of Coup de Grce similarly achieves elemental status: she represents the earth itself, having the richness of a wellspring, and possesses the generosity and greatness of an almost elemental being. 11 A corollary of this elemental nature seems to be the absence, on the part of such women characters, of any ability to think clearly about their situation. Marcella is a good example of this: as she prepares for her desperate attempt to assassinate Mussolini, it is not she, but the men around her, who are seen to reflect on the folly of her action, on its value and its probable chance of success, while no such reasoned thought comes from her. She rushes headlong towards her goal, undeterred by the efforts of her male companion to dissuade her; he gives up when he realises that she couldn't be persuaded, any more than an object, a tool or a weapon
7 8 9 10 11
DE ROSBO, Entretiens, cit., p.90 YOURCENAR, Coin in Nine Hands, cit. p.58 DE ROSBO, Entretiens, cit., p.90 YOURCENAR, A Coin in Nine Hands, cit., p.101 DE ROSBO, Entretiens, cit., p.89
could be persuaded. 12 This instinctual and unthinking mode is fully in keeping with Yourcenar's view of women, as indicated by her further comments:
Finally and most importantly, women have very rarely been, or, which amounts to the same thing, have very rarely shown themselves to be, capable of thinking what they are or what they do. 13
This is an opinion frequently attributed by Yourcenar to her male characters (for example Hadrian, or Georges in Le premier soir); 14 that she reiterates it here in the context of an interview shows to what extent it corresponds to her own view. Perhaps the most sobering aspect of these representations of women in Yourcenar's work is that they are generally intended as positive; for example, she describes the character of Valentina, (in Anna, soror...) as an initial sketch of the perfect woman I have often dreamed of - at once loving and detached, passive out of wisdom and not out of weakness. 15 This is the same Valentina of whom the story's narrator says: When her children realized that she was dead, there was no surprise mingled with their sadness. Donna Valentina had been the sort of person one was surprised to see existing 16 (which seems to be taking passivity, wise or otherwise, a little far). Thus, women in Yourcenar's work are defined in terms of passivity, irrationality, passion, earthiness, and purity: the list would hardly be surprising, coming from a French male writer of the time. However, coming from a woman, and particularly from a woman who herself showed such personal and intellectual independence and such rational and analytic powers as did Marguerite Yourcenar, this list is, to say the least, surprising. Furthermore, on reading the interviews where she talks about her work, one has the distinct impression of a hiatus between herself and the general category of women as perceived by her. It is as if this category of women refers to someone other than herself; she can look at it from the outside, judge it, describe it, all as if it were something quite distinct
12 13 14
YOURCENAR, A Coin in Nine Hands,, p. 76 DE ROSBO, Entretiens, cit., p. 89 (italics in the text).
See YOURCENAR, Memoirs of Hadrian, cit., p.63: my fair loves seemed to glory in thinking only as women; the mind, or perhaps the soul, that I searched for was never more than a perfume; and ID., Le premier soir, cit., p.26, where Georges scrutinizes his young bride, Jeanne: He wondered what she was thinking. Was she thinking about that ? Or, to put it better, was she thinking ? So many women dont think about anything (my translation).
15 16
YOURCENAR, Anna, Soror..., cit., p. 235 (Postface). Ibid,, p.170.
and removed from her. When questioned in an interview about the lack of strong female characters in her work, she replies:
there is sometimes, in very great men, a tendency toward total impersonality. Hadrian says of this: A man who is writing or calculating no longer belongs to his sex. He even transcends humanity. This is much rarer [...] even in the most eminent of women.
To the interviewer's rejoinder: But you are an example of the contrary, she replies, That may be true, but one swallow doesn't make a spring, 17 insisting on her perception of women as beings other than herself. Indeed, certain critics have suggested that Yourcenar, far from identifying herself as a woman writer, wishes rather to identify with the male power of the characters she represents (most notably Hadrian). 18 While this interpretation does not seem entirely justified (it does not for example explain the shift in the later fiction away from overtly powerful characters towards such obscure figures as Nathanael and his son, Lazarus), it is nevertheless striking that in all her work male characters dominate both the action and the focalisation of the narratives. This is true even in the memoirs where Yourcenar retraces the history of her family. 19 The last two volumes concentrate overwhelmingly on Yourcenars father, while even in the first volume, concerned with her maternal family, only the last quarter of the book focusses on a female character, her mother. 20 It is apparent from the above that, in terms of characterisation at least, Yourcenar's writing is very far indeed from being woman-centred, indeed the opposite may be said to be the case. This aspect of Yourcenars work has, with some justification, given rise to vigorous criticism, with her
17 18
YOURCENAR, Les yeux ouverts, cit., p. 272.
ERIC BENTLEY, We are in History, Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/ Critical Texts, ed. G. Stambolian and E. Marks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp.122-140, p.131; quoted in ROBINSON, Scandal in the Ink, cit., p. 227. I use this term advisedly, as these volumes deal mostly with the history of Yourcenars maternal and paternal families (in Dear Departed and How Many Years respectively), and very little with the authors own life-story, so that the term autobiography hardly seems appropriate, although frequently used to describe these works (see for example P AUL BINDING, Flight from Privilege (review of How Many Years) The Independent on Sunday (Review section), 25.11.1995, p.37. For a more detailed analysis of Dear Departed, and of the mother-daughter relationship in Yourcenar, see LINDA STILLMAN, Marguerite Yourcenar and the Phallacy of Indifference, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 9 (1985), pp. 261-77. While inaccurate in detail and perhaps overstated in its conclusions, the central thesis of this article is interesting: that despite her denials, Yourcenars work was in fact influenced by her mothers premature death.
20 19
writing being denounced in one case for its racism, classism and sexism. 21 It cannot be denied that Yourcenars work does indeed contain some quite misogynistic elements, and that her portrayal of women characters tends to reinforce existing stereotypes, as we have seen. However, part of the interest of this work lies in the fact that these aspects coexist with elements of an apparently quite different nature. What I would like to suggest here is that, in her treatment of her male characters, Yourcenar is in fact writing as a woman, and that aspects of her femininity become apparent not so much through the material she presents as through the way in which it is presented. One of the key points in this regard is the concept of identity. It has been suggested by recent psychoanalytical theory (for example by Nancy Chodorow) that women and men differ in their sense of personal identity; whereas men experience themselves as strongly defined and individuated beings, women have a less distinct sense of self and experience themselves as more connected to the world to use Chodorow's phrase. In her book The Reproduction of Mothering, she describes male and female identity formation in the following terms:
growing girls come to define and experience themselves as continuous with others; their experience of self contains more flexible or permeable ego boundaries. Boys come to define themselves as more separate and distinct, with a greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation. The basic feminine sense of self is connected to the world, the basic masculine sense of self is separate. 22
Chodorow is not alone in reaching this conclusion, as Marianne Hirsch points out in her review of feminist writings on the subject:
It is interesting that although American psychoanalysis is essentially based on ego psychology and French psychoanalysis insists on the explosion of the unified ego, they intersect where female identity is concerned; for woman the delimited, the autonomous, separated, individuated self does not exist. 23
ELAINE MARKS, Getting away with Murd(h)er: Athors Preface and Narrators Text: Reading Marguerite Yourcenars Coup de Grace after Auschwitz, Journal of Narrative Technique, 20 (1990), pp. 210-220, p. 211. See also GEORGIA H. SHURR, Marguerite Yourcenar: A Readers Guide (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987), Chapter 8, pp.89-107; S TILLMAN, Marguerite Yourcenar cit. NANCY CHODOROW, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 169. MARIANNE HIRSCH, Mothers and Daughters, Signs (Autumn 1981), pp. 200222, p. 211.
23 22
21
These theories throw light on an intriguing aspect of Yourcenar's work; both she and her characters repeatedly question the concept of identity as something fixed and clearly defined. This is most obvious in the case of Hadrian: at the start of the Memoirs, rather than commencing in classic autobiographical fashion with family, birth, childhood, etc., he instead expresses his doubts as to the feasibility of the whole enterprise of telling one's life story, given the difficulty both of knowing oneself, and of ever knowing what in fact this self is:
When I consider my life, I am appalled to find it a shapeless mass. A hero's existence, such as is described to us, is simple; it goes straight to the mark, like an arrow [...] My life has contours less firm [...] The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell [...] To be sure, I perceive in this diversity and disorder the presence of a person; but his form seems nearly always to be shaped by the pressure of circumstances; his features are blurred, like a face reflected in water . 24
Yourcenar here deliberately contrasts a hero's existence with Hadrian's questioning view of his own life and identity. Despite his outward achievements and his obvious self-assurance, he is shown here as doubting the very concept of identity and personhood. Yourcenar seems to be saying that even in the male world of action and events, things, and particularly people, are not as clear-cut as they seem, but much more complex and ill-defined; although he is a man of action, Hadrian's sense of self is much less clearly defined than that of the typical heroic male figure. In Yourcenar's next major work, The Abyss, the alchemist Zeno also questions the outward signs (name, face) by which the individual's identity is normally defined:
Non habet nomen proprium: he was one of those men who are perpetually surprised at being in possession of a name, just as one marvels, in passing before a mirror, at possessing a face, and that it should be precisely the face that it is. 25
Elsewhere in the book, this image is again used to suggest an uncertain or fragmented identity; glimpsing his reflection in a multi-facetted Florentine mirror, the character sees not a single, clearly identifiable face, but a series of multiple and fragmented images:
24 25
YOURCENAR, Memoirs of Hadrian, cit., pp.31-32. YOURCENAR, The Abyss, cit., p. 165.
twenty figures compressed and reduced by the laws of optics, twenty images of a man in a fur bonnet, of haggard and sallow complexion, with gleaming eyes which were themselves mirrors. 26
This suggests strongly that Zeno's experience of his own identity is, in its own way, as unstable as that of Hadrian. Like Hadrian, the last and perhaps most intriguing of Yourcenar's male central characters, the Nathanal of An Obscure Man, also tries to look back over his life and to evaluate his past, but finds it impossible to do so, because
In the first place, it wasn't really his past, but that of the people and things he had encountered along the way; he saw them once more , or at least some of them; he failed to see himself. 27
Here, the character sees his life in terms of others and of the world around him, rather than in terms of an individual self; indeed, this self is singularly absent from his recollections, which leads him to directly question its existence:
But, to begin with, who was this person he considered himself to be ? Where did he come from ? 28
questions to which he can find no obvious answer. This uncertainty as to their own identity is then, a trait common to Yourcenar's main male protagonists, despite their differences in other ways. Not only is this uncertainty ascribed to fictional characters, we also find it in Yourcenar's rare references to herself, as, for example, in her speech of acceptance at the Acadmie Franaise, where she refers to herself as
This uncertain, ever-changing self, this entity whose existence I have myself contested and which I feel to be really defined only by the few works it has been my lot to write. 29
Here, Yourcenar expresses in her own name her doubts as to the concept of self-hood, of a fixed and separate self that each individual possesses as something inalienable.
26 27 28 29
Ibid, p.145. YOURCENAR, An Obscure Man, cit., pp. 115-116. Ibid, p. 116.
YOURCENAR, Discours de rception lAcadmie Franaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), p. 11.
Again, when she comes to tell the story of her own life and that of her parents (in Dear Departed), the doubts she expresses about the possibility of telling this story are similar to those of her characters. The text begins:
The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning [...] That this child is in fact myself I can hardly doubt without doubting everything. Still, to overcome in part the feeling of unreality that this identification gives me, I am forced just as if I were trying to recreate some historical personage to seize on stray recollections gleaned secondhand or even tenth-hand. 30
It is apparent from this that for Yourcenar, the self, the entity which supposedly defines her being, is something as unreal as for any of her fictional characters. Furthermore, it is also apparent that this feeling of unreality is not for her a source of anxiety or concern. She does not present it as in any sense a deficiency or a problem, but as part of the human experience which she wishes to evoke as authentically as possible. It is significant that her desire for lucidity and accuracy should lead her to discover, not greater clarity and transparency, but rather something blurred and unclear, yet ultimately closer to real experience. It would thus appear that Yourcenar's experience of identity, 31 and certainly her way of describing that experience, are closer to a feminine than to a masculine model; both she and the characters she depicts seem to experience themselves as continuous with the world about them, rather than as separate and distinct entities, as in process rather than fixed. On examining other aspects of her work, we find other instances where this same desire for authenticity leads her again away from what is fixed and clearly defined towards what is fluid and blurred. Just as she rejects the self as a separate and distinct entity, she questions in other ways the limits by which categories of things and people are distinguished from one another, and thus, defined. In several instances in her work, and particularly in descriptive passages, boundaries and limits are blurred, one category merges into the next, so that reality (or at least, the character's experience of that reality) is fluid and continuous rather than structured and compartmentalised.
YOURCENAR, Dear Departed, trans. Maria Louise Ascher (New York: Noonday Press, 191), pp. 3-4; original edition Souvenirs Pieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). For a different perspective on the question of identity in Yourcenar, see COLETTE GAUDIN, Prfaces: Gense de la fiction et effacement du moi, Marguerite Yourcenar: Une criture de la mmoire, special unumbered issue of Sud (May 1990) pp. 17-30; also published as Marguerite Yourcenars Prefaces: Genesis as SelfEffacement, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 10:1 (1985), pp. 31-35.
31
30
For example, in one of the key scenes in The Abyss, Zeno walks on the seashore, and seeing water merge into sand, sea merge into shore, comes to see the distinction between life and death as equally fluid and equally unimportant:
One step more on this frontier between fluid substance and sheer liquid, between the sand and the sea, and the power of some wave stronger than the others would make him lose his footing; an agony so brief and without witness would be slightly less a death. 32
The moment of death becomes another blurred and uncertain boundary, life and death are as little separate as the sea and the sand. On returning to the shore, Zeno finds that his human presence has similarly been merged with the elements, all trace of his individual passage erased :
He turned back again toward his clothes, which he had some difficulty in finding, covered as they were already with a light layer of sand [...] His footprints on the wet shore had been promptly absorbed by the oozing flood, while on the dry sand the wind was effacing every mark. 33
It is this awareness of the fluidity of all things, rather than any conscious decision, that decides the further course of Zeno's life. Similar descriptive passages occur in several of the stories that comprise Fires. For example, in the tale Patroclus, as Achilles mourns the death of his friend, the distinctions between life and death, love and hate, friend and enemy become blurred; it seems to him
as though, alive, Patroclus had only been the rough sketch for his corpse. The unavowed hatred sleeping in the bottom of love predisposed Achilles to the sculptor's task 34
and Patroclus is described as this companion who deserved to be an enemy. As if to emphasise this crumbling of distinctions, the whole scene takes place on a battlefield which is described as sodden, marshy ground, slipping from under the feet of those who walk on it:
A treacherous dampness rose from the bare ground; the footsteps of armies on the move shook the tent ; its stakes wobbled in the shaky
32 33 34
YOURCENAR, The Abyss, pp. 269-270 Ibid., p. 270 YOURCENAR, Fires, cit., p.29
ground. Reconciled, the two sides struggled with the river of death: Achilles, pale, entered this Apocalyptic night. 35
Here, the mingling of earth and water into shifting, marshy soil echoes the confusion both of Achilles' feelings and of the immediate outside world, as he watches it collapse in turmoil. The tale ends with his killing of Penthesilea, and with his assimilating her to Patroclus:
Achilles was sobbing, holding up the head of this victim worthy of being a friend. She was the only creature in the world who looked like Patroclus. 36
This finale stresses the theme of indifferentiation: the Amazon is both enemy and friend, both woman and man, both Penthesilea and Patroclus. 37 Similarly, although less graphically, the Nathanal of An Obscure Man perceives as artificial the distinctions by which living things are defined as different from one another:
He didn't feel himself to be, as so many people do, a man as opposed to beasts and trees; rather, a brother of one and a distant cousin of the other. Nor did he particularly consider himself male in contrast with the gentle order of women [...] Ages, sexes or even species seemed to him closer one to another than each generally assumed about the other: child or old man, man or woman, animal or biped who speaks and works with his hands, all come together in the misery and sweetness of existence. 38
When Nathanal's health fails and he feels himself close to death, he prefers to lie in the open, in a small valley where his decaying body will mingle with its natural surroundings:
Finally, he arrived at the hollow he had been looking for [...] It was comfortable here. Cautiously, he lay down in the short dune grass near a grove of arbutuses which sheltered him from the bit of wind. He could sleep a little before going back, if his heart told him to. He was thinking, though, that if by chance he were to die there, he would be spared all the usual human formalities [...] What one would find when
Ibid. Yourcenar chooses here to substitute shifting, marshy ground for the river of Greek legend, thus replacing a simple substance (water) with an ambivalent blend whose constituents cannot be distinguished.
36 37
35
Ibid, p.32.
For a more detailed analysis of this aspect of Feux (Fires), see FRANCESCA COUNIHAN, Le mlange et la combinaison des corps: lunion des contraires dans Feux de Marguerite Yourcenar, LUniversalit dans loeuvre de Marguerite Yourcenar (Tours: Societ Internationale des tudes Yourcenariennes, 1994), Vol.` 1, pp. 225-37.
38
YOURCENAR, An Obscure Man, cit., pp. 116-17.
spring came and the poachers who stole eggs from the nests arrived wouldn't even be worth burying. 39
This merging together of body and earth again conveys an impression of reality as something fluid and continuous, rather than differentiated and compartmentalised. Whether this is in fact an exclusively feminine perception of reality is of course uncertain; however, what can be said is that it corresponds surprisingly closely to views expressed by some French feminist writers. Both Hlne Cixous and Luce Irigaray, when contrasting the female experience of reality with the male norm, stress that whereas the latter is based on rigidly structured binary oppositions, the former is fluid, continuous, and endlessly open. In This Sex which is not One, Irigaray asserts the need for a specifically female form of expression, which will render directly this feminine experience of self and world:
How can we speak so as to escape from their compartments, their schemas, their distinctions and oppositions: virginal/deflowered, pure/impure, innocent/ experienced [...] How can we shake off the chain of these terms, free ourselves from their categories, rid ourselves of their names? 40
She goes on (addressing a woman, as throughout this piece) :

How can I say you when you are always other? How can I speak to you? You remain in flux, never congealing, never solidifying. What will make that current flow into words? [...] These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility [...] All this remains very strange to anyone claiming to stand on solid ground. Speak, all the same. Between us, hardness isn't necessary. We know the contours of our bodies well enough to love fluidity. 41
While these extracts from Yourcenar and Irigaray concern quite different matters, and while the two writers occupy widely divergent positions (not least on the question of women and feminism) there is nevertheless a certain resemblance in the way they are written. Both present an alternative to the logically-structured "masculine" view of the world, an alternative which stresses fluidity, openness and continuum, and both express this directly through the way in which they write. The difference lies in the fact that whereas Irigaray clearly presents this as the feminine alternative, Yourcenar makes no such statement. It is rather as if her
39 40 41
Ibid., p. 123 YOURCENAR, This Sex Which Is Not One, cit., p.212. Ibid, p.214-215
search for authenticity, for a faithful rendering of reality, has led her to the feminine almost despite herself. 42 We may conclude from this that certain aspects of Yourcenar's work (the question of identity, the individual's experience of reality as fluid rather than fixed) indicate a strongly feminine quality in her writing; however, this remains at odds with the limited way in which she chooses to portray women. Indeed, it is apparent from a study of representations of women in Yourcenar's work that their place is, to say the least, a minor one. In a body of work dominated by strong male characters, women are specifically excluded both from central roles and from such positively valued qualities as lucidity and reason. And yet, within this work, another current is present, which seems to question the accepted basis of reason itself, to dissolve the solid building blocks on which it rests, and to suggest instead a world of fluid forms and merging shapes, where reality is closer to a continuum than to a set of separate and fixed categories. It would be overstating the case to suggest that this current is the dominant one in Yourcenar's work; however, its presence can be felt, leading the reader to discover in this work hidden aspects which invite further exploration.
For other perspectives on feminine elements in Yourcenars work, see the readings of Italian feminist collective GRUPPO LA LUNA, Letture di Marguerite Yourcenar (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1986); ELENA REAL, Mer mythologique, mer mythique, mer mystique, in Marguerite Yourcenar, ed. A. Nysenholc and P. Aron, Revue de lUniversit de Bruxelles, 1988: 3-4, pp.81-87; MIEKE TAAT, La mer mle au soleil, Giornata Internazionale di Studio sullopera di Marguerite Yourcenar, ed. G. Giorgi, Il Confronto Letterario, Pavia, 1986: supplement to n. 5, pp. 59-67.
42
Gina Wisker
ABORIGINAL WOMENS WRITING: CHARTING THE DREAMTIME
Our ancient tribal people sat down and sang the spirits into this land giving it its physical form. Whiteman called our dreamtime a myth. Our people know it is a fact, it was before creationtime! they sang the trees, they sang the mountains, they sang the valleys, they sang the rivers and streams, all round, all round. They sang life in its vastness, into this brown land; and the spirit lives still, never has it been silenced, by whiteman or his restrictive ways, and the song had a beginning, and there will never be an ending until justice is returned to the singers of songs, our ancient tribal people! 1
The stories of Aboriginal people are from time immemorial but the writing of Aboriginal women has only recently started to emerge. It raises some interesting issues about writing and reading practices, and about the nature of discourses of interpretation. Wherever we look when seeking Aboriginal womens writing, we find that our own reading assumptions, and our desires to render comprehensible the kinds of narrative and poetry we find, get in the way. We become like the whiteman Ruby Langford criticises, calling what we find something else: a myth, not a novel, an autobiography, something we are used to and can talk about. For those of us interested in reading and studying the wide variety of writing available by Black, Asian and Australasian women, Aboriginal women remain one of the most hidden, silent and marginalised groups of Black women writers. Even the definition which links such writers into a group is an indicator of our difficulty. Black women writers in Australia are geograph-ically spread in a way which staggers anyone trying to discover their work and say something about it. They are also very diverse people, and as difficult to
1
RUBY LANGFORD, Singing the Land, Hecate 17:2 (1991) p. 36.
Wisker: Aboriginal Womens Writing
locate, individually, as they are formally, technically and critically. However, discovery and interpretation, although potentially fraught with misconceptions, is a rewarding experience for readers. As an emergent group of women writers they engage us with their records of personal and coommunity history and their revivifying of heritage, the stories of the Dreamtime. The works of Aboriginal women writers are neither easily classifiable, nor easy to find. And when we start to discuss their work we need to tackle issues of cultural context:
The problems of speaking about people who are other cannot, however, be a reason for not doing so. The argument that its just too difficult can easily become a new form of silencing by default [...] But whites can never speak for Blacks. 2
Gayatri Spivak offers a speaking position for white readers in this situation:
Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced? 3
Ignorance is destructive. Maureen Walker, in conversation with Bronwen Levy details the history of genocide, gold sovereigns offered for Aboriginal scalps, slaughter, rape, and the younger generations guilt about racism, alongside their ignorance:
I just dont think white people have come to terms with themselves, and their history here in this land yet. And so its very difficult for them to come to terms with Aboriginal people, and its very difficult for them then to try and pass onto their children, or teach them anything about Aboriginal culture, or Aboriginal history. And so, they choose not to do it. Or, theyll present only the traditional culture. 4
Carole Ferrier has acknowledged some of the difficulties of incorporating Aboriginal womens writing into the literary establishment in her book on Australian womens writing, Gender Culture and Politics, 5 which contains
GAYATRI SPIVAK and SNEJA GUNEW Questions of Multiculturalism, Hecate 12:1/2 (1986), p. 137.
3 4 2
Ibid. MAUREEN WALKER in conversation with Bronwen Levy, Hecate 17: 2 (1991),
p. 189. CAROLE FERRIER, Aboriginal Womens Narratives, Gender, Politics and Fiction, ed. Carole Ferrier (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1985), pp. 200219.
5
a chapter on Aboriginal womens writing. From this and my own searching I discovered that the categories of novel, drama and poetry were misleading descriptions for creative works which spring from an oral literature, and which when transformed into something recognisably publishable, usually had to be filtered through a white writing partner, thus changing the form of the expression and inevitably some of the emphasis as well. Many Aboriginal women have been and are creative but, as Alice Walker has shown in writing about Afro-American women, 6 their creativity has usually taken ephemeral forms. Women were also oral storytellers, and in this they resemble the griottes of East and West Africa. The stories of Aboriginal women, unlike those of more Westernised African women, are only just beginning to be recorded. What I found when I looked for writing by Aboriginal women were several different popular forms. There are largely autobiographical records produced through the partnership of a white Australian and an Aboriginal woman in which oral storytelling was recorded by the white man or woman acting as a cultural translator. Latterly these have been succeeded by works by Aboriginal women writing without the translator, such as Sally Morgans My Place, an intensely autobiographical record of the lives of her family and her people, or Glenyse Wards Wandering Girl. 7 The style is realistic, everyday, a testimony. There is also the more formally developed poetry of Kath Walker, an activist and teacher who uses metaphor and myth, and political, historical engagement. Bobbi Sykess more revolutionary poetry is polemical and shows a very clear sisterly relation to that of Afra-American women such as June Jordan and Sonia Sanchez. It speaks out critically against racism and silencing. Defining and categorising these works is necessary if we wish to talk about them. Once you know how to name, you can start to recognise difference, and recognition enables speech and power. But naming, of course, is a form of translation, and the history of Aboriginal women is one rife with translation. One of the side effects of translation, however wellmeaning, can be disempowerment: by rendering the point of view and the story in a form which we can understand we remove its real meaning and power for its producers and community. First visitors and settlers redescribed and misunderstood the roles of womens relationships, and customs of friendship, their redescriptions giving them in their own minds the license to import European ways and hierarchies, a scale in which
ALICE WALKER, In Search of Our Mothers Gardens (London: The Womens Press, 1984). SALLY MORGAN, My Place (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987); GLENYSE WARD, Wandering Girl (Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, 1988).
7 6
notoriously all non-European or darker skinned peoples always end up relegated to the lowest point:
If they ever deign to come near you to take a present they appear as coy, shy, timorous as a maid on her wedding night. But when they are, as they think, out of your reach, they holler and chatter to you, and frisk and flirt and play a hundred wanton pranks, equally as significant as the solicitations of a Covent Garden strumpet. 8
This is a shocking but telling piece. Bradleys crass misreadings the playfulness is certainly not equally significant here at all are evidence of what we have come to recognise as an imperialist equation of the indigenous with the sexually available, newly discovered lands with the opportunity for exportation of excess sexual energies and the destructively naive finders keepers attitudes underlying imperialist and colonialist expanision. As a simple piece of evidence in a cautionary tale, however, this quotation reminds us acutely how as readers and students we have to avoid intentional or unintentional imperialism, colonialism and appropriation. Aboriginal women writers themselves are well aware of the dangers of appropriation, of being mispresented in any transaction which offers them and their works some wider dissemination. Silence, absence and marginalisation are other alternatives which many are forced to put up with and which others choose. The relationships between white Australian (or non-Australian) feminists and Aboriginal women, whether in a daily arena or one of the academy, have been far from easy, mirroring the anger among Black feminists in the UK at their marginalisation in a homogeneous soup of womanhood, a middle-class white heterosexual feminist assumption:
I dont even know if Im capable of understanding Aborigines, in Victoria? Aboriginal women here, Ive never seen one, and if I did, what would I say, damned me if Im going to feel guilty. 9
WILLIAM BRADLEY, Voyage to New South Wales, 29 Jan 1788, cited in Karen Jennings and David Hollinsworth, Shy Maids and Wanton Strumpets, Hecate 13:2 (1987-88), pp. 113-33, p.129. LISA BELLEAR NOONUCCAL, Hecate 17:2 (1991) pp. 204-205. For Black feminists reactions to white feminism see Feminist Review 17: special issue, Many Voices One Chant, Black Feminist Perspectives (1984).
9
Lisa Bellear Noonuccal, an Aboriginal woman poet, takes on a middle-class white feminists voice in Womens Liberation, to expose ignorance, selfishness, and later a little misdirected magnanimity. In considering the history of racist abuse and suffering, the lot of Aboriginal women must be particularly foregrounded, especially in relation to mistranslation and misrepresentation. The Aboriginal population was reduced in Queensland from 120,000 in the 1820s to less than 20,000 by the 1920s. White male settlers misunderstood established modes of relationships and sharing, lapsing into treating Black women with a mixture of desire and guilt, transferring to them their own repressive guilt and blaming the women for the sexual activity into which they forced them. Black women were viewed by white males as being founts of insatiable libidinal desire. 10 Typically among imperialist or colonialist male exports, self-loathing was projected onto the women who were called animals, white repression turning into a projection-rejection response, aggressively dehumanising, and parallelling the seizure and use of the land. There are numerous tales of running down black girls who were called gins and keeping them with shearing teams, to be repeatedly raped, then releasing them at the end of the season. On farms women were used to both provide sexual services and carry out domestic chores. Issues of identification, labelling and translation are important here too. Language describing the sexual control of these girls is animal oriented, a trick which dehumanises its objects, and removes any sense of identification and guilt from the one who maps and labels in order to define and control. Capturing women is mustering, raping is gin busting, and keepers of Aboriginal women are gin shepherds and combos, while the women themselves were stud gins or black velvet. Prostitutes were usually paid in bad drink and opium, and discarded, as were homestead girls when older or pregnant, so venereal disease spread and kin alienation was a real problem. The results of all this were a fall in birthrate, disease, starvation, and infant mortality by exposure.
Representation and writing

Set against this history of disempowerment and translation, of what do Aboriginal women write? There is a need to write of their lives, and the lives of relatives and friends, to describe and so pass on the tenor of the everyday in these very different contexts. By doing so they dispel some of the myths about Aboriginal peoples that they are always lazy and drunk and tell truths about racism and sexism. They write of the difficulties
RAYMOND EVANS, Dont you remember Black Alice, Sam Holt? Aboriginal women in Queensland History, Hecate 8:2 (1982) pp. 6-21.
10
within familes who have intermarried or interbred, for those who realise that they are part Black, when the movement to embrace this Blackness politically is relatively new in Australia. The absence of great Aboriginal women writers and university teachers or literary critics can in part be explained by the relatively recent recognition of the importance of ensuring that Aboriginal culture is preserved, enabled, funded, even intermixed in many instances as it is with White Australian culture now. The women whose work is available to us are a minority who have sought and found wider public recognition; others remain with oraliterature and do not seek publication or publicity. Many have set themselves to record the beauty and the difficulties of the lives of those of their community. Whether they write their own work or work with a transcriber, they are imaginative escapees recording that escape from prejudice and often servitude. Others concentrate more on re-telling the old tales of the dreamtime, explaining mythically, exploring heritage. These works find new audiences among those interested in myth, fantasy, the imaginative lives of women. Probably the first Aboriginal novel is Wild Cat Falling, by Mudrooroo Narogin (also known as Colin Johnson) and the second is Monica Clares Karobran. A milestone in the development of the Aboriginal womans autobiography/novel is Sally Morgans already mentioned My Place, of which Narogin notes that:
it marks a stage when it is OK to be Aboriginal as long as you are young, gifted and not very black. It is an individualised story and the concerns of the Aboriginal community are of secondary importance.
Morgans work, and Ruby Langfords Dont take your Love to Town, Narogin argues, not typically Aboriginal because they describe an individual battling towards success, while Aboriginal tale-telling was largely a tribal camp fire activity about the community, not the one. 11 A great problem about writing and perhaps colluding not only with the formats of white established writing but also the controls of the publishers sets up a confrontational situation seen in looking at Black womens writing from other contexts. The question arises as to who is giving and who is being given the voice, and for what reasons. Narogin comments:
MUDROOROO NAROGIN, Writing From the Fringe (Melbourne: Hyland House 1990), p.167. M UDROOROO NAROGIN, Wild Cat Falling (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965); MONICA CLARE, Karobran: The Story of An Aboriginal Girl (Sydney: APCOL, 1978); RUBY LANGFORD, Dont Take Your Love to Town (Ringwood: Penguin 1988).
11
It is only in the last few years that black literary texts have been allowed to speak for themselves: that is, the Aboriginal allowed to say what she or he wants to say and in the language she or he wishes it to be said. 12
Dual authoring, and the editing of Black womens writing by white collaborators, male or female, must affect the writing and treatment of issues, and Narogin argues that it seriously affects the themes and forms used in Clares Karobran, as it also does in Labumores (Elsie Roughseys) An Aboriginal Mother (1984), of which the male, non-Aboriginal, editors said at the time:
it became apparent that some editing would be required in order for it to be acceptable for commercial publication and accessible to the average white Australian reader....Despite the changes to the text, we feel that we have preserved the flavour and flow of Elsies work. It remains comprehensible to her fellow Mornington Islanders, and will be of interest, no doubt, to many Aboriginal readers, as well as to the white audience. 13
In the later case of Margaret Somerville and Patsy Cogens Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs, Somerville tells us of Patsys resistance both to putting down her oral language and to the oraliterature form, the wandering around and around, because she wanted it to take the form of written autobiography. 14 This desire to organise and render the language and form more logical springs, as it does with Caribbean women writers, largely from a negative attitude towards mothertongue which has developed because of racism and hierarchies related to language and expression. Reclaiming and writing in mothertongue, scripting as near as possible the oraliterature form, is a move many writers come to recognise as a way of claiming roots and identity. Forms of writing can indicate forms of cultural resistance. Carole Ferrier identifies several: the use of wry humour and irony to critique, the use of the Aboriginal form of resistance by withholding information, or deliberately telling, and the spiral, non-linear narrative form, which is also used by Keri Hulme, the part-Maori writer, in The Bone People. 15 There
12 13
Ibid., p. 158.
PAUL MEMNOTT and ROBIN HORSMAN, Preface to ELSIE ROUGHSEY, An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and The New (Ringwood: Penguin 1984). MARGARET SOMERVILLE and PATSY COHENS, Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs (Sydney: Allen and Unwin 1990), and MARGARET SOMERVILLE, Life (H)istory Writing: The Relationship Between Talk and Text, Hecate 17:1 (1991), special issue: Women/Australia/Theory, pp 95-109.
15 14
FERRIER, Aboriginal Womens Narratives cit., p. 200-19
are similarities here with the kind of patterning and recurrences found in some African narratives: with the telling of ones story in order to claim identity found in slave narratives, with the mixture of speech and storytelling found in African narratives which emphasise immediacy and the oraliterary form - passing on stories as with an oral form. Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra comment on the realist elements of Aboriginal narratives, which lay a claim for truth:
Aboriginal realist texts are always structured by an underlying abstract text which is a primary means of encoding Aboriginal meanings and the metameaning of Aboriginality itself. 16
And Carole Ferrier argues that in the work of Aboriginal writers there is a dialectic between speech and silence in working simultaneously with and against history. 17 For the Aboriginal writer claiming identity it is an awkward critical moment. Post -structuralism focusses on the problematic status of the subject, just at a time when the Aboriginal writers and others who have been marginalised wish and need to claim identity and subjecthood and to dispel the established patterns of relations in which the central focus of meaning has been those in power. Aboriginal women writers who seek to explore and express their identity, both individually and in terms of the community, to speak and to create, will to some extent have to collude with the established, publishable forms. But we as readers will need to come half way as well, and discover how to read their work, find out from them how they construct their own articulations of visions and records, of self, reality, history. It is an emerging form, and there is an emerging number of Aboriginal women writers. We need to continue to develop our critical awareness of how to read their work. We also need to find it in the first place.
Starting to read location and introductions.

For those who wish to begin to read Aboriginal womens writing, a good starting point is with the accessible (in terms of ordering books rather than just appreciation) Sally Morgan and Kath Walker. Anthologies of Australian writing are available in England, i.e. The Faber Book of Modern Australian Verse, Australian Poetry in the Twentieth Century, The Penguin Book of Australian Womens Writing though women appear less frequently than men and Aboriginal women hardly at all in the general
BOB HODGE and VIJAY MISHRA, Dark Side of the Dream ((Sydney: Allen and Unwin 1992).
17
16
FERRIER, Aboriginal Womens Narratives cit., p. 215.
anthologies. 18 Good bookshops can order Glenyse Ward, Faith Bandler, Ruby Langford, among others. The tradition is an oral one, and many of the works we might read are life stories. The first published work by an Aboriginal woman was Ursula McConnels Myths of the Munkan in 1957; then came Sylvia Cairns Uncle Willie Mackenzies Legends of the Goundins (1967), followed by Elsie Jones, Kilamopa Wura Kaani: The Galah and the Frill Neck Lizard (1978) and Daisy Utemorrah, Visions of the Mowanjum: Aboriginal Writings from the Kimberley (1980). Poets include Kath Walker, and Bobbi Sykes whose Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions was published in 1979. Other Aboriginal women are starting to publish in journals such as Hecate and Identity: they include Vicky Davey, Mary Duroux, Karen Nangaa Foster, Hyllus Maris, Ngitji Ngitji (Mona Tur), Nyra Rankin, Valda Naburula Shannon, Daisy Utemorrah, Pansy Rose Napalijarri, Maureen Watson and Aileen Corpus. Several of these women also publish short stories and dramas. Autobiographies include those by Evonne Goolagong, Evonne! On the Move (1975), and others by Margaret Tucker, Theresa Clemens and Shirley C. Smith who with the assistance of Bobbi Sykes, wrote Mumshirl: An Autobiography (1981). Then followed Marnie Kennedys Born a Half Caste (1985), and Sally Morgans My Place (1987), Glenyse Wards Wandering Girl (1988), and Ruby Langfords Dont Take Your Love to Town (1989). The very first novels, which have a great deal of autobiographical content, are Faith Bandlers Wacvie (1977), and Monica Clares Karobran, (1978). Fuller lists are available from Claire Bucks Bloomsbury Guide to Womens Literature (1992) and Paperbark, an Anthology of Black Australian Writing (1990). 19 Autobiographical and semi-autobiographical works are in a long tradition of Aboriginal creative response, as Mudrooroo Narogin noted:
The Faber Book of Australian Verse, ed. Vincent Buckley (London: Faber 1991); Australian poetry in the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann (Australia: Heinemann 1991); The Penguin Book of Australian Womens Writing, ed Dale Spender (Victoria: Penguin 1988). BOBBI SYKES, Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions, (Cammeray, NSW: The Saturday Centre 1979); E VONNE GOOLAGONG, Evonne ! On the Move (Sydney: Dutton 1973); SHIRLEY C. SMITH and BOBBI SYKES, Mumshirl (Richmond, Victoria: Heinemann 1981); MARNIE KENNEDY, Born a Half Caste (Canberra: AIS 1985); FAITH BANDLER, Wacvie (Adelaide: Rigby 1977); The Bloomsbury Guide to Womens Literature, ed. CLAIRE BUCK (London: Bloomsbury 1992); Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings, ed. JACK DAVIS et al. (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press 1990).
19
18
The widespread use of biography and autobiography by Aboriginal writers can be linked to a cultural tradition in which verse or song would detail the lives of dreaming ancestors [...] It remains to be seen if this tradition was used to detail the lives of ordinary people [...] It may have been so. 20
Fictionalised Autobiographies Sally Morgan, Glenyse Ward and Faith Bandler

Sally Morgans personal, powerful tale My Place is just such contemporary testimony. Sally Morgan retells her own story and locates herself and her family as Aboriginal people with their own history and lifestyles. The continuing theme is her growing speculation about her origins, based on the questions fired at her at school. Her colour, indigenous to Australia, ironically is seen as a mark of difference and foreignness by her white school mates, and this begins to be confusing. Sally does not actually know of her Aboriginal origins, like other deliberately integrated Aboriginal children, many of whom were actually adopted out of Black families.
The kids at school had also begun asking us what country we came from. This puzzled me because, up until then Id thought we were the same as them. If we insisted that we came from Australia, theyd reply, Yeah, but what about ya parents, bet they didnt come from Australia. One day I tackled mum about it as she washed the dishes. What do you mean, where do we come from ? I mean, what country, the kids at school want to know what country we come from. They reckon were not Aussies. Are we Aussies, Mum? 21
Her nan grunts and leaves, her mother says to say they are Indian, which seems exotic to Sally. The problem, momentarily solved, resurges, and the book focusses on these issues of identity throughout. Her nan becomes a strong influence especially after the death of her father, bringing unlabelled Aboriginal values about life and the land into the home. Although they keep many pets, there is a rule about returning the wild animals:
The only pets we werent allowed to keep were wild ones, Goanna, tadpoles, frog, gilgie and insects all had to be returned alive and well to their natural habitat. 22
MUDROOROO NAROGIN, cited in Aboriginal Writing Today, ed. J. Davis and B. Hodge (Canberra: AIAS 1985), p. 2.
21 22 20
MORGAN, My Place, cit., p. 38. Ibid., p. 56.
Sally raises a deserted baby mudlark, and plays in the swamps. Her nan is the link with the hidden past and she communicates with the gum trees and other growing things, protects animals and draws traditional representations in the dust of the yard. All of this is gradually recalled and pieced together to form a picture of a strong woman who knows she needs to keep silent about her Aboriginal origins, but wishes to retain the values and beliefs and is a mainstay in the family. Using the form of oraliture, the book circles around revelations about nan and other family members, with meaning becoming clearer as incidents are recalled or recur. But the day Sally comes to realise her nan is Black and Aboriginal is poignant and painful. In the chapter A Black Grandmother as nan collects coins about be devalued, the misplaced trust in old currency and the ignored trust in old ways parallels the terrible devaluation Sally experiences at the hands of her seeming friends when she acknowledges that her nan is Black. Her personal currency is devalued; she too is tricked by Australian notions of unity and worth which have actually cut her out like devalued coins. The first revelation comes about when her art teacher has ridiculed her treasured artwork, actually a product of a different, Aboriginal, inherited way of representation. When Sally ingests a set of cultural values which denies her artistic heritage and burns the artwork in shame, nan is furious and bursts out:
Nan punched. She lifted up her arm and thumped her clenched fist hard on the kitchen table. You bloody kids dont want me, you want a bloody white grandmother, Im black. Do you hear, Im black, black, black!.
Sally tries to work this all out but her sister acknowledges hostility:
Dont Abos feel close to the earth and all that stuff? God, I dont know, all I know is none of my friends like them. 23
On openly acknowledging her Aboriginal origins, Sally finds racial prejudice entirely based on colour and preconceptions about behaviour and difference. Some of her seeming friends reject her, but she decides to discover more about her origins. Piecing together stories from her nans brother, Arthur, she begins a searching study into her family history and that of Aboriginal people in Western Australia, during which work she uncovers a heritage of white Australian violence and shame. Arthurs story forms part of the second half of the book along with that of Daisy, Sally Morgans nan.
23
Ibid., pp. 97, 98.
The book is a lively, inquisitive, revivifying of a lost past hidden because of the fear of prejudice, establishing identity and Aboriginal legacy, with joy and pride. Personal and funny, it links memories by themes and incidents, building into a pattern of quests, and discoveries. If we just read this as an autobiography, however, we are missing the very kind of Aboriginal expression which Sally discovers is ironed out and denied in her own art at school. The different stories of Sallys family provide a circling and layering, building up a sense of the way the community and family have responded to and understood events, with Sally central. The subject matter is poignant, testimony to the familys recognition that it is their Aboriginal origins which will make them vulnerable in racist society. They have also internalsed a sense of inferiority, but it is one daily reinforced in a society which sees Aborigines as less than human beings. The maintenance of a lie about origin is tragic, but understandable. Glenyse Wards Wandering Girl and her second work, Unna You Fullas are more recent autobiographical works which deliberately set out to speak for other Aboriginal women in the community, who have experienced the racist oppression and denial which Glenyse suffered. 24 She records her experience at Wandering Mission and later as a servant to white farmers in the 1960s. Glenyse Wards style is a mixture of straightforward truth telling, from her point of view, and a wryly humorous rendition of some of the experiences, (the irony is confused with naivete at the recipients peril). Kathy Willetts comments The authors use of understatement, ironic humour and simple language make the narrative both credible and moving [...] The authentic voice of the author has not been suppressed by editorial influence. 25 So she notes straightforwardly for example that the carpet is stained terrible, I felt shame, and the cream cake went down real well. 26 Humour allows relief against the racism. As Jackie Huggins points out: Murrie humour (Murrie is an Aboriginal term for Aboriginals) is an integral and warm concept of Aboriginal society. Black humour is often so delicate that it is hard to locate. 27 Where Sally Morgans book looks at family life, Glenyse Wards books record her own personal example of common phenomena in the
GLENYSE WARD, Wandering Girl (Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation 1988), and Unna You Fellas (Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation 1991). KATHY WILLETTS, In Search of the Authentic Voice (review), Hecate 16:1/2 (1990), p 167.
26 27 25 24
WARD, Wandering Girl, cit., pp. 26, 27, 56.
JACKIE HUGGINS, Firing on the Mind: Aboriginal Women Domestic Servants in the Inter-War Years, Hecate 13:2 (1987/98), pp. 5-13, p.8.
everyday lives of Aboriginal girls and women who were removed from their families, brought up in missions and sent out into either domestic service or to work on farms and sheep shearing stations. Hers is in many ways a typical story, though less harsh perhaps than it could have been in an earlier period. Most European children in the North were reared by Aboriginal women and suckled. Some women had warm relationships but most report brutality and poor diets. They fed the dogs better than they fed the blacks out there! reports Ruby De Sage of one station and in the home, The Black womans entire day seemingly revolved around catering for the white familys needs, values and lifestyle. 28 They had little leisure time, no holiday and it was necessary to seek a permit in order to visit their families. In their own communities, Aboriginal children grow up then as now, often cared for primarily by the grandparents within the warm atmosphere of the wider family and whole community which shares the responsibility. The removal of children into adoption or service, and the separation of women from their communities was an attempt to eradicate Aboriginal cultural behaviours and beliefs, founded on a notion of white superiority. Domestic and stockyard work was no idyllic lifestyle. Glenyse Ward was at least spared the kind of sexual harassment of which Archibald Meston wrote:
The Aboriginal women are usually at the mercy of anybody, from the proprietor or manager to the stockman, cook, rouseabout and jackaroo. Frequently the women do all the housework and are locked up at night. 29
Jackie Huggins work on Aboriginal women in service mentions the developing form of personal testimony without dependence on a white writing partner, and Glenyse Wards book is a good example of this:
A new phenomenon of contemporary Aboriginal writing is emerging whereby women writers have the double advantage of relating their history in literally black and white terms, and simultaneously transcending and cutting across cultural boundaries. 30
Glenyses testimony is poignant and filled with wry humour. Her entry into life as a servant is full of rude awakenings and racism. Working for Mrs Bigelow, she is treated as less than human, refused a cup to drink
28 29
Ibid., p. 13.
ARCHIBALD MESTON, First Report on Western Aborigines (16 June 1897, Queensland State Archives col/140).
30
HUGGINS, Firing on the Mind cit., p. 22.
from, supposed to eat beans on toast when they eat balanced meals. The language is stark and simple and it:
sets up a series of readily decodable signs which offer a preferred reading of the text in support of Aboriginal claims for redress of violently oppressive conditions imposed on them as late as the 1960s. Ward sets up a series of binary oppposites whereby white bigotry and oppression are contrasted with Black consciousness, and responses to an imposed subservience. These binary opposites enable the Aboriginal reader, in the active process of decoding, to identify with the authors Aboriginality, dignity, intelligence and final decision to take control of her own destiny. White readers, too, are invited by the careful structuring of signs in the text, to dissassociate themselves from the insensitivity and domination of the callously charitable Mrs Bigelow. 31
Glenyse Ward highlights the experience of the Aboriginal as victim: we lost our identity through being put into a mission, forced to abide by the European way, 32 but the tone is also unstoppably lively, celebrating life and self preservation. Contrasts are emphasised between the freedom of Xmas time and parties at the Mission, and the constraints of everyday life there and at Mrs Bigelows. There is much joy, friendship and celebration in the childrens lives in the Mission and among friends she makes outside Mrs Bigelows home, such as the local shopkeeper. Isolation and alienation contrast with friendships, and humane treatment with the bigotry and bullying of her employer. Food provides contrast too - the beans and tin mug give way when, alone, Glenyse eats bacon and fresh fruit on bone china, claiming her status as a woman with dignity. This is a personal story which also speaks for the community. As Mudrooroo Narogin writes:
Aboriginal writers without exception are committed writers. They are in no sense closet writers...they have no desire to isolate themselves from their kith and kin. 33
It is an episodic tale, a memoir, with a personal register and chronological sequence, and a sound sense of development of the narrators self image. Glenyse Wards first statement about identity comes when she confronts a living room full of Mrs Bigelows guests (much like Maya Angelou in I
31 32 33
WILLETTS, review cit., p 167. WARD, Wandering Girl, cit., p. 1.
MUDROOROO NAROGIN, Guerilla Poetry: Lionel Fogartys Response to Language Genocide in Ulli Beier, ed. Long Water, Aboriginal Art and Literature, in Aspect, no 34 (August 1968) pp 72-81.
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, when she drops a tray to point out how it matters to be called by her own name):
Soon as I opened the door all the chatter and laughter stopped. You could hear a pin drop as all eyes were on me. All of a sudden some poshed-up voice, with a plum in her mouth came out of a crowd, Tracy dear, is this your little dark servant? I just stood there smiling. I thought it was wonderful that at last people were taking notice of me. There were sniggers and jeers from everywhere. I turned to the lady who did all the talking and said My name is Glenyse. She was quite startled and said, Oh dear, I didnt think you had a name. 34
We have here faithfully recorded a mixture of perspectives. Glenyse naively hopes she will be welcomed, she is aware of the sniggers and jeers, and she retains her dignity, showing up the bigotry of the guest. The whole merges into an ironic, perceptive response. Glenyse Wards are fully Aboriginal documents committed to selfidentity, published by an Aboriginal collective, devoid of non-Aboriginal interference. This makes her work like Robert Brophos Fringedweller, of whose voice Narogin writes that it is:
an Authentic Aboriginal voice perhaps speaking for the first time without the intrusion of an editor, the cleaner-upper of a text who too often wipes away the purity of a mans or womans personal style or lore so that we end up with sterile, neatly written paragraphs in standard English. 35
This whole issue of white co-authorship and editorship is a sensitive one. While clearly sponsorship and positive action lie behind much collaboration, what emerges is a hybrid; texts which have been modified by the co-authorship, and by the regulatory procedures of publishing contexts. It is in danger of being a form of translation which mistranslates. This is a familiar feature of all published writing, of course, but for those seeking an outlet for expresion of an authentic voice, it is oppressive, and frustrating. Bruce McGuiness makes a political statement about the importance of authenticity :
We maintain that unless Aboriginal people control the funding, and unless they control the content, the publishing, the ultimate presentation of the article, then it is not Aboriginal; that it ceases to be Aboriginal
WARD, Wandering Girl, cit. P. 24; cf. MAYA ANGELOU, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (London: Virago, 1988). NAROGIN, cited in Aboriginal Writing Today, ed. J. Davis and B. Hodge (Canberra: AIAS 1985), p. 3.
35 34
when it is interfered with, when it is tampered with by non -Aboriginal people...Its no good for Aboriginal people to be writing what publishing companies, what governments, what government agencies decree that they ought to write. If its going to be legitimate Aboriginal literature, then it must come from Aboriginal people and their communities without any restrictions placed upon them. 36
A significant feature of much Aboriginal writing, in common with work by other Black writers, is the claiming of identity through tracing personal history, and through insisting on being named. Like Afra-American slave narratives, testifying is a characteristic of recovered Aboriginal slave narratives, and if the person to testify is dead, their family might take over, as with the early biographical novel Wacvie, by Faith Bandler, an Aboriginal rights activist and writer from Murwimballah NSW, daughter of a Pacific islander who was brought to work in Queensland canefields by slave traders in the 1880s. In Wacvie (1977) and Marani in Australia (1980 with Len Fox), 37 Faith Bandler traces her fathers capture from his beautiful home island Ambrym in the new Hebrides, to work in Queensland from which he escaped in 1897, settling in Tumbulgum in New South Wales. Returning to her fathers island she is greeted as family and everyone attempts to trace her ancestry:
I came home determined that my fathers story should be told. There were other reasons why the book had to be written. The slave trade of Australia had never been included in school curricula. I found that most Australians do not believe that slave labour was used to develop the sugar cane industry. Those who were enslaved did not have the opportunity to tell their story. The story has only been told by historians with a detachment from the thoughts and feelings of the people concerned. 38
Faith Bandler, Glenyse Ward and Sally Morgan are all providing semifictionalised biography and autobiography, forms which spring out of oral history and forms such as diaries and letters, oraliterature and testimony from the lives of women and communities to whom the written word is both a new development (with illiteracy rates high) and a form of translation and loss. The autobiographical form, however, although offering an opportunity to seek, recognise and express a sense of self, is in
BRUCE MCGUINESS, The Politics of Aboriginal Literature in Aboriginal Writing Today, ed. Jack Davis and Bob Hodge, cit., pp. 40-50, p.49.
37 36
FAITH BANDLER and LEN FOX, Marani In Australia (Adelaide: Rigby/Opal BANDLER, Wacvie, cit.
1980).
38
danger of being misread by academic postmodernist critics and decreed to be conforming to bourgeois individualism. This denies the community orientation of the self, which both Faith Bandler and Glenyse Ward stress when they argue that their slave or domestic narratives are typical and speak for a groups experiences. It is important that there be the opportunity to recognise the subject, to let the subject, individual or representative, speak, so that Aboriginal women can claim their different identity and heritage. As Nancy Harstock argues, this speaking out in your own voice is a move to re-empower silenced people:
Rather than getting rid of subjectivity, our notions of the subject, as Foucault does, and substituting his notion of the individual as an effect of power relations, we need to engage in the historical, political and theoretical process of constituting ourselves as subjects as well as objects of history..........to develop an account of the world which treats our perspectives not as subjugated or disruptive knowledge but as primary and constitutive of a different world. 39
What can be lost in the written recording of oral history or oral literature is a different voice:
Its rhythms, its spiral not linear chronology, its moods of non-verbal communication, its humour, and its witholding of information. Many of these things will be untranslatable to the printed page. 40
Many Aboriginal writers also comment on the difficulties of having to be seen as so representative of their communities when they wish to escape the stigma and stereotyping of being typical. Jackie Huggins notes, in conversation:
Were caught in between like meat in a sandwich, when it comes to being torn between white peoples expectations of us and Community expectations; I think that you have to have a really strong Black person not to apologise for who you are and what you do. But also, how do you draw the line with these racist white fellas? 41
Poetry
NANCY HARSTOCK Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?, Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. in Joyce Nicholson (New York: Routledge 1990) pp 1634, p. 171.
40 41 39
FERRIER, Aboriginal Womens Narratives cit., p. 135.
JACKIE HUGGINS Questions of Collaboration, an interview with Jackie Huggins and Isabel Tarrago, Hecate 16:1/2 (1990), p. 147.
As well as writing oriented towards autobiography and testimony, there is a wealth of poetry produced by Aboriginal women writers. Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) is the best known Aboriginal woman poet and her The Dawn is at Hand is available in the UK. She was born in November 1920 on Stradbroke Island, 30km East of Brisbane, and commemorates the myths of Stradbroke island in Stradbroke Dreamtime (1972), a compilation of stories of her childhood, with illustrations. She went into domestic service, served in the Australian womens army service in the war, had two sons, and joined the Communist Party, the only party which eschewed the White Australia Policy. In the 1960s years of freedom rides, strikes and struggle for the vote she was prominent and persuasive for Aboriginal Rights (as was her father). In 1964 her first volume of poetry, the first by any Aborigine, We Are Going, was published with encouragement from both Judith Wright and the Commonwealth Literary Fund . The Dawn is at Hand came out in 1966, and My People in 1970. In 1989 her poetry was set to music by a fellow Australian, Malcolm Williamson. Kath served as Queensland State Secretary in relation to Aboriginal rights, lobbied for reforms, served on the Aboriginal Arts Board, the Housing Commitee and tribal Council, lectured on the Aboriginal condition and became Managing Director of the Noonuccal-Nughie Cultural Centre and a remedial school teacher. She travelled extensively on scholarships and visits and also established a sitting down place in the Stradbroke island area of her ancestors and welcomed travellers to her caravan. 42 Kath Walkers poetry reclaims identity, history and context for Aborigonal people. Her main concerns interweave the mythic and the contemporary community, showing with the authentic Aborginal voice and ways of seeing the world how her people have been disinherited and denied. There is a sense of loss, a recognition of confusion about why the estbalished customs and beliefs were considered fit victims for the European steamroller which oddly and inappropriately called itself progress, when it merely meant dehumanisation and difference. Her cadences are filled with loss, but also with celebration, and in many of the poems there is a mixture of lively humour, ironising western values, with a reverence towards nature and community and a hopeful projection to a time of new unity and identity. In All One Race she suggests a tolerant multiculturalism. While Japanese, German, British and others are not interested in brumby runs or
KATH WALKER, The Dawn is at Hand (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press 1970; London: Marion Boyars 1992); Stradbroke Dreamtime (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1992); We Are Going (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press 1964); My People: A Kath Walker Collection (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press 1970).
42
kangaroos, the Aborigines do not wish to take the homes or activities of those other nationalities either:
Im for all humankind, not colour gibes; Im international, and never mind tribes. 43
In Let us not be bitter she suggests a new time is coming, and bitterness is regressive, a maggot in the mind. The future comes like dawn after the dark/ bringing fulfilment. There are many other poems whose generosity and debate about how to live in unity and racial tolerance establish KathWalker as a politically outspoken voice of her people. So The Unhappy Race speaks to white mans losses; Assimilation - No!, and its companion piece Integration-yes! set up a sound argument about learning in harmony rather than being forced to deny difference and become secondary, subjugated. 44 An Appeal, in the same politicised, rousing verse form as Audens A Communist to Others pleads for statesmen, Unions, Churches, Writers, the Press and white well wishers to right the wrongs of inequality and oppression. In a similar tone but different form (even shorter lines rhyming) in United we win the fringe dweller Black man knows that he has lost a great deal but has white men as friends and a new dawn of equality is hoped for, with mateship uppermost, when a world of workers form shore to shore as equals live at last. 45 With a more specific and social orientation, Kath Walker looks at the fate of Aboriginal people who have come into close relations with whites and their lack of values. In Dark Unmarried Mothers she considers the legitimated assaults on Aboriginal women in jobs, on stations, in town and city. Persistently there is no reckoning, and those who might bring the rapists to order Turn the blind eye/ wash the hands like Pilate. 46 Her poems also register and mourn the siginificant elders, the old ways. In Last of His Tribe a victim of Change is the law, ousted by new ways, old William Mackenzie, last surviving member of the Darwarbada tribe of the Caboolture district is recalled. He died in 1968 and spent his last days displaced in a Salvation Army Home. Here his valour and his language iare relived and preserved:
I ask and you let me hear The soft vowelly tongue to be heard now
43 44 45 46
WALKER, All One Race, Dawn, cit., p. 19. Let us not be bitter and Unhappy Race , ibid., p. 20, p. 39. An Appeal, and United We Win, ibid., p. 21, p. 109. Dark Unmarried Mothers , ibid, p. 27.
No more for ever. For me You enact old scenes, old ways, you who have used Boomerang and Spear. You singer of ancient tribal songs, You leader once in the corroboree. 47
In the same collection Tribal Justice deals with a boastful adulterous bully, Bora with rites of passage, and Ballad of the Totems amongst others recalls old rights and beliefs, reviving a lived version of the Aboriginal ways and beliefs. Changes are also recorded as are the difficulties of living between two cultures when the community has been disenfranchised by white Australian ways. One who has ostensibly adapted, working as a cook, is torn between the two cultures, but ensures her people are fed. Cookalingee, for Elsie Lewis is still an Aboriginal woman lubra and rewards the hungry black faces who show surprise at the presentation of the kitchen on the station
Cookalingee, lubra still Spite of white-man station drill, Knows the tribal laws of old: Share with others what you hold; Hears the age-old racial call: What we have belongs to all. 48
So the white man tucker is handed out in tin plates to everyone, and, remembering the old days, she feels lonely, away from their natural existence. Daisy Bondi celebrates a legendary Aboriginal woman of the recent past who, able to muster and carry out the stockwork like a man, organized her clan to challenge slavery and insist on wages. Other poems of loss fill the pages, and detail from an Aboriginal point of view, in Aboriginal cadences and expression, exactly what has been destroyed and lost, the community spirit of the repeated we establishing an identity and land claim for an area whose religious sigificance has been replaced with rubbish tips.
Notice of estate agent reads: Rubbish may be tipped here. Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring, They sit and are confused, they cannot say their thoughts: we are as strangers here now,
47 48
Last of His Tribe, ibid, p. 30. Cookalingee, ibid., p. 105.
but the white tribe are the strangers. 49
There is power in this poem as the people equate themselves with natural forces, but they are forced into the dark and shadows. The Dreamtime, the hunting and the animals have all left:
The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. The bora ring is gone,. the corroboree is gone. And we are going. 50
Loss is not all Kath Walker records, however. Many of her poems contain a manifesto for equality, a recognition of difference that does not sacrifice Aboriginal ways to the ostensibly progressive, in fact misguided, repressive, blinkered ways of the white peoples who have misunderstood and misjudged and denied the Aboriginal community, their identity, and their land rights. White people, she shows, have a great deal to learn from the values of those whom their progress denies. In more complex, intellectually referenced phrasing, incorporating the Aboriginal reference and phrase with the more western literary expression, Kath Walker wryly berates the white man for his blind drive towards a dehumanising progress. Civilization, the poem quoted above, is my personal favourite. Positive and powerful, it focusses on all the central issues about translation and voice which run through the poetry and prose of Aboriginal women writers. Issues about translation and misappropriation are woven into the text as she show how subtly the values of the Aboriginal peoples are relabelled and revalued by the white man, who believes himself to be more civilised. Money, ownership, disenfranchisement, encarceration, are all imposed on a people who previously had no need for the regulators and categorisers, those who price everything and label everything. The new knowledge has been useful, she acknowledges, but the tones of irony and loss register her sound sense that much too much of more essential value has been lost in the process. The history of the arrival of the white man is one of marvel to:
We who came late to civilization, Missing a gap of centuries
but:
49 50
We are going, ibid., p. 107 ibid., p.108.
Wisker: Aboriginal Womens Writing we were people before we were citizens, Before we were ratepayers. 51
Power and obedience to rule perplexes them, and the reader is similarly perplexed:
We could not understand Your strange cult of uniformity, This mass obedience to clocks, timetables. 52
The assertion in Civilisation, that we have benefitted sounds both honest and ironic, and the conclusion expresses the simplicity and warmth of the kind of life which white-dominated economic values have entirely denied:
But remember, white man, if life is for happiness, you too, surely, have much to change. 53
Aboriginal women writers write of their lives, their ancestors, myths, tribal ways, and the hideous dehumanisation of racism. Their autobiographical, fictional and poetic work gives a voice to the enslaved of the past, and documents the arrogance of ordinary whitefolk in everyday behaviours who, fed on a sense of the value of white economic civilized progress, believe they are naturally superior, and therefore have some right to deny those rights of others. If we recall Lisa Bellears poem Womens Liberation, quoted here on p.4, 54 we need to think about the implications of our reading and our response. Any critical piece on an emerging literature will be a tentative step towards understanding, and recognition. It will necessarily also be some form of appropriation and translation. In order to understand new literatures, like any other literature, we have to relate them to our previous reading, and acquire some contextual underpinning. This is all fraught with potential bias, and the partial information which seems to be available can skew our reading and attempts first to understand, then let the texts speak for themselves. In looking at issues around the recording and publication of autobiography and biography, Carole Ferrier advocates the enabling of a variety of voices to speak through the biography because of the disruption
51 52 53 54
Civilization, ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 116. ibid., p. 117. LISA BELLEAR NOONUCCAL, Hecate 17:2 (1991), pp. 204-5.
to an authoritative version, but she warns against the problem of alternative texts - which, in not following an established format, might not be read, might be disregarded and marginalised:
So when you choose your alternative, perhaps previously-silenced subject, you need to employ a range of strategies to engage with the complex ways in which power and authority circulate 55
This is pertinent to the recording of biography/autobiography, to publishing in formats which readers will recognise. It is also true of critical response. Unless we recognise, we cannot comment and try to understand, pass responses on, recommend, speak about. Silence is no answer, and absence has been with us too long - these texts need space to be produced and read as far as possible with our understanding of their aims, their context, their modes of expression. Recalling the arguments of Spivak and Gunew, if we just remain silent in an awe of difference tinged with guilt, we too have become disempowered, and everyone loses. 56 Ignoring Aboriginal womens writing, or feeling too guilty to speak about it, are both sides of a response which concentrates on how we are feeling about our own racial construction rather than about what we can learn from and enjoy in the writing of this powerful, articulate, emerging group of talented women, strong in their sense of the value of community and creativity, history and myth.
55 56
FERRIER, Aboriginal Womens Narratives cit., p. 138. SPIVAK and GUNEW Questions of Multiculturalism, cit., p. 137.
P. M. Wetherill
FANTASY CITIES, SECRET GARDENS 1
This is a descriptive exploration, with no hidden thesis, of ways in which elements which exist in natural opposition define and structure crucial experience. It starts from the premise that the confrontation of themes in art from similar or consecutive periods offers a concrete vision of the mentality, the areas of sensibility and preoccupation of those periods. Of necessity, I indicate lines of investigation rather than making exhaustive statements. My preoccupations will turn essentially on the relation between urban reality and its artistic expression as well as their subjective, public and private, memory-laden perception. I shall also be looking at the ways in which the resulting literal and symbolic configuration disintegrates, reforms and even re-emerges in the wider recurrent motifs and obsessions offered by the juncture with opposing spaces: city, country, gardens, parks. In all this, I sense the need not to be too clear-cut, to avoid, for example, smooth metaphors like P. P. Fergusons admittedly attractive idea of Paris as the all-embracing place for any kind of revolution you care to think of. 2 The linkage of different kinds of discourse (Stierles readability of the city) is equally loose, for it ignores the specific and distinctive ways in which language works. 3 So in a kind of thematic drift, I shall move between different kinds of reality and different kinds of fiction which is at one and the same time a way of ducking the problem whilst being closer to the strong subjectivity of real experience, for all cities, like the gardens they contain, are essentially objects and creatures of individual fantasy, places of
A version of this paper was read to the BCLAs VII International Conference, Cities, Gardens, Wildernesses, Edinburgh, 12-15 July 1995. P. P. FERGUSON, Paris as Revolution, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
3 2
K.-H. STIERLE, Der Mythos von Paris, (Mnchen: C.Hauser , 1995).
Wetherill: Fantasy cities, secret gardens
memory. Uncanny looming figures inhabit them, 4 and in the nineteenth century, Paris, in its multiple reflections, is a dazzling world of divergent architecture and discourse, where the individual creates his own fantasies. 5 So we cannot really separate the real city from the fictional one. At the level of expression and perception, there is constant circulation and fusion, in the drift and wander which is both physical and mental flnerie. Whether this is true, in some shape, of cities of a more distant preRevolutionary past is not the subject of this paper. What can be asserted, however, is that, in the process whereby nineteenth-century Paris ceases to appear knowable [...] by the end of the century, 6 the mental configuration of the city alters radically in its relation to what is not the city, adding to the opposition of city to country (which, of course, subsists) that which sets city against the gardens which go increasingly to make up its patchwork. Such moves are well represented in the curve which takes us from Stendhal to Proust, respectively unstable precursor and shifting inheritor in the momentum of a process which has no fixed point or clear cut-off although Haussmanns transformation of Paris is a clear, pivotal moment. So there is little doubt that the process is anchored in history: but it is a history in which the dreaming which the city implies and stimulates in the early part of the century, the pre-Haussmann city as a source of inspiration, with its changing fashion, where les diffrences ont disparu et il ny a plus que les nuances (the differences have vanished, and there is nothing left except the nuances) 7 give way to Haussmanns creation which is rather the product of fantasy. The city develops and encourages the growth of fantasy in the spatial gaps and meaningful uncertainties which this onward process throws up and which spectator, character, writer and reader all experience in their personal, conflicting ways contaminating and upsetting Realisms belle assurance we for too long took for granted and perhaps adding grist to Prendergasts suggestion that pastoral and urban cannot be mixed 8 . Our incomplete and imperfect readings are none the less (or precisely for that reason) inspiring. The spaces created, increasingly public, offer new dimensions and journalists, out of their depth as usual, were able to speak
See W. BENJAMIN, Gesammelte Schriften 1974), I:2, pp. 542-43.
5 4
(Frankfurt am Main: Rowohlt,
See D. J. OLSEN, The city as a work of art, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 306.
6 7
FERGUSON, Paris, cit., p. 7.
HONORE DE BALZAC, Trait de la vie lgante, quoted in STIERLE, Mythos, cit., pp. 353-54. See CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST, Paris and the Nineteenth century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 62.
8
nostalgically of the ways in which and the days when the comparatively narrow [rues] Vivienne [...] Richelieu [...] Saint-Denis [...] Saint-Martin [...] faisaient pousser des cris dadmiration nos pres (made our fathers utter cries of admiration). 9 Evidently, the space of the flneur (an overworked stereotype of whom we are perhaps beginning to tire), changes, for the shift from arcades to Boulevard is a significant one which ushers in a new dimension. If Benjamin is right to point out that das erste Gaslicht brannte in den Passagen (the first gaslight was burning in the passageway) and to speak of the Strae als Interieur, in der die Phantasmagorie des Flneurs sich zusammenfat(the street as an interior in which the phantasmagoria of the flneur is concentrated), 10 the space of fantasy confronts us after Haussmann with what Marx saw (or so we are told ) as the images trompeuses que la socit bourgeoise se fabrique (deceptive images which bourgeois society constructs for itself). 11 And of course the lighting on which the space of fantasy depends is not flickering early gaslight but the torrents de lumire which Zola made so much play with both in the luxury world of the inner boulevards (Nana) and the working class thoroughfares of LAssommoir. There is no clear break or cut-off in the way these phenomena develop. Indeed, the overlaps and the double vision themselves were far from being stereotyped which is what makes them especially interesting and credible. Thus Stendhal and Balzac, twenty years in age between them but making their great contributions simultaneously, offer strongly contrasting views of a pre-Haussmann world which may still be strongly bucolic and pastoral (even when the scene is Paris or Parma) or, in the case of the younger author, biased towards an urban vision dominated by the reference to Paris even when as in Eugnie Grandet or Le lys dans la valle, the capital seems far distant. This is not to exclude urban fantasies even in Stendhal. Indeed his fantasy about his own identity, Henri Beyle milanese, hinges on the dreams of his incarnation in the city where he spent years of his youth and maturity and which is so significantly present in the early pages of La Chartreuse de Parme. The town has special status however, for it is both present and absent, just as Paris, in the second part of Le Rouge et le Noir, is both visited and barely seen, 12 and hardly a point of contrast with the doings
E. ABOUT, in Paris Guide (1867), (Paris: Maspro, La Dcouverte, 1983), ed. C. Verdet, p. 34. WALTER BENJAMIN, Das Paris des 2.Empire bei Baudelaire, Gesammelte Schriften, I:2, p. 552. See R. P. JANZLIN, Lexprience mythique..., in Walter Benjamin et Paris, ed. A. Wisman (Paris: Cerf, 1986), p. 458 (my italics).
12 11 10 9
Hence perhaps his total absence from S TIERLE S monumental Mythos, cit.
in Verrires. Also, in La vie dHenri Brulards seamless continuity of life and art, Stendhal dreams up a far from idyllic past which is both bucolic and urban. It is a resurrection, city and garden, in which Stendhal, as ever in fact or fiction, explores the problem of authentic personal identity, to which he seeks constantly to give substance in Brulard by detailed line drawings, in themselves an obsessive recreation of the city, the location of his own precise self in the distant past of space and time: ever present streets, gardens and the dark rooms of persecution, with X marking the spot. Thus, via an aptly named jour de souffrance, his:
Chambre humide et obscure o le soleil ne donnait jamais. Nous navions pas de fentre sur le jardin Lamoureux seulement un jour de souffrance (les villes de parlement sont remplies de mots de droit) qui donnait une brillante lumre lescalier ombrag par un beau tilleul. 13
(Damp, dark chamber where the sun never shone. We had no [proper] window overlooking the Lamoureux garden only a ... (assize towns are full of legal terms) which shone a brilliant light on the stairs shaded by a fine lime tree.)
These motifs of enclosure and unseen brilliance will resurface in Proust. A further motif is introduced here: that of the lime trees which are a constant mentioned motif of childhood at one and the same time geographically normal and emphatically mentioned in the Rue des Vieux Jsuites and of course the Place de Tilleuls of Stendhals childhood at Grenoble. 14 These factual trees recur in Le Rouge et le Noir, 15 notably those, discouragingly cropped at first in that place of fantasy, the garden where Julien embarks upon his seduction of Mathilde de la Mle. The hidden scheme hatches beneath the vote forme par les tilleuls fort bien taills (the vault formed by the well-clipped lime trees p. 531) in a garden which is a place both of communication, frustration and dissimulation:
En vain, aprs le dner, il affecta de se promener longtemps dans la jardin, Mlle de la Mle ny parut pas. (pp. 536-537) Enfin il alla se placer dans un coin obscur du jardin. (p. 538)
See STENDHAL , Vie de Henri Brulard, ed. Martineau (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 105. Further page reference, given in the text, are to this edition.
14 15
13
Ibid., pp. 67, 68.
STENDHAL , Le Rouge et le Noir, ed. Martineau (Paris: Plade, 1956). Page reference, given in the text, are to this edition.
(In vain, after dinner, did he endeavour to stroll a long while in the garden, Miss de la Mle made no appearence. In the end, he went and positioned himself in a dark corner of the garden.)
This city garden, in a Paris which we hardly perceive, stands both parallel and in contrast to those which had witnessed dramatic doings elsewhere. Although barely described, the earlier garden at Vergy holds key signs. Notably On prit lhabitude de passer les soires sous un immense tilleul quelque pas de la maison. Lobscurit y tait profonde.(We got into the habit of passing the evenings under a vast lime tree close by the house. The darkness there was very deep p. 265) Behind the language not necessarily ironic of romantic banality (dlicieux, splendide etc.), this is the place of adultery, with its gmissements du vent dans lpais feuillage du tilleul.(moans of the wind through the dense foliage of the lime tree p. 268). An unrestrained place, then, quite different from the city trees and gardens at Verrires, severely cut back, hedged in and held in check, for they make up the Cours de la fidlit:
les diverses parties de ce magnifique jardin [...] sont aussi la rcompense de la science de M. de Rnal dans le commerce du fer [...] En FrancheComt, plus on btit de murs, plus on hrisse sa proprit de pierres ranges les unes sur les autres, plus on acquiert de droits aux respects de ses voisins. Les jardins de M de Rnal, remplis de murs... (p. 221)
(the various parts of this magnificent garden ... were also the reward of M. de Rnals acumen in the iron business ... In Franche-Comt, the more one builds walls, the more ones estate is raised up out of stones piled one upon the other, the more one acquires title to the respect of ones neighbours. M. de Rnals gardens, bristling with walls...)
Rnal, even when he goes to Vergy, does not seek nature but is attentif copier les habitudes des gens de cour(careful to copy the manners of court people p. 262) in other words Paris and set out a garden which boasts force bordures de buis et alles de marronniers bien taills(an abundance of box hedges and avenues of well-clipped chestnuts p. 262); for Rnal there is not a lime tree in sight. Anticipating Emma Bovarys meaningful transformations, it is for Julien to sabotage Rnals efforts by suggesting to Mme de Rnal the transformation which turns the garden into a very different and supple thing, with its petit chemin sabl qui circulerait dans le verger et sous les grands noyers(little sandy track meandering through the orchard and under the great walnut trees p. 263). The contrast with Verrires is more than antithesis: it is rather a straining (of loyalty and lust) in more than one direction. This is perhaps a cours fantastique,
fantasmatique de linfidlit (phantastical, ghostly route to infidelity), both place and lesson, offering perhaps the prospect that Mme de Rnal will suffer the fate of the butterflies Julien and the children pursue so mercilessly: On les piquait sans piti dans un grand carton arrang aussi par Julien(We pinned them pitylessly onto a large sheet of cardboard Julien had prepared for the purpose p. 263). The family context will remain, for, in the final course of her lapse, Mme de Rnal dies en embrassant ses enfants (pressing her children to her). This is natural both in life and the novel, for Stendhals fantasies, witness his paternal obsessions, constantly go the family way. Hence an associated theme: that of the orange trees, which we find both in Brulard and La Chartreuse de Parme. 16 For Brulard, the orange trees are the proof that the maternal line, the Gagnon family were once the Guadagni and that his true home, the sign and symbol of his origins is Italy: Nous tions venus dun pays o les orangers croissent en pleine terre. Quel pays de dlices, pensais-je.(We came from a country where orange trees grow in the fields. An earthly paradise, I thought p. 101) - a home already degraded in Avignon where the Gagnons settled:
Ville de Provence o venaient les orangers [...] ctaient soixante ou quatre-vingts orangers en caisse [...] lesquels lapproche de lt, taient placs en grande pompe dans les environs de la magnifique alle de Marronniers. (p. 101)
(A city in Provence where orange trees flourished [..] thats to say sixty or eighty potted orange trees [...] which as spring came were placed with much ceremony in the vicinity of the splendid chestnut-lined avenue.)
Hence, in a typical shift from fictional life to lived fiction, one motif in La Chartreuse de Parme, a city without gardens. There, Fabrices prison, the tour Farnese, like the heights above Vergy, offers a solitude ariennne(aerial solitude p. 312), the contrary of a garden or a city, and a sensation pleine de nouveaut et de plaisir in ce vaste silence qui rgnait cette hauteur (rich feeling of novelty and pleasure, in the vast silence which reigned at this height p. 313). This space with its view of the distant Alps (with perhaps the sensed presence of Milan), is transformed into the disguised and artificial garden of his affair with Cllia Conti: Cllia already possesses dans de jolies cages une grande quantit doiseaux de toutes sortes (a large number of birds of all kinds in pretty cages p. 310) and she adds a few potted orange trees to complete the illusion. This is the transposition of those trees with their Italian roots which we have seen in
STENDHAL , La Chartreuse de Parme, ed. Martineau (Paris: Plade, 1956). Page reference, given in the text, are to this edition.
16
Avignon, a modest replacement of the petit bois dorangers en pleine terre (thicket of free-growing orange trees Stendhals emphasis is significant whose perfume Cllia respirait avec dlices ( breathed in with pleasure) a little while earlier and which fills her, already half aware of Fabrice, with the need to transplant it:
Si au moins se disait-elle, sous ma petite fentre du palais de la forteresse, la seule qui ait de lombre, javais la vue de jolis orangers, tels que ceuxci, mes ides seraient moins tristes [...] je pourrais acheter quelques orangers qui, placs sous les fentres de ma volire, mempcheraient de voir ce gros mur de la tour Farnse. (pp. 276-277)
(If at least, she told herself, under my little window in the fortified palace, the only one which had a little shade, I could have seen some pretty orange trees, like these, my thoughts would be less sad [...] I could buy some orange trees which, placed under the window of my bird cage, would prevent me from seeing the great wall of the Farnese Tower.)
Thus, dream, childhood and present fantasy (which is also the fantasy of a chronicled Italian past) mix and mingle. The garden is that of personal, playful authorial memory, but it is also that of an ideal creation, of an ideal self and an ideal other. If the gardens of Combray are already sensed in this scheme, it seems at least to be very different from Balzac, Stendhals apparent and essential point of contrast. In fact, this is not always and everywhere the case, for the younger authors earlier garden themes, too well known to need much emphasis here, include the garden where Eugnie Grandet and Charles meet and where she later remembers, inventing her past and deluding herself about her future. A garden of memory and dreaming not totally different from Prousts. The difference lies in the fact that, with Balzac, the city, which Charles represents, cannot be excluded the reference is elsewhere, just as the organised space in the Grandet house sets up oppositions and barriers which imply Eugnies inevitable failure. In like manner, Balzacs garden visions in the urban novels may be of constraining, degraded and degrading spaces. In total contrast to La Chartreuse, the Galeries de Bois are a place of all possible prostitutions offering metaphors of vegetation which promise not ecstasy but revulsion:
L donc se trouvait un espace de deux ou trois pieds o vgtaient les produits les plus bizarres dune botanique inconnue la science [...] Une maculature coiffait un rosier, en sorte que les fleurs de rhtorique taient
embaumes par les fleurs avortes de ce jardin mal soign, mais ftidement arros. 17
(There then lay a space of two or three feet where the strangest vegetables grew, unknown to botanical science [...] blight spots capped a rose bush in such a way that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the aborted flowers of this ill-kept, but fetidly irrigated garden.)
At the same time, Balzacs city is not Parma it is a city without space. If there are distant views, they are, like the one in which Rastignac contemplates his future battleground, misty and schematic, devoid of detail. This makes for the kind of easy fantasy which allows the disasters of Ferragus to take place.
* * *
All this is powerfully different from the later period, after Haussmanns transformations, as is apparent in the tone of writing about change and continuity. Thus Banville, writing in 1867 about one of Pariss most phantasmatic quarters:
Nul quartier plus que [le Quartier latin] na t profondment modifi par les rcents travaux qui ont transform Paris; nul pourtant na mieux gard sa physionomie propre. 18
(No district was more deeply altered by the recent building works which have transformed Paris than the Latin quarter; yet none has better preserved its peculiar physiognomy.)
Typically, changes in mentality lead some observers to emphasise historical continuity, linking the present with the past and seeing the present as the future past. Characters are rooted in the unmistakably historical process of the city and in the intertwine of its everyday, present, historical readability 19 . Of course, this shift does not easily exclude fantasy, for it is a world where fragments of a former world still loom above the present landscape 20 and where the street lighting in places is weak enough to encourage all kinds of fancies.
HONORE DE BALZAC, Les Illusions perdues, ed. Butteron (Paris: Plde, 1952), vol.IV p. 690-91.
18 19 17
Paris Guide, cit., p. 103.
Cfr Paris as the centre of an open historical world, the focal point of an historical experience: STIERLE, Mythos, cit., pp. 339, 341.
20
Ibid, p. 375-76.
At the same time, if there is continuity, if Paris was, before and after Haussmann, the established place of drifting dream and exploration, the new city changes the nature of the sport, as transitional figures like Baudelaire and Flaubert, 21 in their evolving work, would seem to show shifting perhaps from phantasmagoria to fantasy, from the swirling fog of Les sept vieillards(1859) to the new precise contours (at once architectural and formal) of Le Cygne(1860). All this in the manner of another kind of transition (writing necessarily follows the patterns of history), for my real target at this stage is Flaubert, whose development, once he reaches thirty, has been strangely neglected but we can point to the fact that his mature works, all written during and after Haussmanns changes, stand in curiously ambivalent relation to those changes. Thus, Madame Bovary gains irony if one thinks that Emmas dreams are of a Paris which was disappearing before the authors eyes and this is in itself a strong difference from the urban and horticultural climate in which his predecessors wrote, and in which she lived. During the period when Madame Bovary, Salammb, and LEducation sentimentale were written, the city becomes a place of control and segregation with the fantasies about other people such restrictions may encourage: 22 flats with functional spaces for dining and sleeping, precise streets visibly going somewhere, lines of demarcation, the rich west of the Htel du Louvre and north to the rue Saint-Lazare and the poor beyond these boundaries. 23 And the change is great, not merely as far as the citys streets and buildings are concerned but also its gardens, also standardised, with their identical trappings and furniture for here, in the new, even surface of things, the balance between public and private is overturned: the great eighteenth-century properties of the city centre (Richelieu, Colbert, Grammont) give way to the vast public spaces, new or vastly reformed. and located elsewhere: Bois de Boulogne, Champs Elyses, Buttes Chaumont, Monceau, Montsouris, where the little old ladies can dream and where the bourgeoisie can define its new fantasies. It is a world of pastiche, the essential mode of a ruling class as yet too unsure of itself to invent a style of
As distinct from pre- and post- figures like Balzac and Stendhal, Zola and Maupassant. Although some claimed the contrary: cfr Paul de Kock, in Paris Guide, cit., p. 76, Grce aux dmolitions de ces vieilles ruelles [...] aux constructions modernes, aux voix nouvelles ... il ny a plus quun Paris (thanks to the destruction of those old alleys ... modern buildings, new streets ... there is now just one Paris). See OLSEN, The City, cit., p. 148. It is almost as if the controlling walls of the gardens at Verrires were some sort of pre-Haussmannian manifestation.
23 22
21
its own 24 . Exotic vegetation is specially imported; between 1852 and 1870, the Bois de Boulogne becomes the dream of an English garden; Monceau fills with stalactites, whilst on the Buttes Chaumont, Greek temples, chlets, artificial rivers and cascades and cliffs, new lakes and look-out points hide the ancient public tip and execution ground beneath, and promenades take on the names of a fragile new colonial glory (Mxico, Puebla, Vera Cruz). 25 Fixed fantasmata, soon to be lost from memory. The invasion of an invented countryside is made more fantastic still by the explosion of pleasure places which needed this new space to exist. At the same time, the great fantasy world of the department stores explodes and Montmartre, worth only one page in 1881, rates three already, in the Guide Joanne of 1885. The city is thus redefined in the image of a new class. Great exhibitions inspire the vision of fantastic homes and stimulate the response: Je suis en France (I am in France). 26 Redistribution and redefinition forges a new relationship to the town, 27 in which not only the street and public spaces generally take on increasing significance, 28 but also the opposition between public reality and private world becomes more acute. 29 The city, the crowd and the objects which fill it become more anonymous; separate elements lose their integrity. 30 As the capital is thus reconfigured, a much greater sense of social dislocation appears in which the averted gaze of Degass LAbsinthe and the glazed stare of Manets La prune contradict all pretence at sociability. 31 The period breed strong conflicts of perception, as one can see from the way in which the complaints of some contemporaries (they have killed the imagination [fantaisie]) 32 and their clash with views which notably stress speed and space and the fantastic potential of certain changes:
24
See LArt en France sous le second Empire (Paris: Muses Nationaux, 1979), See L. HERBERT, Impressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. Paris Guide, cit., p. 225. See J. GAILLARD, Paris la ville (Paris, Champion, 1977), p. 231-32. See WALTER BENJAMIN, Das Passangenwerk, Gesammelte Schriften, V,1 , p.
p. 23.
25
142.
26 27 28
290. See EDWARD SHORTER, The Making of the modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 225 in OLSEN, The City, cit., p. 89. See J. HOUSE, Monet, nature into art, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 80-81, see also p. 75. See R. BURTON, Bonding and breaking in Baudelaire, Modern Language Review, 88 (1993), p. 67-68. ALFRED DELVAU, cited in C. STUDENY, LInvention de la vitesse (Paris, Gallimard 1995), p. 199.
32 31 30 29
Toute peine est pargne et comme dans les feries, chaque objet vient pour ainsi dire se ranger sous votre main. 33 Ne semble-t-il pas que lespace soit supprim par des moyens plus prompts le traverser; que le temps sefface par la rapiditit avec laquelle on va du Nord au Midi [...] Les chemins sabrgent en se multipliant. 34 (All trouble is spared and, just like in fairy stories, every object places itself, so to speak, in your hand.
Does it not seem as if space has been suppressed by more rapid means of crossing it; as if time has disappeared by virtue of the speed with which one moves from North to South ... Routes become shorter even as they multiply.)
The implosion of space and time, like the intense new gas lighting 35 it goes with, creates another, different fantasy world which behind the straight faades lurks in the arcades and the narrow streets. 36 Le Cygne brings out this double vision. More significantly still, perhaps, the Flaubert of Madame Bovary, at a time when the new Paris is beginning clearly to appear, proposes a variety of divergent urban and parkland fancies, nourished by more private and varied (and outdated) dreams. Thus, Emmas fantasys of elopement with Rodolphe: 37
du haut dune montagne, ils apercevaient tout coup quelque cit splendide avec des dmes, des ponts, des navires, des forts de citronniers et des cathdrales de marbre blanc, dont les clochers aigus portaient des nids de cigogne. (p. 201)
(from the top of some hill, they would see at a glance some splendid city with domes, bridges, ships, forests of lemon trees and cathedrals of white marble on whose pointed bell towers storks nests sat.)
MAXIME DU CAMP, Paris ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moiti du xixe sicle (Paris: Hachette, 1869-75), vol. I, p. 5, cited in C. STUDENY, LInvention, cit., p. 215. C. DELATTRE, Voyages en France, 1848, cited in C. STUDENY, LInvention, cit., p. 231. See Zolas insistent reference to torrents de lumire and the nappe de vive clart in the early pages of Nana and those of LAssommoir. See WALTER BENJAMIN, Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, in Gesammelte Schriften, I:2, p. 358. All quotations from Madame Bovary are taken from GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Oeuvres, ed. A. Thibaudet and R. Dumesnil, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1951-52): page reference in brackets after the text refer to this edition.
37 36 35 34
33
Emmas vision, which collapses when Rodolphe jilts her, conflicts with her later view of a real Rouen (pp. 268-269), with its chemines dusines (factory chimneys), the ronflement de ses fonderies (rumble of its founderies) and the drabness of the arbres des boulevards sans feuilles (leafless trees of the boulevards) opposing city keynotes for Emmas two affairs. More importantly for what I am wanting to say here about the intermingling of direct experience and written fantasy, Emmas Mediterranean dream city grows out of Romantic literature and is a variant of Flauberts own, half-satisfied fantasies before and after the journey to Egypt, the Near-East and Greece. As a further stage, it announces not only Emmas Rouen but also Flauberts own Carthage, and no doubt Jerusalem seen from Machaerous in Hrodias. These spring from personal fancies:
Que ne vivais-je du temps de Nron! Comme jaurais caus avec les Rhteurs grecs! Comme jaurais voyag dans des grands chariots sur les voies romaines, et couch le soir dans des htelleries, avec les prtres de Cyble vagabondant! [...] Je suis sr davoir t sous lempire romain, directeur de quelque troupe de comdiens ambulants, un de ces drles qui allaient en Sicile acheter des femmes pour en faire des comdiennes [....] as-tu prouv cela quelquefois, le frisson historique? 38
(Why did I not live in the days of Nero! How I would have talked with the Greek rhetoricians! How I would have travelled on great chariots through the streets of Rome, and slept in the same hostelries as the wondering priests of Cybele! ... I am sure that under the Roman empire I was the manager of some troupe of itinerant players, une of those comedians who went to Sicily to buy women to turn into actressess... have you not felt it sometimes, the thrill of history?)
More precisely still

A mesure que jpelle lantiquit, une tristesse immense menvahit en songeant cet ge de beaut magnifique et charmante pass sans retour [...] Que ne donnerais-je pour voir un triomphe, que ne vendrais-je pas pour entrer un soir dans Suburre quand les flambeaux brlaient aux portes des lupanars et que les tambourins tonnaient dans les tavernes. Comme si nous navions pas assez de notre pass nous remchons celui de lhumanit entire et nous nous dlectons de cette amertume voluptueuse. 39
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Correspondance, ed. J. Bruneau, (Paris: Gallimard, 1973-), vol.2, pp. 152-153, Louise Colet, 4 septembre 1852.
39
38
Ibid., vol. 1, Louise Colet, dbut fvrier 1847, p. 437.
(The more I spell out antiquity, the more an immense sadness comes over me, as I dream of this age of magnificent beauty which is gone and beyond recall ... What would I not give to see a triumph, what would I not sell to go one night into the Suburra, when the torches burned of an evening outside the brothels and the tambourines rang out in the taverns. As if we did not have enough past of our own, we ruminate over that of the whole of mankind and delight in its delectable bitterness.)
And such fantasies become just as precise as Emmas when Flaubert in Salammb creates the extensive, detailed text of the gardens of Hamilcar and the (garden-)city of Carthage beyond as it emerges in the dawn:
A gauche, tout en bas, les canaux de Mgara commenaient rayer de leurs sinuosits blanches les verdures des jardins. Les toits coniques des temples heptagones, les escaliers, les terrasses, les remparts, peu peu, se dcoupaient sur la pleur de laube [...] Les rues dsertes sallongeaient; les palmiers, et l sortant des murs, ne bougeaient pas: les citernes remplies avaient lair de boucliers dargent perdus dans les cours [...] Tout en haut de lAcropole, dans le bois de cyprs, les chevaux dEschmon, sentant venir la lumire, posaient leurs sabots sur le parapet de marbre et hennissaient du ct du soleil. 40
(To the left, right at the bottom, the canals of Megara began to etch the green of the gardens with their sinuous white lines. The conical roofs of the heptagonal temples,, the stairways, the terraces, the ramparts gradually emerged out of the paleness of dawn ... The deserted streets stretched out; the palm trees, peering over the walls here and there, did not move: the full cisterns seemed like silver shields lost in the courtyards ... Right above the Acropolis, in the cypress wood, the horses of Eschemoun, sensing the coming of daylight, rested their hooves on the marble parapet and whinnied towards the sun.)
This description obsessively repeated throughout the novel, is an explicit, fantasy rejection of Paris, as we see when we set it and the letters I have quoted against the letter Flaubert wrote to Du Camp in June 1852:
Cest l quest le souffle de vie, me dis-tu, en parlant de Paris. Je trouve quil sent souvent lodeur des dents gtes, ton souffle de vie. Il sexhale pour moi de ce Parnasse o tu me convies plus de miasmes que de vertiges. Les lauriers quon sy arrache sont un peu couverts de merde, covenons-en. 41
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Salammb, ed. Thibaut (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), vol. I, p. 756-757.
41
40
FLAUBERT, Correspondance, cit., vol. 2, 26 juin 1852, p. 114.
(Its there that the breath of life is, you told me, speaking of Paris. I find that it often smells of rotten teeth, your breath of life. For me what issues from that Parnassus where you invite me is more ill odour than the thrill of heights. The laurels one gathers there are a little covered in shit, lets admit it.)
This explicit rejection of Emmas Parisian dreams also clarifies his view of Frdric Moreau. Especially, we should remember that Emma herself is a figure of urban fantasy, created and lost by the text. Shuttling (on Thursdays) between home and Rouen, obsessed by a Paris she never sees, she moves from the real world of Tostes to live, for the rest of her life, in Yonville, which is an invented and unreal space. This is clear to anyone who tries to locate Yonville on Michelin map n. 52, for, if we follow Flauberts careful directions in the opening lines of part II, we find that, if Yonville is surrounded by real places and features (lAndelle, la Boissire, le pays de Bray, la fort dArgueil), it slips through our fingers when we try to give it a precise site. Flaubert has led us up the garden path. So Emmas Rouennais or Parisian fantasies start from a problematic location which the reader is fooled into believing in. Emmas fantasies are frustrated by Charless attitude. He: navait jamais t curieux ... pendant quil habitait Rouen, daller voir au thtre les acteurs de Paris.(had never been curious, when he lived in Ruoen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris p. 42) whereas the mysterious space of the city is already evocatively and provocatively present in Emmas early, schoolgirl dreamings:
tous ces tableaux du monde [...] passaient devant elle les uns aprs les autres dans le silence du dortoir et au bruit lointain de quelque fiacre attard qui roulait sur le boulevards. (p. 40)
(all these images of the world ... filed past her one after the other in the silence of the dormitory, and against the distant sound of some late-night cab driving down the boulevards.)
Shades of Emmas erotic ride with Lon, and more immediately a stimulus to her speculations, setting her own cold confinement against the precise, imagined expansive life of her school friends in the city:
Que faisaient-elles, maintenant? la ville, avec le bruit des rues, le bourdonnement des thtres et les clarts du bal, elles avaient des existences o le cur se dilate, o les sens spanouissent. Mais elle, sa vie tait froide comme un grenier dont la lucarne est au nord... (p. 46, my italics).
(What were they doing now? In the city, with the sounds of the streets, the buzz of the theatres and the bright lights of balls, they lived lives in which the
heart swelled, the senses blossomed. Whereas she, her life was as cold as a granary whose skylights looked north.)
But the fantasy city is not Emmas personal monopoly. As a recurrent dream with many characters, the novel develops a whole mythology of the city. Thus Lon, who se meubla dans sa tte un appartement(furnished an apartment in his head p. 121), or Homais, speaking of students in Paris, clearly a Balzac reader and much more given to sexual fantasy than is normally thought: Il y a mme des dames du Faubourg Saint-Germain qui en deviennent amoureuses [des tudiants] (there are even ladies from the Faubourg Saint-Germain become students lovers p. 124-25) This does not stand apart from other forms of discourse on the city, but impinges directly on the real world of (male) fantasy in general close for example to that of the real-life cur from Trouville who inspired Homais dreamings and whom Flaubert quotes:
Allons donc, vous autres jeunes gens de Paris qui, dans vos soupers fins, sablez le champagne [...] Et comme il y avait des sous-entendus, entre les mots soupers fins et celui de sablez, ceux-ci: avec des actrices! Et dire que je lexcitais, ce brave homme. 42
(Come on then, you young men of Paris, at your after-theatre supper parties, uncork the champagne ... and what innuendos, those between the words parties and uncork: with actresses! And to say that I was getting the good man excited.)
Emmas celebrated evocation of Paris upon which I do not need to dwell is therefore part of whole social, fictional, factual pattern of lustful speculation which circulates between the discourse of invented and reported experience. Thus the barber at Tostes, dreaming of high life and distant voyages: rvant quelque boutique dans une grande ville, comme Rouen, par exemple, sur le port, prs du thtre.(dreaming of some shop in a big city, like Rouen, for example, on the harbour, near the theatre p. 66; my italics), and no doubt stimulated by the shabby but undoubtedly exotic organ grinder who plays: des airs quon jouait ailleurs sur les thtres, que lon chantait dans les salons, que lon dansait le soir sous des lustres clairs, chos du monde qui arrivaient jusqu Emma.(airs that they played elsewhere on the stage, that they sang in the salons, danced to in the evening, in the light of the chandeliers p. 67; my italics). Emma like Lon attempts to put this specifically urban dreaming and speculation into practice. At the same time, their world also articulates the public and private spaces Haussmann is at that time making so free with.
42
Ibid., pp. 354-55, Louise Colet, 14 juin1853.
The scnarios show Flauberts preoccupation with the contrastive patterns of city and garden with, initially, mingled references to the two in the growing relationship between Emma and Lon:
des visites srieuses, il va dans son jardin elle vient dans le jardin du pharmacien... Mme Bovary donne un chic anglais au jardin [...] en face de la maison, celle du Pharmacien qui a un jardin plus grand, plus cultiv et plus fleuriste que celui de Mme Bovary [...] jardinage fleurs en commun [Lon] lui rapporte des *fleurs* plantes grasses de Rouen 43 (some serious visits, he goes into his garden she comes into the pharmacists garden... Mme Bovary gives an English elegance to the garden ... in front of the house that of the Pharmacist who has a bigger garden, more elaborate and flowery than Mme Bovarys [...] gardening flowers in common [Leon] brings her back flowers cactuses from Rouen.
These motifs disappear so that Flaubert can set up the contrast between a garden motif associated with Rodolphe and a city theme associated with Lon. Although gardens, with their crumbling furniture, are present quite early, the central motif is delayed until Emmas decidedly rustic affair with Rodolphe, first consummated in the woods then pursued in the Bovarys garden letters are left there, quelle accusait dtre trop courtes, in oh so Freudian cracks in the trees, and this is where reconciliations take place: Quand Rodolphe le soir arriva dans le jardin [...] toute leur rancune se fondit.(When Rodolphe cmae into the garden in the evening ... all their resentment melted away p. 191). And this is where they make love with Lon ejected from the garden:
Il lentranait sans parler jusquau fond du jardin Ctait sous la tonnelle, sur ce mme banc de btons pourris o autrefois Lon la regardait si amoureusement, durant les soirs dt. Elle ne pensait gure lui maintenant. (p. 173)
(He drew her without speaking to the bottom of the garden. It was under the bower, on the same bench of rotten sticks where on earlier occasions Lon had gazed on her so lovingly, of a summer evening. She hardly thought of him now.)
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Plans et Scnarios de Madame Bovary, prsentation, transcription et notes par Yvan Leclerc (Paris:CNRS/Zulma, 1995), pp. 8, 9 (f12, f10). In this edition asterisks denote a word erased by Flaubert himself.
43
This may be the ternelle monotonie de la passion (never-ending monotony of passion) a doubly ironical phrase for Emmas reading of things is wrong and so is Rodolphes but the natural description which accompanies these moments (pp. 173, 203) is disquietingly, suspiciously idyllic perhaps too idyllic to be true (except for the fact that it contains distinctly ironical anticipations of Frdrics conquest of Mme Dambreuse in lEducation sentimentale):
Les toiles brillaient travers les branches du jasmin. Ils entendaient derrire eux la rivire qui coulait [...] Des massifs dombre -et-l, se bombaient dans lobscurit [...] Le froid de la nuit les faisait streindre davantage... (p. 173)
(The stars shone between the jasmine branches. They heard the river flowing behind them ... Thickets of shadows swelled in the darkness here and there ... The cold of the night made them embrace all the more tightly.)
After Rodolphe leaves her, the garden mirrors Emma state. Now we see le sable des alles sous les feuillles mortes(the sand of the footpaths beneath the dead leaves p. 215) Emma first refuses to sit on the garden seat, and once she has recovered, she destroys the place:
Elle fit au commencement du printemps bouleverser le jardin dun bout lautre, malgr les observations de Bovary. Il fut heureux, cependant, de lui voir enfin manifester une volont quelconque. (p. 222)
(At the beginning of spring, she had the garden turned inside out, from one end to the other, despite Bovarys remonstrations. Yet he was happy to see her at last manifest some sort of will.)
The change is radical, for now it is Bournisien who comes to sit there, and the garden becomes a place of idle and pointless chatter (pp. 222-224), a variant of Emmas and everybody elses empty words. As a site of converging ironies, it later becomes the place where, after Emmas suicide, Bournisien forces Charles to enact the clichs of un tour de promenade dans le jardin. Il discourait sur la vanit des choses terrestres.(a turn about the garden. He held forth on the vanity of things earthly p. 335) - and the stresses of a world which, as always in Flaubert, is quite out of tune with human feelings: il grinait des dents, il levait au ciel des regards de maldiction; mais pas une feuille seulement ne bougea. (he gritted his teeth, lifted his eyes up to heaven to curse; but not a leaf stirred p. 335) - very different from the clichs of harmony when Rodolphe was there with Emma.
Finally, Charles dies sur le banc dans la tonnelle(on the bench in the bower p. 256), which may not be the same as that used by Emma and Rodolphe since Emma has changed everything in the garden but the words are the same, textual congruence and ironies where reality may diverge. Through all the changes, discursive identity fixes the garden and its trappings as a place of constantly conflicting preoccupation. So it is not surprising that Salammb, Flauberts next novel begins with the precise detailed obsession of an exotic garden at Cartage:
Des figuiers entouraient les cuisines; un bois de sycomores se prolongeaient jusqu des masses de verdure, o des grenades resplendissaient parmi les touffes blanches des cotonniers; des vignes, charges de grappes, montaient dans le branchage des pins.(p. 743). (Fig trees sorrounded the kitchens; a sycamore wood extended as far as a thicket of green where where pomegranates luxuriated amidstr the white fluff of a cotton field; vineyards, laden with grape, limbed up the branches of pine trees.)
This is not completely different from the idyll at Yonville. In LEducation sentimentale, however, Flauberts urban world changes radically like Hausmanns Paris: the rural space within the town, which plays a crucial, unrecognised role in Madame Bovary, is quite different from LEducations more modest gardens. That of Frdrics house in the rue Rumford which Frdric shows to Mme Arnoux is mediocre in its dimensions: ... trente pieds de terrain, enclos par des maisons, orns darbustes dans les angles et dune plate-bande au milieu. (thirty feet of ground, enclosed by other houses, embellished with shrubs in the corners and a flower-bed in the middle p. 188). It is full of down-to-earth banality with its pelle feu (coal shovel) and its tas de sable dans lalle (pile of sand on the garden path) clearly marked out as the failed site of a sad, brief, hoped-for idyll, cancelling out the offered rose in the premiers jours davril (first days of April) with the lilas, the souffle pur and the petits oiseaux (lilacs ... pure breeze ... little birds). All is offset and contradicted by the bruit lointain que faisait la forge dun carrossier (distant noise made by a coach builders forge p. 188) - and of course this is no tryst, for Mme Arnoux has been sent by her husband to get money from Frdric. When the idyll does come, it happens elsewhere, like Frdrics walks in Nogent in a setting is not unlike that of Julien Sorels conquest at Vergy. Especially, the site is roofed over: by a tree, other vegetation, or some artificial parasol:
un chvrefeuille norme, couvrant, dun seul ct, les planches du toit; ctait une manire de chlet suisse peint en rouge, avec un balcon
extrieur [...] trois vieux marronniers et au milieu, sur un tertre, un parasol en chaume que soutenait un tronc darbre.(p. 271)
(a vast honeysuckle which covered on one side only the planks of the roof; it was a kind of swiss chalet, painted red, with a balcony outside ... three old chestnut trees and in the middle, on a mound, a straw parasol held up by a tree trunk.)
This situation has its added ironies, of course, including the reference to Switzerland, with its attendant kitsch and the echo of the Arnoux destination when Frdric first met them. The idyll takes place outside Paris, in opposition to Paris, as if Paris could not contain an event characterised especially by impermanence and indeed, the relationship comes to grief as soon as Frdric and Mme Arnoux return to the city. Such instability is visible in the fragility of both the natural and the urban world and the constant movement between further proof that, even if his characters live in the physical world of the 1840s, their real mental world, determined by that of their creator, is that which Haussmann was creating at the time LEducation was being written. So, although Flaubert makes no mention of it, even in the late passages which bring characters up to date, the new fragility of urban relationships is clearly sensed. It is a constant theme in a novel where individuals appear, disappear and shift their allegiances without warning, the direct expression of a world of fragmented plot and constant of motion and the ephemeral beauty or ugliness of modern life which Baudelaire seeks out in Constantin Guys 44 a fleeting contact with things very different from the solid unthreatened social groups present especially in Balzac and Stendhal, and surviving perhaps into the contemporaneous world of Madame Bovary . Monets series of paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare point to the convergence of views and common sensibility in this period. Essentially, there is a lack of focus: Sequences of colour and tones which no special focus on one element at the expense of another. 45 The relationships are those of colour and surface pattern replacing the perspectival structure and sharp tonal contrasts. 46 There is a little accentuation or priority in the representation of the city. As Manets Bar des folies Bergre demonstrates, even when the contours are clear perspective is heavily and ambiguously distorted.
See CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, uvres compltes (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec, p. 1192.
45 46 44
HOUSE, Montet, cit., pp. 80-81. Ibid., p. 46.
Such devices are close to Flauberts fragmented, unstable representation of the city and its fleeting, disjointed natural insertions. Even in crowd scenes, as I have mentioned, suggestion replaces delineation and contour. 47 Frdrics Moreaus jealous fascination with couples in the crowd, well attested in the manuscripts, disappears significantly from the novels final form (Garnier p. 65). They have no place in a city which, in the 1860s, in the authors sensibility at least (if not that of his characters) has become with its wide pavements and straight avenues, an area both of fast communication and problem solving and mass movement la masse noire alluded to at the beginning of Nana (Folio p. 39). As in Caillebotte, 48 even the individuals insertion into the town becomes problematical a different representation from Renoirs clear views of human groups painted ten years later, 49 but perhaps an explanation for Monets, to my mind, disastrous elimination of the human figure and humanity in general after 1880. So the fantasies this new world stimulates are born of movement and incompleteness. They are present not merely in Flaubert, but also in Degass truncated figures and the haste of Manets representations. This conflicts with the crisp representations of a fashionable painter like Braud, whose scenes repress anything other than narrative speculation, even about locations which, like the boulevard Montmartre and the thtre des Varits, are more or less simultaneously explored by Zola (in Nana). It conflicts too with the opinion of contemporaries who in 1867 speak of:
Boulevards identiques, maisons semblables [...] rptition perptuelle dobjets faits la mcanique sur un type uniforme [...] la rptition du mme dessin comme sur les papiers tenture bon march.
(Identical avenues, houses that look the same ... the perpetual repetition of mechanically produced objects to a uniform model ... the repetition of the same pattern like on cheap wallpapers.)
and conclude that Paris a perdu le pittoresque, la varit, limprvu (has lost what was picturesque, variety, unpredictability). 50 The apparent lack of these qualities, the overall similarity of things are belied by those who do not have similar reading problems and who without creating the fantasy cities of Illuminations, incorporate, like Flaubert, the new mentality into the old city, or like Zola in many works (La Cure, L
47 48 49
Ibid., pp. 15, 17-18. See Rue de Paris, 1877.
See his Pont des Arts, 1867, in Herbert, Impressionism, cit., p. 7, which nevertheless shows the Right Bank of the new Paris.
50
Fournel and Karr, quoted in C. STUDENY, L Invention, cit., pp. 198, 199.
uvre), present an explosive world whose characteristic explosive vocabulary, as we see in Luvre, is: dbordement, crue, dbcle, bousculade, dbandade, envahissement, droute, inondation (overflowing, growth, ruination, jostling, invasion, rout, flooding). This disrupted, disruptive vision is part of a new world which includes Zolas gardens in La Faute de labb Mouret and especially for my purpose, La Cure:
A leurs pieds, le bassin fumait, plein dun grouillement, dun enlacement de racines, tandis que ltoile rose des Nymphas souvrait, fleur deau, comme un corsage de vierge, et que les Tournlia laissaient pendre leurs broussailles. 51
(At their feet, the pool issued smoke, full of teeming, tangled roots, while the red rose of the water lilies opened out, on the waters surface, like a virgins bodice, and the tangled tournelias hung down.)
Strangely, these are prefigured by a brief episode at La Vaubyessard:

on salla promener dans la serre chaude o des plantes bizarres, hrisses de poils srigeaient en pyramides sous des vases suspendus qui, pareils des nids de serpents trop pleins, laissaient retomber de leurs bords de longs cordons verts entrelacs. 52 (Madame Bovary, Garnier, p. 55-56)
(One went for a stroll in the hothouse where where strange plants, bristling with hairs raised their pyramid shapes beneath hanging pots which, like overfull serpents nests, spilled over their sides long green intertwined ropes.)
This garden of corruption, in a place which will long continue to feed Emmas fantasies, is a further indication of Flauberts anticipation of the new mentality. It is some considerable distance from the sordid garden of the Galeries de bois. Like the more celebrated, extensive and delirious examples we find in Zola, it points rather to a rejection of the city and its replacement not by a natural refuge (in town or country) but by a prurient exotic dream world which may exist within the city of La Cure, but which is in strong opposition to it:
Ctait alors, au milieu de la lueur ple, que des visions les hbtaient, des cauchemars dans lesquels ils assistaient longuement aux amours des Palmiers et des Fougres. 53
51 52 53
EMILE ZOLA, La Cure (Paris: Plade, 1960), p. 486. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary (Paris: Garnier, 1971), pp. 55-56. ZOLA, La Curie, I, p. 487.
(It was then, amidst their pallour, that visions confused him, nightmeres in which he witnessed at length the loves of palm trees and ferns.)
Such visions are present, potentially, in Madame Bovary, in the gardens of Salammb, alongside the dream city Emma constructs from maps and newspaper articles and alongside the city Frdric lives in, but does not see, for he too excludes perceived reality 54 .
* * *
With Proust, my final stage, I find a work which contains, perhaps more than any other, the completed, physical and social context of Haussmanns world, with its precise values and reflexes. But this, in La recherche, is filtered through an intensely subjective focus which hides Paris behind the closed curtains of morning, suppressing it as the spectacular topographical entity which, map in hand, we can explore in Illusions perdues or LEducation sentimentale. Most significantly, although more traditional motifs remain (Swann searches for Odette on the Boulevard des Italiens and the same Swann lives on the clearly situated wrong side of town), interest is displaced to the world of Combray or to Paris as fantastic garden. Stendhals emphasis, once again, becomes dominant but it is not offset here by Mmoires dun touriste or Promenades dans Rome. Rather, investing material Stendhal kept much nearer to home in La vie dHenri Brulard, Marcel drifts into and out of less clearly delineated gardens of reality and imagination. Thus, the assumed fantasies of persecution which the early story of Genevive de Brabant displays: Ce ntait quun pan de chteau, et il avait devant lui une lande o rvait Genevive qui portait une ceinture bleue (it was only the wing of a castle, and before him stretched a plain where Genevive dreamed, a white girdle around her waist) 55 leading to other family tales told or enacted in the garden in Combray with the by now familiar motif of the overarching tree: les soirs o assis devant la maison sous le grand marronnier(in the evenings sitting in fronte of the house under the great chestnut pp. 13-14). The garden at Combray is a refuge from Paris, but into it Swann brings the fears and evocations from an unknown world, setting off:
See for example the sordid beginning of the second part of LEducation sentimentale. MARCEL PROUST, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard, 1954-) ed. Clarac, vol. I, p. 9. Page references in the text are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.
55
54
non pas le grelot profus et criard qui arrosait au passage de son bruit ferrugineux, intarrissable et glac [...] mais le double tintement timide, oval et dor de la clochette des trangers (p. 14)
(not the profuse, shrill bell which ... @?@ its rusty, inextinguishable, icy noise ... but the timid, rounded, gilded double tinkle of the front door bell.)
Associations arise in a space where the conflicts of fantasy and the apparently real are played out. The grandmother walks freely in the rain (enfin on respire), and yet is restrained by: les alles trop symtriquement alignes son gr par le nouveau jardinier dpourvu du sentiment de la nature(the paths all-too-symmetrically aligned to his liking by the new gardner, who quite lacked the feeling for nature p. 13). We have already seen at Verrires how such gardens which appear to reduce fantasy to very little and to destroy the terrors of the night. And yet, fantasy is rarely far away, for night is never kept at bay: nous gardions le moins de lumire possible [...] pour ne pas attirer les moustiques(we kept the least light possible on ... not to attract the mosquitoes p. 14). And Swann looms up as: lobscur et incertain personnage qui se dtachait, suivi de ma grandmre, sur un fond de tnbres, et quon reconnaissait la voix.(the obscure and incertain figure who issued out of a background of darkness, followed by my grandmother, and whom one recognized by his voice p. 19) every bit as ominous and mythic as Golo, to whom he is linked, for, as we know, the grandmothers petit pas enthousiaste et saccad(small, enthousiastic, jerky steps p. 11) directly and ironically echoes the step (au pas saccad de son cheval the jerky step of his horse p. 9) of the horse of Genevives persecutor. So, it is logical that, in this world where familiar faces herald the terrors of the night, Marcel should be driven from the garden and consigned to his room, its closed space and its deathly echoes:
Une fois dans ma chambre, il fallut boucher toutes les issues, fermer les volets, creuser mon propre tombeau, en dfaisant mes couvertures, revtir le suaire de ma chemise de nuit (p. 28)
(Once in my room, it was necessary to block all the exits, close the shutters, dig my own tomb, pulling back the bed covers, put on again the shroud of my night shirt)
An illogical outcome, complicated by its autobiographical resonance, for the garden is, in itself, a place of torture, both for Marcel and his grandmother, whose ordinary torments (viens donc empcher ton mari de boire du cognac! come and stop your husband from drinking brandy): me causaient une telle horreur que jaurais aim battre ma
grandtante.(provoked such horror in me that I wanted to hit my grandmother p. 11). The garden becomes the perverse paradise a contradictory place both of torment and maternal warmth from which he is expelled, and from which Marcel flees into further realms of fantasy:
je montais sangloter tout en haut de la maison ... (dans) cette pice ... (qui) servit longtemps de refuge pour moi ... toutes celles de mes occupations qui rclamaient une inviolable solitude: la lecture, la rverie, les larmes et la volupt. (p. 11)
(I climbed off to cry up at the very top of the house ... in that room which had long served as my refuge ... served for all those activities which demanded an inviolable solitude: reading, dreaming, crying, pleasure.)
These fragmenting conflicts (echoing Flauberts fragmented world?) are resolved only much later, when the Madeleine brings to the mature Marcel the world of Combray in the synthesis and the prodigality of art and memory:
la vieille maison grise sur la rue vint comme un dcor de thtre sappliquer au petit pavillon donnant sur le jardin ... toutes les fleurs de notre jardin et celles du parc de M.Swann ... tout cela est sorti ville et jardins de ma tasse de th.(p. 47 - my italics).
(the old grey house superimposed itself like a stage set over the small pavillion overlooking the garden ... all the flowers in our garden and M. Swanns grounds ... all this city and gardens came out of my cup of tea.)
This fusion also combines many dimensions:

jallais du moins [continuer ma lecture] au jardin, sous le marronnier, dans une petite gurite en sparterie et en toile au fond de laquelle jtais assis et me croyais cach aux yeux des personnes qui pourraient venir faire visite mes parents. Et ma pense ntait-elle pas comme une autre crche au fond de laquelle je sentais que je restais enfonc mme pour regarder ce qui se passait au dehors. (p. 83-84)
(at least I was going to continue my reading in the garden, under the chestnut, in a little straw and canvas hut at the bottom of which I sat, thinking miself hidden from the sight of anybody who might come to visit my parents. And my thoughts, were they not like another haven ... in which I remained immersed even as I looked out to see what was happening beyond.)
The rest of the page would need to be quoted, and those following, to show how from the intimacy of his hiding place, Marcel in his reading, is invaded by dincessants mouvements du dedans au dehors, vers la dcouverte de la vrit(incessant movements from inside outwards, towards discovering truth) and by les motions que me donnait laction laquelle je prenais part, car ces aprs-midi-l taient plus remplis daction que ne lest souvent toute une vie(the emotions which the event in which I took part aroused in me, bcecuase those afternoons were more packed with action than is often the case for a whole life). Cut off now from the bruits les plus loigns, ceux qui devaient venir des jardins situs lautre bout de la ville(the most distant noises, those which must have come from the gardens located at the other end of town p. 33), this is a unique garden world more secret than Brulards private maps and even than Emma Bovarys adulterous space. In the shift and change, the transformation and fluidity which are at the heart of Prousts text, Marcels particular vision is distinct that of from others in La recherche. Notably, it conflicts with the experience of Marcels lapsed double, Swann, through whom we come to a personal reconfiguration of Paris. As a manuscript draft puts it, [Odette] lui avait dit quelle tait enceinte, Swann devenu son mari avait d quitter son joli quartier, son vieil htel, habiter le vilain appartement somptueux quelle dtenait (Odette had told him she was pregnant. Upon becoming her husband Swann had to leave his charming rooms, his old mansion, move into the vulgar, sumptuous apartment she possessed). 56 This is one of those constantly renewed dispositions nouvelles du kalidoscope [social](new arrangements of the social kaleidoscope p. 17), which make up the experience of Paris. They breed fantasies about the districts one does not know, and, in an ironic rerun of Ferragus, they even launch Marcel in libidinous pursuit of a woman who turns out to be la vieille Mme Verdurin que jvitais partout(old Mme Verdurin, whom I always tried to avoid ibid., pp. 713-714). But especially for my purpose, this reconfiguration brings Swann, and at his heels Marcel, closer to the mysteries of the Bois de Boulogne, a newly configured space, a place quite different from the garden at Combray. At its extreme limit (and significantly, bringing Swann and Marcel together) it is an extension of the Vinteuil sonata, although significantly we do not even know with what degree of irony we should read the failed artists words:
Nest-ce pas que cest beau, cette Sonate de Vinteuil, me dit Swann. Le moment o il fait nuit sous les arbres, o les arpges du violon font
Esquisse lxxxiv, in La recherche, ed. Tadi, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), vol. I, p. 986. .
56
tomber la fracheur [...] Cest cela qui est si bien peint dans cette petite phrase, cest le Bois de Boulogne tomb en catalepsie. (Vol. I, p. 533)
(Is it not beautiful, this sonata by Vinteuil, Swann told me. The moment when night falls under the trees, when the arpeggios of the violin bringing in the cool air ... Thats what this little phrase depicts so well, the Bois de Boulogne fallen into catalepsy.)
This is a complex world of proliferating associations, for it is also the place of the aging Marcels regrets for a lost society (vol. I, p. 421) and, much more mysteriously, the site of Odettes famous appearances. With its petits mondes divers et clos (different closed little worlds), the Bois de Boulogne is a Jardin des femmes, and a far cry in this from the purely factual description the early versions of this passage contain. 57 It is transformed into a vast conceit 58 , a female zoological space where lon voit rassembls des flores diverses et des paysages opposs (one see gathered together different floras and contrasting views p. 417). Plante pour elles darbres dune seule essence, lalle des Acacias tait frquente par les Beauts clbres (planted for them with trees of a single scent, the avenue of Acacias was frequented by the most celebrated beauties 418). With its Virgilian reference to the great abandoned lovers of antiquity, it is a place of mythology, a descent into hell and torment. It is one to which the Porte Dauphine gives the image pour moi dun prestige royal, dune arrive souveraine, telle quaucune reine vritable na pu men donner limpression par la suite (image to me of a royal distinction, a sovereign entrance, such as subsequently no real queen ould impress upon me Vol. I, p. 419) and it is in this regal space that, for the adolescent Marcels confusion, Odette appears, with, aux lvres un sourire ambigu o je ne voyais que la bienveillance dune Majest et o il y avait surtout la provocation de la cocotte(an ambiguous smile on her lips, were I saw nothing but the benevolence of majesty, and where there was above all the provocation of a flirt Vol. I, p. 419). The richness of the garden is also in its varied aesthetic and artistic status. References to Balzac, Vinteuil, Virgil, Constantin Guys (and behind him, of course, Baudelaire), weave associations of sensation and event, giving greater complexity still to the other gardens where Marcels emotive life is spent, in reality or speculation: those of the Champs Elyses (see Vol. I, p. 394-416) where he saw Gilberte, and Odettes jardin dhiver (winter garden), a true sign of the past and a sign of her profession (Vol. I, p. 592 et seq).
57 58
For example in Esquisse lxxxvi, ibid., vol.I, pp. 988 et seq. Ibid., vol.I, p. 417 et seq.
Here is the essential process, so different from Stendhal, for here everything is subjected to cross-referencing of increasing complexity. Paris is Venice is Delft - and the city is a garden:
Je ne dis pas Venise au hasard. Cest ses quartiers pauvres que font penser certains quartiers pauvres de Paris, le matin avec leurs hautes chemines vases auxquelles le soleil donne les roses les plus vifs, les rouges les plus clairs; cest tout un jardin qui fleurit au-dessus des maisons, et qui fleurit en nuances si varies quon dirait, plant sur la ville, le jardin dun amateur de tulipes de Delft ou de Haarlem. (vol. II, p. 572 - see also Vol. III p. 650)
(I did not say Venice by hance. It is its poor districts that certain poor districts of Paris recall, in the morning with their tall wide-mouthed chimneys which the sun tinges with the rosiest of hues, the brightest reds; a veritable garden blooming below the houses, blooming with such a variety of hues as if the garden of of some tulip lover from Delft or from Harlem ad been planted over the city.)
My talk of thematic drift at the beginning of this paper would seem to be justified by what we find at last in Proust. Certainly, no clear-cut theoretical formula could account for his increasingly secret and fragmented world or for the shifting motifs, from Stendhals orange trees to the fantastic garden of the mind Paris had become by the end of the nineteenth century. In both Stendhal and Proust, the writers involvement fuses biography and creation and questions the distinction between urban experience and experience elsewhere. Haussmanns reconfiguration of the city, sensed in Flaubert, repeatedly detailed in Zola, is a convenient divider for the phenomena I have explored. At the same time, points of continuity throughout the whole period show the mental set to this crucial area of modern experience to be working at a variety of levels, rhythms and speeds.
R. K. Britton
CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM: A Reassessment of the Political and Cultural Debate in Modern Spanish American Thought and Literature 1
In 1845, the writer and politician Domingo Faustino Sarmiento launched at the Spanish American world a book which was destined to have a significant impact upon it. Entitled Facundo, it was ostensibly a journalistic account of the career of Juan Facundo Quiroga, a provincial caudillo and leader of an army of gaucho irregulars, who controlled large parts of Northern Argentina during the civil wars between the Federalists and Unitarians. Facundo Quiroga had been murdered in an ambush in 1835, and Sarmientos prime motive was now to attack the Federalist dictator of Argentina, Juan Manuel Rosas, whom Quiroga had previously served, for basing his regime on the same barbaric and arbitrary principles which Quiroga had represented. The sub-title of the first edition of the book, published in Chile where Sarmiento had been exiled in 1840 for his opposition to Rosas, was Civilizacin y barbarie, and though this was removed from the revised version of 1851, it was to encapsulate the conflicting opposites of what would become a cultural, political and historical debate of continental proportions. Before the end of the century, the precise meanings of civilisation and barbarism as Sarmiento used them were not only questioned but, in some cases, refuted. Nevertheless, they became polarities around which a complex web of issues involving cultural identity, autochthony, and political, social and economic advance were to be discussed throughout Spanish America. That this was possible is due to the shifting nature of what, at any particular historical moment, these opposing terms were thought to signify. Indeed, what some writers conceived as representing
A version of this paper was read to the BCLAs VII International Conference, Cities, Gardens, Wildernesses, Edinburgh, 12-15 July 1995.
1
Britton: Civilization and Barbarism
civilisation, other contemporaries construed as precisely the opposite. This article sets out, therefore, to trace the lineaments of this debate, its mutating definitions, the transformations it has undergone as reflected in the different literary forms in which it has been taken up. It suggests, furthermore, that an understanding of the development of Spanish American literature and ideas over the past 150 years which fails to take it into account is likely to be seriously deficient. The origins of the debate are, however, of greater antiquity. Beneath the apparent diversity of late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas lies a unifying dialectic whose roots go back to the earliest years of the discovery and conquest of America, and whose first exponents were the contemporary chroniclers of those events. They were, on the one hand, men like Fernndez de Oviedo and Francisco Lpez de Gmara, the foremost official historians of the Spanish Empire, and on the other those such as Bartolom de las Casas and El Inca Garcilaso, who wrote from the point of view of the defeated and enslaved indigenous peoples. Although these first manifestations did not turn specifically upon stated notions of civilisation and barbarism, they were implicit within and fundamental to it. Embedded in the official historiography of the conquest is a sophisticated justification of Spains enterprise in the New World, which seeks to demonstrate its providential nature and civilising mission under the power of the modern nation state and the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church. 2 As a churchman himself, Bartolom de las Casas did not reject this argument out of hand, but nevertheless made of his history a passionate appeal to the King of Spain to protect his new indian subjects from the excessive cruelties and depredations of the conquistadors and their followers which exceeded anything justifiable in law or religion. 3 Neither was El Inca Garcilaso unambiguous in his position. He was, after all, one of the first mestizos, his mother being an Inca princess, and his father, Sebastin Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish nobleman and soldier who was appointed chief justice for the Cuzco area in the Spanish ViceRoyalty of Peru. Like the histories of Bartolom de las Casas, El Inca Garcilasos chronicles, Los comentarios reales and La historia general del Peru (The Royal Commentaries and the History of Peru) oppose the official
Early official histories were concerned with obeying the wish of the Spanish Crown not to concede control over the vast mainland territories of the New World to Columbus and his heirs. See MARCEL BATAILLON, Historiografa oficial de Coln, de Pedro Mrtir a Oviedo y Gmara, Imago Mundi (Buenos Aires, 1954) Yr 1, No. 5, pp. 23-39. This is also quoted by ROBERTO GONZLEZ ECHEVARRA, Myth and Archive: A theory of Latin American narrative (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 61. BARTOLOM DE LAS CASAS, Brevssima relacin de la destruccin de las Indias (Sevilla, 1552); modern edition edited by Lewis Hawke and Manuel Gimnez Fernndez (Santiago: Fondo histrico y bibliografico, Jos Toribio Medina, 1954).
3 2
record, and provide a vital point of counter-reference which reveals the violence, greed, and betrayal which marked the early history of colonial Peru, contrasting it with the story of the Inca empire which the Spaniards had obliterated. 4 But it also does something much more significant in terms of the debate we are examining. It is the first great literary work to reflect the crisis of cultural identity resulting from the meeting and mingling of Europeans and native Americans in the New World within the process of enforced colonisation, a crisis which imperial authority and criollo society suppressed until the end of the eighteenth century. 5 The concept of civilisation held by Renaissance Europe was essentially a graeco-roman one based on the assumption that only social life which was organised and protected within a large, urban community could foster those qualities stability, material well-being, and cultural and moral progress which justify mans existence. Not only was life outside those controlling confines regarded as rough, crude, undeveloped and untouched by higher sensibilities, but those living outside the pax romana were regarded as barbarians for whom civilisation by conquest was always justifiable. It is therefore scarcely remarkable that the idea of civilization exported in the sixteenth century to the New World from the Old should have been one which measured it very much in terms of urbanisation, and the bureaucratic control of a centralised, monarchical state sanctioned and mediated by the spiritually and culturally unifying power of the Spanish Church. It was, furthermore, no great leap from that set of ideas to one which introduced racial and ethnic considerations into the definition, especially where these also coincided with religious differences. Even so, in sixteenth-century Spain, the acquisition of territory and the conversion of its non-christian inhabitants was not without serious moral and religious
GARCILASO DE LA VEGA (El Inca), Primera parte de los comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisboa, 1609); Segunda parte de los comentarios reales de los Incas: Historia general del Per (Crdoba, 1617); See also The Royal Commentaries of the Incas and the History of Peru (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1966), 2 vols, transl. H. Livermore. See CARLOS J. ALONSO, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and autochthony (Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 1-18. Here Alonso observes (pp. 5-6) that All discourse produced by a culture [...] is to some degree confirmatory of that cultures identity inasmuch as it is expressive of the set of beliefs or practices which impart a sense of closure to that cultural experience. Because such a view of culture is paradigmatic, it is constantly perceived to be under threat from historical change. Culture as a concept thus exists in a state of permanent crisis.
5
objections which had to be reconciled before the imperial undertaking could be justified. 6 However, the European concept of civilisation received a severe jolt when faced with the physical realities of the American mainland. Indeed, the culture-shock suffered by the Spaniards as a result of their first contacts with it are only now beginning to be fully understood through revaluations of the writings of the early explorers. European experience was barely capable of dealing with this vast new continent, many of whose plants and animals had no place in Aristotelian natural history, and whose inhabitants ranged from the noble savages of the Antilles to the rulers of extensive mainland empires, whose organisation and feats of building and engineering filled the Europeans with amazement. Their attempts to come to terms with what they encountered therefore often lapse into invention and fantasy. Recalling the fabulous things in America described by Magellans navigator Antonio Pigafetta, Carlos Fuentes has remarked:
This discovery of the marvellous, because it is imagined and desired, occurs in many other fantastic chroniclers of the invention of America: but even the more sober, one feels, had to invent in order to justify their discovery of, or even their being in, the New World. 7
The tensions between urban and rural life already present in European ideas of civilisation and barbarism were greatly magnified by the sheer scale of the Americas, but also reinforced by the methods of agricultural production and exploitation of natural resources on which the colonial economy was built. These demanded not only the forced labour and systematic destruction of the native indians, but also the importation of slaves from West Africa to work the plantations. Thus, when the early nineteenth century saw a revolt of progressive criollos against the restrictions of direct Spanish rule, and the organisation of a successful independence movement, the social, economic and racial structures of the colonial system
Officially the Spanish Crown based its right to rule the Indies upon prior discovery and just conquest, reinforced by the papal bull Inter caetera (1493) which granted Spain all the lands discovered in the New World except any held by christian princes. Papal doctrine widely disputed at that time allowed that infidels might retain control of their lands only by the favour of the Church, which could appoint christian rulers over them. In 1510, the Council of Castile therefore drew up a document, the Requerimiento, which called upon the native people of America to submit peacefully to the Spanish Crown and receive the catholic faith. This long and complicated legal text was to be read out to the indians on all occasions before military action was taken against them. See J. H. PARRY, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (London: Hutchinson, 1966), Ch. 7. See CARLOS FUENTES, Gabriel Garca Mrquez and the Invention of Latin America, E. Allison Peers Lectures, 2 (Liverpool University Press, 1987) p. 6.
7 6
remained largely in place, preventing any consistent or rapid modernisation. The civil strife and inter-republican wars which engulfed virtually all the emergent republics of Spanish America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw periods of progressive liberalism alternate with decades of authoritarian dictatorship. In this unsettled context, questions of social and economic development, cultural and national identity and autochthony overflowed into the immediate political debate, and were taken up in a number of literary forms. Spanish American writers have traditionally be conspicuous for their deep involvement in the political life of their countries and continent. Similarly, a surprising number of Spanish Americas political and public figures have also been men of letters. Indeed, not only have literary and political roles seemed, at times, interchangeable, but this same mutability has blurred the distinctions between the different forms of writing which authors have chosen to use; these forms becoming as hybrid as they are eclectic. 8 Hence, books that are ostensibly histories become biographies, autobiographies and political polemics combined. Novels and short stories employ narrative and rhetorical techniques to rewrite the historical record, expose injustices and abuses, or to explore questions of culture and identity. Similarly, essays on political or social issues become studies of metaphysical or spiritual questions couched in the language of poetry. These different discourses therefore often exist in as confusing and promiscuous a relationship as that which applies to the forms of writing, reflecting the universality of a debate which rejects compartmentalisation. It is therefore evident that the civilization versus barbarism question was not one which suddenly and unexpectedly faced the Spanish American republics in the first half of the nineteenth century. In different forms, and without being simplified into those precise, politically charged antinomies, it had been posed three centuries before in terms that reflected all the contradictions of the colonial process. Ultimately, imperial Spain had been obliged to justify what it could not control namely, the corruption, genocide and slavery which colonisation entailed as an inevitable price to be paid for the higher aim of bringing administrative order, the Catholic faith, the Spanish language, and European trade and technology to a huge, unknown part of the world to which they had previously been denied.
A number of important critical studies have focussed upon the extent to which prose narrative in Latin America has been mediated by other discourses, and the overlapping and merging of forms such as historiography, the novel, the essay and journalism. See, for example, among the more recent, GONZLEZ ECHEVARRA, Myth and Arcihive, cit., and The Voice of the Masters: writing and authority in modern Latin American literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); ANBAL GONZLEZ, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
8
But for Spanish American writers such as Jos Mart, who died fighting in the second war of Cuban independence in 1894, this civilising mission was nothing more than a pretext on which to take other peoples land by force. Furthermore, Mart states in his seminal essay Nuestra Amrica (Our America), published in Mexico in 1891, that Spains treatment of the native Americans and the destruction of their cultures was an act universal vandalism:
those peoples whose world the valorous conquistadors slyly and subtly entered, with all the guile and experience of the Old World, to discharge against them their powerful steel weaponry represented budding cultures in their infancy. The result was a historical disaster and a crime against nature [...] The conquistadors tore a page out of the book of the Universe! 9
The second half of the nineteenth century thus saw the question of la raza (the race) enter the political and cultural debate in Spanish America, where it was destined to remain for nearly a hundred years. Yet it had also been present from the beginning of the struggle against Spanish rule, introduced into the agenda for independence by Bolvar the Liberator in 1819, when, in his message to the Congress of Angostura he said:
Let us remember that our people are not European, nor North American...It is impossible to say, properly speaking, to which human family we belong. The greater part of the indigenous population has been destroyed, Europeans have mixed with Americans, and Africans, and these with both Indians and Europeans. Born all of one mother, our fathers, different in origin and blood are strangers, with skins of visibly different colours. These dissimilarities link us in the most transcendent of ways. 10
JOS MART, Nuestra Amrica (La Revista Ilustrada denueva York. January, 1891); now in Poltica de Nuestra Amrica, ed. Roberto Fernndez de Retamar (Mxico: Siglo Veinteuno Editores S.A, 1977), p. 36 (No ms que pueblos en ciernes, no ms que pueblos en bulbo eran aquellos en que con maa sutil de viejos vividores se entr el conquistador valiente, y descarg su poderosa herrajera, lo cual fue una desdicha histrica y un crimen natural [...] Robaron los conquistadores una pgina al Universo! SIMN BOLVAR, Discurso de Angostura, Escritos polticos (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990), p. 103 (Es imposible asignar con propiedad a qu familia humana pertenecemos. La mayor parte del indgena se ha aniquilado, el Europeo se ha mezclado con el Americano y con el Africano, y ste se ha mezclado con el Indio y con el Europeo. Nacidos todos del seno de una misma Madre, nuestros Padres diferentes en origen y sangre son extranjeros, y todos diferencian visiblemente en el epidermis; esta desemejanza trae un reato de la mayor transcendencia.).
10
These words may well be seen as the origin of the idea that Spanish Americas future lay in cultural as well as ethnic mestizaje (mixing). It was to become a doctrine which was, until the 1930s, as passionately rejected by some as it was espoused by others, forming a focal point around which both sets of adversaries argued different versions of the civilisation and barbarism duality. Let us now return to Sarmientos Facundo to explore the ideas behind the first formulation of those terms. It should be remembered that, in Facundo, Sarmientos passionate concern is the political situation in Argentina in the 1830s and early 1840s. The book is primarily a political polemic, and the details it provides of life on the pampas, Argentine geography, the character of the gaucho, and the personality and military campaigns of Quiroga are written with this purpose in mind. Facundo Quiroga was, in Sarmientos view, a means to an end; the instrument through which the arbitrary rule of one man, Juan Manuel Rosas, could be established and sustained by force which respected neither the individual nor the law, and suppressed ideas and learning. The means which Quiroga embodied owed its existence to the isolation, ignorance and harshness of the life of the gaucho, for whom urban living and social organisation were completely alien. Yet Sarmientos portrait of Facundo, like his descriptions of the gauchos, is not entirely one-sided. Like the people from whom he comes, Quiroga has a practical intelligence, skill and resourcefulness, with an abundance of physical courage. His intuitive belief in his own actions marks him as a leader. But he is also cruel, instinctive, irrational and violent, with no understanding of how to govern what he conquers other than by intimidation. He is natural man misdirected, and the outcome of his success is disastrous. But we have to turn to a writer of fiction to grasp the extent of this disaster, which is illustrated in Esteban Echevarras short story El matadero (The Slaughterhouse), probaly written in 1838 but not published until 1871. 11 The somewhat obvious symbolism by which Rosas bloody dictatorship is compared to a slaughterhouse, and the authors barbed anticlericalism, do not detract from the impact of the sharp, at times almost obscene detail, the vitality of the anonymous crowd dialogues, or the revulsion felt at the narration of the brief central event. This takes place against the background of the killing of a new batch of cattle which is brought into the Buenos Aires yards after a long interval when the city has had no fresh meat . The event is watched by a large mob of scavengers and
See ESTEBAN ECHEVARRA, La cautiva y El matador (Buenos Aires: Sopena, 1962), 7 th ed. The story is also known through John Incledons English translation in The Spanish American Short Story: A critical anthology, ed. Seymour Menton, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) pp. 3-21.
11
the curious from among the poor of the city. As the slaughter, skinning and fighting for offal and remains comes to an end, the slaughterhouse workers, all Rosas supporters many of whom are also members of his gangs of paid assassins, suddenly turn upon an aristocratic looking young man who happens to be riding by and who is not wearing the red ribbon which proclaims that he is a Federalist. What begins as a violent game aimed at humiliation and intimidation, becomes, within half an hour, a sadistic murder as the man is beaten to death on a table in the Slaughterhouse office for being a Unitarian savage. Sarmientos conception of civilisation and barbarism, as reflected in Facundo, must therefore be understood in relation to the context of Argentina in the early years of Rosass regime. Civilization constitutes life in urban centres which preserves freedom of thought and expression, maintains constitutional liberties under the rule of law, encourages the arts and sciences and promotes trade and prosperity. Essentially this view can be seen as a cosmopolitan and elitist one. Sarmiento was a patriot but not a cultural nationalist, and saw part of the tragedy of Argentina as its failure to emulate the models offered by Europe and North America. It is a position for which there was much support from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the second decade of the twentieth, when, taking their lead from French positivism, many Spanish American thinkers set out to diagnose what they saw as the sickness of the new republics. As Martin S. Stabb has pointed out, in his survey of the Latin American essay of ideas, In Quest of Identity, an important aspect of this ostensibly scientific approach to man and society was a strong interest in race and racial theories:
The biological thought of the nineteenth century - diffused through such popularising movements as Darwinism, social organicism and the relatively new discipline of physical anthropology - provided abundant material on which the racial theoriser could draw. Moreover, the fact that Spanish America had a population of great ethnic complexity naturally led her thinkers to consider race in assessing the continents problems. 12
In the influential works of men like the Argentinians Carlos O. Bunge and Alcides Arguedas, and the Peruvian Francisco Garca Caldern, who subscribed to the Comtian system and popular scientism, the moral and temperamental failings which accounted for the state of political, social and economic life in Spanish America were attributed to various racial types, and Americans of mixed race, whether mestizo or mulatto, were held to
See MARTIN S. STABB, In Quest of Identity: Patterns in the Spanish American essay of ideas, 1890-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967) p. 12.
12
represent the worst characteristics of the races from which they were descended. Geography and climate were also regarded as important determining factor of racial and therefore moral and intellectual characteristics. The social and political ills which such essayists identified could therefore often be ascribed to racial and racist first causes. Other Spanish American intellectuals staged a simultaneous revolt against this kind of deterministic scientism. Their reaction was a complex mixture of ideas and attempts to revalue the historical and cultural experience of the Southern American continent which were essentially teleological, sometimes bordering on the metaphysical, but at their centre was a search for identity which was based upon the autochthonous realities of their countries. Here again, Jos Mart is a central figure in his roles as poet, journalist and cultural and political thinker, a leading force in the Modernista movement, and the leading architect of Cuban independence. Turning again to Nuestra Amrica, we see Mart as the passionate advocate of a united vision among all Spanish Americans which would seek the answer to the continents problems not from outside, but from within:
Government must be born of the country. The spirit of government has to be that of the country. The form of government must reflect the way the country is constituted. Government is no more nor less than the achievement of an equilibrium between the natural elements of the country. For this reason, in America, natural man has superceded the imported book. Natural men have replaced the artificially educated. The native mestizo has overcome the exotic creole. The struggle is not between civilization and barbarism, but between false knowledge and nature.....The failure of the American republics to distinguish their true characters, to derive a form of government from them and govern by that form, has been purged by having to suffer tyrannical regimes. 13
Mart thus takes direct issue with the now ageing Sarmiento, the passing of old-style dictators such as Francia, Rosas and Porfirio Daz no doubt giving him cause for optimisim on the question of purgation! As for Sarmiento, who had not only returned to Argentina following the fall of Rosas, but also served for a short period as the countrys president, one of his last works (1883) had been entitled Conflicto y armona de las razas en Amrica (Conflict and Harmony among the Races of America) in which he showed
See JOS MART, Nuestra America, in Poltica de Nuestra Amrica cit., p. 39 (El gobierno ha de nacer del pas. El espritu del gobierno ha de ser del pas. La forma del gobierno ha de avenirse a la constitucin propia del pas. El gobierno no es ms que el equilibrio de los elementos naturales del pas. Por eso el libro importado ha sido vencido en Amrica por el hombre natural. Los hombres naturales han vencido al criollo extico. No hay batalla entre la civilizacin y la barbarie, sino entre la fals erudicin y la naturaleza..).
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that over 40 years since the appearance of Facundo, he had grafted neopositivist racial theories onto his earlier pro-Europeanism, and found no difficulty in justifying the Spanish colonisation of America, and the policy of unstated genocide which had, both in Argentina and the USA, ensured that the continent was not left in the hands of savages who are incapable of progress. 14 Marts strong identification with the autochthonous America be seen as a key point of departure both from the view that civilization in Spanish America was an urban phenomenon built on European and North American democratic models, and that barbarism was to be equated with the indigenous, the rural and the natural. From Mart also comes the repudiation of ideas about the inherent inferiority of the non-European races. It was part of a radical reversal of the positivist school of thought, which saw the works of thinkers such as the Mexicans Jos Vasconcelos and Alfonso Reyes, and the Peruvian Manuel Gonzlez Prada give the impetus to a metaphysical and philosophical attempt to seek the spirit or essence of America through its indigenous past and present, the vitality of the common people, and the land of which they were a part. In essays such as Vasconceloss La raza csmica (The Cosmic Race), and Indologa (Indology) which appeared in 1925 and 1926 respectively, it was argued that Spanish Americas future lay in creating a new, mixed race which drew upon the cultural strengths of all the different elements which it comprised, and which would realise the utopian dream which the Old World had always sought to find in the New. In a similar essay entitled Eurindia (The Euroindies), published in 1924, the Argentinian Ricardo Rojas maintained that race had nothing to do with ethnicity, but was a product of the collective consciousness of a people, reinforced by territorial possession and a common historical experience. In Peru, meanwhile, a younger generation of Gonzlez Pradas disciples, among them Haya de la Torre, Jos Carlos Maritegui and Antenor Orrego, had, by 1928, translated a deep understanding of the Andean indian communities into a left-wing political movement built around the APRA party. To Mart also must be attributed the first systematic critique of the USA and its political and economic intentions towards its southern hemisphere neighbours. This is revealed in the course of the many Escenas norteamericanos (North American Scenes) which he wrote over several
14
Sarmientos phrase salvajes incapaces de progreso is also quoted by ROBERTO FERNNDEZ DE RETAMAR in his essay Calibn: Apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra Amrica (Mxico: Editorial Diogones S.A., 1972), p. 50. The differences between Sarmiento and Mart on what constituted civilisation and barbarism in the Latin American context are also discussed inter alia by Carlos Alonso, Civilizacin y barbarie, Hispania, 72:2 (1989), pp. 256-263.
years for the Buenos Aires daily La Nacin (The Nation). 15 These fascinating pieces of descriptive and analytical reportage reveal, indirectly and subtly, the profound misgivings he felt about the effects of capitalism upon North American society. However, the chief voice raised to urge that Spanish America distance itself from the example of the USA has been traditionally regarded as that of Jos Enrique Rod, the Uruguayan philosopher, whose essay Ariel first appeared in 1900. The book exercised as widespread an influence in the Spanish-speaking world including Spain itself as Facundo had done, and its followers formed themselves into arielist groups in most American republics. Although Ariel is nowadays seen as opposing the positivist thinkers of the time in Spanish America, Rod was not an anti-Comtian. Indeed, he drew considerably upon the ideas of both Comte and, more specifically, Rnan in formulating his main arguments. Primarily, these were that Spanish America must seek its own future through the characteristic spiritual and aesthetic qualities of its people, and that its educated elites should aspire to the ideal at the core of Greek culture, namely the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and the creation of beauty and harmony. This did not mean that the practical and the material could be ignored, but that
The civilization of a people acquires its character from those superior ways of thinking and feeling that lie within it, not from manifestations of prosperity or material grandeur. 16
The great enemy of this ideal, Rod argues, is the example of the United States where, while we must admire the sheer energy and achievement of its population, and the moral and religious strenth that has enabled a free society to be created in the New World, life has become a vicious circle in the pursuit of material well-being for its own sake, leaving the impression of a society with a vacuum at its centre. Ariel also re-engages with the civilisation versus barbarism debate in a number of ways. Rods point is that if civilisation is to be measured in terms of social, intellectual and artistic progress, then barbarism is characterised by the failure to achieve them and the slide towards vulgarity
See JOS MART, Nuestra America, in Poltica de Nuestra Amrica cit., pp. 17-20. In his critical introduction to this selection of Marts political writings and correspondence, ROBERTO FERNNDEZ RETAMAR summarises Marts position on the intentions of the USA with reference also to his Escenas Norteamericanos which Mart wrote for La Nacin, and emphasises the care with which both he and the editor of the paper had to choose their words to escape official reaction (ibid, p. 30-31). See JOSE ENRIQUE RODO, Ariel (Madrid: Editores Austral, Espasa Calpe, 1991), p. 92 (La civilizacin de un pueblo adquiere su caracter, no de las manifestaciones de su prosperidad o de su grandeza material, sino de las superiores maneras de pensar y de sentir que dentro de ellas son posibles.).
16 15
and mediocrity. The argument which emerges from this is that modern industrial society, as found in the USA and Europe, with its manufacturing cities and instrumental approach to education, promotes precisely the kind of barbarism that must be avoided. This theme was to be taken up by other Spanish American thinkers and writers in the nineteen thirties and forties, when men like the Argentinian Ezequiel Martnez Estrada attacked the denaturing of modern man within the city. However, two important strands of the civilisation versus barbarism debate remain to be dealt with. Both lead directly back to Facundo and Sarmientos definitions of barbarism and civilization as they applied in that book. In general terms, they can be summarised as the exploration of political dictatorship and the curtailment of freedoms of thought and action which it entails, and achieving a balance between man and the natural environment. Significantly, both have been investigated mainly by novelists, and it is to this process of investigation that I would now like to turn. The nineteen twenties saw the emergence of a body of narrative by Spanish American writers from many countries which moved away from the traditions of nineteenth century literary realism essentially urban and bourgeois in its aims and preoccupations and began to apply the methods and principles of Zola to rural life in the Americas. Critics usually refer to this category of writing now almost regarded as a genre in itself as the regionalist novel or the novel of the land, and have long recognised the contribution it has made to the search for autochthony and cultural identity. Foremost among the novels of this kind, and central to the ongoing conduct of the debate were Doa Brbara (1927) by the Venezuelan writer and politician Rmulo Gallegos, Don Segundo Sombra (1926) by the Argentinian Ricardo Giraldes, and La vorgine (The Vortex) (1924) by the Colombian writer Jos Eustasio Rivera. As Carlos J. Alonso has pointed out, there are interesting points of comparison between Don Segundo Sombra and Doa Brbara, and between both novels and Sarmientos Facundo. 17 Giraldess novel is strongly based upon his own life. In Don Segundo Sombra the narrator is a boy who grows into a man, learning the life and work of a gaucho under the tutelage of Don
See ALONSO, The Spanish American Regional Novel, cit., Chapters 3, 4 and 5, pp. 79-144. Alonso points out that the theme of civilization and barbarism in Facundo and Doa Brbara has been examined and well documented. Among specific studies to which he refers are ERNEST A. JOHNSON Jnr, The Meaning of `civilizatin and `barbarie in Doa Brbara, Hispania 39 (1956), pp. 456-61; JOS ANTONIO GALAOS, Rmulo Gallegos o el duelo entre civilizacin y barbarie, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 165 (1969) pp. 299-309; MARIANO MORNIGO, Civilizacin y barbarie en Facundo y Doa Brbara, Revista Nacional de Cultura 26 (1963), pp. 93117; NELSON OSORIO, Doa Brbara y el fantasma de Sarmiento, Escritura No 8:15 (1983), pp. 19-35.
17
Segundo Sombra. When he suddenly learns that he has inherited a ranch, he gives up the gauchos life to take over the responsibility for running it, a decision which severs his links with the old gaucho from whom he has acquired the knowledge, experience and example to succeed in his new life. (And, incidentally, to write the book which is the account of that life.) Many critics have pointed out that Don Segundo Sombra upholds the interests of the landowning classes, and is therefore a somewhat traditional, if not reactionary, work. However, the whole purpose of the narrative is to demonstrate how the possession of the ranch has also been earned by gaining the necessary knowledge and experience through work and hardship, to which is added willingness to accept a role which is unexpectedly offered. The discipline of work also brings the narrator into contact and harmony with the natural environment of the pampas, with which he has to establish a balance that is mutually sustaining. The parallels between this story and the more complex, many-layered Doa Brbara are informative. Here we enter the similar world of the Venezuelan llanero through the story of Santos Luzardo. Taken away by his mother from the ranch where he was born to avoid the horrors of a family feud, Santos is brought to Caracas at the age of fourteen. He goes to school, then graduates as a lawyer. On his mothers death, he inherits what is left of the family property, the Altamira ranch. Instead of selling it, he decides to return to the llano to manage it, just as the final round of the saga of family rivalry is about to be played out. He discovers that Doa Brbara, the wife of his elder cousin, Lorenzo Barquero now controls the adjoining ranch of El Miedo, and is attempting, by false legal means, rustling and intimidation to take over the Altamira property also. The drunken, dying Barquero and Marisela, his daughter by Doa Brbara, have been thrown out to exist in a primitive hut in some unwanted swampland, and Doa Brbara herself not only rules a gang of dangerous peons and drifters at El Miedo, but also controls the local military governor and magistrate. Beautiful, sensuous and dominating, Doa Brbara has become a corrupted and evil force of nature. Instinctive and superstitious (she is thought to be a witch who is helped by spirits, and she believes this herself) she is driven to seek power and money for no clear reason. Yet this is partly explained by the brutality of her own upbringing as an orphan among river pirates. When she is fifteen, the gang murder the first man she falls in love with and then rape her. She is finally saved by an old indian who teaches her magic. By observing the law and using his knowledge of it against her, and being willing to back this with force if necessary, Santos Luzardo gradually wins the struggle for the land, and takes Brbaras abandoned daughter Marisela under his protection and educates her. Finally they fall in love and agree to marry. Sensing that the spirits have deserted her, and that her
empire is crumbling, herself in love with Santos Luzardo but unable to kill Marisela as she intends because in her she recognises herself as a girl, Doa Brbara disappears down the river from which she came, leaving the ranches and the divided family to be once more united. The self-evident symbolism relating to the civilization and barbarism debate permeates the book. But in the narrative the polarities are reconciled. The natural world is is neither good nor bad, and human beings have to establish a balance with it. The immensity of the llano dominates the story, and the characters as in Don Segundo Sombra come to terms with their environment through skill, fortitude and the discipline of work. A similar balance is struck between urban legality and social order, brought by Santos Luzardo, and the fresh, instinctiveness of nature, represented by Marisela. This balance is, however, a fragile one. Without strength and discipline on the part of human beings, nature will destroy them and their dreams, as it has destroyed Lorenzo Barquero. The life of the Argentine pampas and Venezuelan llano is not the same as that of the rubber tappers and traders who work the jungles of the Amazon Basin, and Riveras novel La vorgine illustrates the reverse aspect of the situation presented in the other two novels. Here the aristocratic young soldier and poet, Arturo Cova, who flees Bogot in questionable circumstances with a young woman ,Alicia, seeking a haven in the wilderness beyond the reach of their respective families, gradually perishes in the terrible conditions to which he is reduced extracting wild rubber. Though ostensibly written to expose the inhumanities and exploitation suffered by the rubber workers at the hands of the traders who employed them, this purpose is somewhat overshadowed by another which becomes increasingly apparent as the book, narrated by Cova in the first person, progresses. It can be persuasively argued that La vorgine is the story of a poet who dies in a self-inflicted confrontation with nature, and is an admission of defeat civilization in one of its main forms, namely high literary culture, fails to come to terms with the jungle. The barbarism which untamed or uncontrolled nature constitutes in its more extreme forms, obliterates urban mans attempts to impose any kind of order, or civilisation upon it. The patterns which these and other, similar novelsadopt in pursuit of a reconciliation of the civilisation versus barbarism polarities which arise from the cultural and psychological divisions between the country and the city are both significant, and symbolic in a revealing and important sense. This reconciliation process requires the kind of synthesis which concepts like autochthony, authenticity and cultural identity all presuppose, and the model through which it is sought is invariably one in where a selfconscious, articulate, urbanised narrator or protagonist finds himself obliged to come to terms with life outside the city. This inevitably involves
the recognition and acceptance in part or in whole of the ways and values of the rural population, in whatever situation they live, and irrespective of their social and ethnic origins. One major area of the civilization versus barbarism debate which continues to have currency today in ways similar to those in which Sarmiento first formulated it, is that of political tyranny and its destructive consequences. In the last eighty years over a hundred novels, many of them neither good nor memorable, have been published which focus upon the figure of the dictator. This political phenomenon results from the fragility of the internal democratic process of many republics, and the past willingness of the USA to favour the most vicious of regimes so long as they provide a bulwark against socialism and safeguard its trade and financial interests. The international reputation enjoyed by Spanish American writers, particularly since the 1960s, has coincided with the attention such novels have received across the world. Names and titles like Miguel Angl Asturriass El Seor Presidente (The President), Alejo Carpentiers Discurso del metodo (Reasons of State), Garca Mrquezs Otoo del patriarca (Autumn of the Patriarch), and Rao Bastoss Yo el Supremo (I The Supreme) are perhaps the most notable. For all these authors, dictatorship has led to disastrous results. The stagnation and political stasis which has prevented progress, and locked the republics of Spanish America into periods of cultural isolation, witnessed the perversion of history, and the lies and self-deception on which all such regimes have come to rely, have all been anatomised in these works, together with the separation of power and responsibility from the vast majority of the people. The role of the United States in supporting such regimes has also come under scrutiny, never more savagely or hilariously attacked than by Garca Mrquez when, in Autumn of the Patriarch, the yankees remove the sea from around the coasts of the Patriarchs country in payment for defaulted debts! Garca Mrquez catalogued the horrendous effects of this kind of political barbarism in his speech of acceptance for the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stokholm in 1982.
We have never had a moment of serenity. A Promethean president embattled in a palace of flames died fighting single-handed against an army, and two air disasters which occurred under suspicious circumstances, circumstances which were never clarified, cut off the life of another of generous nature and that of a democratic soldier who had restored the dignity of his nation. There have been five wars and seventeen coups dtats and the rise of a devilish dictator who, in the name of God, accomplished the first genocide in Latin America in our time. Meanwhile, twenty million Latin American children have died before their second birthday, which is more than all those born in Europe since 1970. Nearly one hundred and twenty thousand have disappeared
as a consequence of repression, which is as if, today, no one knew where all the inhabitants of Uppsala were. Many women arrested during pregnancy gave birth in Argentinian prisons but, still, where and who their children are is not known; either they were passed on into secret adoption or interned in orphanages by the military authorities. So that things should not continue thus, two thousand men and women have given up their lives across the continent, and more than one hundred thousand in three tiny, wilful countries in Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Were this to happen in the United States, the proportional ratio would be one million six hundred violent deaths in four years. A million people have fled from Chile, a country noted for its tradition of hospitality; that is ten per cent of the population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and half million inhabitants, a nation which considered itself one of the most civilised countries of the continent, has lost one in five of its citizens into exile. The civil war in El Salvador has created, since 1979, virtually one refugee every twenty minutes. A country created from all these Latin Americans in exile or enforced emigration would have a larger population than Norway. 18
Since Garca Mrquez pronounced this terrible litany, we have seen an uneasy end to the hostilities in Central America, and the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina have been removed amid a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation in what must surely be one of the most inspiring proofs of the spirit of civilisation yet witnessed. Thus, within a continuum of changing and inter-relating forms, it can be argued that modern Spanish Americans have tended to see the historical and political forces shaping their countries as being essentially oppositional. Civilisation has been equated by thinkers and writers of these republics as implying moral, social and cultural progress; barbarism as stagnation, intertia, repression and loss of identity. The ramifications of the various ideas and judgements which the resulting dialectic has embraced reach back to the earliest contacts between the Old and New Worlds, and have reappeared in different guises throughout the independence and post-independence periods. The definitions which these terms have embodied, though initially specific to the vision of one man as applied to one country, have acquired a continental relevance which has extended to questions of race, cultural identity, political systems, the shadow of the United States, the relevance of European models, the diversity and challenge of the physical environment, the city versus the country and the struggle to achieve freedom and justice in the face of
This quotation is taken from Richard Cardwells translation of GABRIEL GARCA MRQUEZs 1982 Nobel Adress entitled The Solitude of Latin America published in Gabriel Garca Mrquez: New Readings, ed. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 207-11.
18
repressive regimes. For a century and a half, it has seemed as if each generation has differed, often violently, on precisely which factors within Spanish American reality should be placed on one side of the scales or the other. When agreement is reached, and that may already have happened, the debate in which Spanish America has engaged as part of its effort to enter the modern world on its own rather than other nations borrowed or second-hand terms, may well be over. Except, perhaps, for the exorcism of ghosts. This may prove to be the task the next generation of writers.
Abdulla Al-Dabbagh
ORIENTALISM, LITERARY ORIENTALISM AND ROMANTICISM 1
The Origins of Orientalism

Many researchers explain the term orientalism in its general and scientific sense, and not in its ideological and specific sense. 2 In other words, they take the term to cover all oriental studies and not any particular tendency within them. For this reason, they trace the origins of orientalism back to traditional philology, which was interested primarily in research into ancient writings. These researchers believe that philological studies, which consisted of the collection of ancient writings and in the establishment and interpretation of the true texts, appeared both in the West (where they corresponded to the Hellenistic period) and in the East (where they corresponded to the time of the Han Empire). Therefore, in spite of the fact that orientalism, as a term, became widely used only in the nineteenth century, it goes back, in practice, to Antiquity, and it continues with no radical change in its tasks, however widened in scope, until the end of the Middle ages. With the advent of the Renaissance, 3 again both in the East and in the West, philological studies entered a new stage which consisted of the
Parts of this paper have appeared in two earlier and revised versions: one, Orientalism and Literary Orientalism, was accepted at the Fifth Triennial International Congress of the British Comparative Literature Association, held at the University Leicester, July 3-6, 1989; the other, The Oriental Dimension of European Romanticism: The Cases of Scott and Goethe was delivered at the international conference on European Romanticism and Scotland held at the Centre for Romantic Studies, University of Glasgow, March 19-22, 1990. The first was published in volume 4, February 1990, 14-24, of the now defunct annual journal, Orientalism. The second was published in the fifth and last volume, July 1991, pp. 17-24, of the same journal. 2 See, in particular, N. I. K ONRAD , West-East: Inseparable Twain (Moscow: Central Department of Oriental Literature, 1967).
3 1
Ibid., p. 8.
Al-Dabbagh: Orientalism
substitution of criticism for hermeneutics, i.e. the replacement of exegesis by the intellectual analysis of the content of the ancient texts, which now began to be offered in the light of the new, humanist philosophy of the Renaissance. As for the modern times, these studies were only partly a continuation of Renaissance philology. And although the humanist spirit of the Renaissance remained, the fundamentals of this spirit changed with the adoption of the rationalist philosophy that has become the principal guide in all spheres of knowledge since the Enlightenment. Thus, oriental studies achieved their final form in the beginning of the ninettenth century, but their origins go back to earlier times. And here in this Golden Age of Orientalism appeared cases, among the orientalists, of genuinely disinterested desire in knowledge and of true respect for the peoples of the East, amounting at times to veneration, in accordance with the ancient formula of ex oriente lux. 4 Although there is no doubt that the modern epoch in orientalism, i.e., the last hundred years or so, coincided with a wide colonialist, and later imperialist, expansion, it is not fair to the genuine researchers in oriental studies to attribute their efforts solely to the requirements of this expansion. 5 And although large segments of twentieth century orientalism acquired a clear, imperialist character, the genuinely scientific side of it remains, in essence, a continuation and a development of the studies of the nineteenth century.
Three Views of Orientation

The main conceptual foundations of the view of orientalism described in the previous section are the abscence of an absolute seperation between East and West, between orientalism (as a western, intellectual trend) and oriental studies in the general, comprehensive sense and, finally, between oriental studies and the linguistic, literary and cultural studies to which they must belong in their assumptions and methodology, regardless of the inevitable specificities of environment and economic, social and cultural conditions. These conceptual foundations also include a regard for historical stages and the stages of the development of human thought, such as the Classical era or the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, as world epochs not confined solely to the East or to the West. This entails a more comprehensive analysis of literary systems and the attempt to discover in them general trends and phenomena. There is a second view of orientalism that stems from a standpoint that is totally different from that of the first view. This claims that there is
4 5
Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10.
a radical and absolute separation between East and West, and that oriental studies do not belong to any general frame, but must draw their concepts and methods of analysis from the absolute specificities of the East, whether these be historical or philosophic, religious or national. The studies of the orientalists (and this means what the foreigners, and the westerners in particular, write about the East) are false and unacceptable principally because of their origin, and they do not contain anything except deliberate distortion intended to insult and to antagonize. The third view of the Orient and of orientalism has the same standpoint as the second view, but draws diametrically opposite conclusions. It also believes in the radical and absolute separation between East and West, latent in Kiplings never the twain shall meet, and it also claims that oriental studies must draw their ideas and conclusions from the absolute historical and intellectual specificities of the East, devising for that purpose a series of terms and concepts, some of the most famous of which are: the oriental or the Asiatic mode of production (i.e. the inability of the East to accomplish an industrial revolution), oriental despotism (i.e. the inability of the East to achieve democracy), 6 the essential spirituality of the East and the absence of a Renaissance or an Enlightenment movement or a rationalist philosophy in the East (i.e. the inability of the oriental to think logically). From all this, it reaches a conclusion which is the exact opposite of the first view and which claims that the works of the orientalists (i.e. the non-eastern researchers) provide the only basis for understanding the East because the oriental is incapable of scientific study (he does not understand himself and has to be understood through others).
Edward Saids Theory

One of the richest and most controversial works on this subject and on East-West cultural relations is Edward Saids Orientalism. 7 If we leave aside the various sharp observations and the numerous pieces of interesting information that the book abounds in and concentrate our attention on its conceptual foundations, we find that Saids view seems, initially, to be new to a certain extent. Said claims that the main aspects of orientalism must not be regarded as scientific investigations, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology; these in turn become naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of ) christian supernaturalism, and
See, for example, K. A. W ITTFOGEL, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
7 6
EDWARD W. SAID, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
orientalism and oriental studies are no more than the new texts and ideas through which the East was accomodated to these structures. 8 To this structuralist understanding of orientalism, Said adds a psychological dimension, derived from such contemporary French thinkers as Foucault and Lacan when he describes orientalism in his introductory chapter as a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orients special place in European Western experience since the Orient is Europes cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other. 9 Saids theory, then, in spite of the new colouring provided by the terminology derived from structuralism and existential psychology resembles, in essence, the second view of orientalism described in the previous section. This is because it comes to regard the whole of orientalism as, inevitably, a distortion. Saids is an absolutist, ahistorical viewpoint which regards the orient as an abstract category and cannot distinguish between the different orientalists or the various stages of orientalism. And although the weakness of Saids theory appears most glaringly in his treatment of the European writers and thinkers who were truly sympathetic to the East, especially in the romantic movement and in the first half of the nineteenth century generally, the root of its falsehood is its lack of the historical dimension that is necessary for the understanding of orientalism as an extensive cultural movement. The ignorance that stems from fear has been, as Edward Said rightly says, the basis of the European view of the East, from the Crusades and during the Middle Ages. What Said does not recognize is that this basis is really the first stage in the growth of the orientaalist movement and of the view towards the East which develops during the Renaissance and passes through the Enlightenment reaching its peak in the first half of the nineteenth century. The orientalist movement in its deforming, antagonistic, modern sense that is closely linked to the colonialist movement did not begin until the last decades of the last century, as orientalism entered its declining phase. As for the twentieth century, it is necessary to divide it into two principal channels: one is distorting, hostile and devoted to serving the aims of imperialism in a wider and stronger form than before; the other rests on scientific foundations and aims at discarding all distortions by inheriting and developing the best that the earlier orientalists had achieved. All these different stages and tendencies, however, do not represent for Said, in the final analysis, anything but a distorting image of the East that extended linearly from the Crusades to modern times.
8 9
Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 1.
Literary Orientalism
One of the positive aspects of Saids book is his interest in literary orientalism and his treatment of the writers who portrayed the East and the orientals as part of the orientalist movement along with philologists, archaeologists and students of religious and social structures. And although we have, for some time, had studies on the reflections of the East in western literature, 10 these studies are still at a rudimentary stage of research, with the theoretical and intellectual dimensions of the topic still awaiting a new comprehensive formulation. The field is truly wide and perhaps the bulk of the available information will not be collected for some time. It covers, for example, all the stages of English literature from Chaucer to modern times, and no doubt it is not difficult to discover similar influences in other western literatures. A number of the great Elizabethan dramatists wrote plays dealing with the East. These include Kyd, Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher and, of course, Shakespeare. Othello is one of the masterpieces of literary orientalism, and it played, together with Antony and Cleopatra, a big role in creating the model for the general tendency of similar works in western literature. The oriental tale had a decisive impact on the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century. As Martha Conant says, in a seminal study which we shall return, the Arabian Nights was the fairy godmother of the English novel. 11 The truth of this statement becomes clear also from the
Of the few studies available in English, see P. M. A SIN, Islam and the Divine Comedy (London: Murray, l926); DOROTHEA METILITZKI, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, l977); BYRON PORTER SMITH, Islam in English Literature (1939) (New York: Caravan Books, 1977); MARTHA P. CONANT, The Oriental Tale in English in the Eighteenth Century (1908) (New York: Octagon Books, 1967); MARIE DE MEESTER, Oriental Influences in the English Literature of the 19th Century (Heidelberg, 1913); SAMUEL CHEW, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Octagon Books, 1965); ARTHUR CHRISTY, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York: Octagon Books, 1972); MUHSIN JASSIM ALI, Scheherazade in England: A Study of the l9th Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (New York: Three Continents Press, l98l) and NAWAL MUHAMMAD HASSAN, Hayy Bin Yaqzan and Robinson Crusoe (Baghdad, 1980). The area, however, is of continuous interest to researchers as evidenced by such recent works as RANA KABBANI, Europes Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); PETER L. CARACCIOLO, ed. The Arabian Nights in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of the Thousand and One Nights into British Culture (London: Macmillan,1988) and MOHAMMAD SHARAFUDDIN, Islam and Romantic Orientalism (London: I. B. Tauris, l994).
11 10
CONANT, The Oriental Tale, cit., p. 243.
fact that we can hardly find any of the great novelists of the next century, the real age of the flowering of the novel, who did not read the Arabian Nights and who was not influenced by it. This oriental influence was also apparent in the numerous fictional attempts of the eighteenth century, the most celebrated of which were Backfords Vathek, Johnsons Resselas and Goldsmiths A Citizen of the World. From another direction, Ibn Tufails Hayy Bin Yaqdhan had a similar influence, if not so far-reaching, on the rise of the novel and on subsequent intellectual development (particularly on Defoes Robsinson Crusoe and on the whole Rousseauist concept of the Noble Savage). The third great period in English literature which came under a strong, oriental influence was no doubt the romantic period. The oriental tale and the influence of the translations of the Arabian Nights may be regarded as factors that paved the way to romanticism. Orientalism, in this era, becomes a literary phenomenon clearly seen in the works of a number of its greatest writers, such as Goethe, Hugo, Pushkin, Gogol, Walter Scott and Byron. We shall argue later on, that orientalism is a fundamental, inseparable part of the romantic movement, and that the extension of the literary map beyond the limits of Graeco-Roman civilization to absorb, principally, the cultures and literatures of the East becomes one of this movements essential tasks. In English romanticism, Byron expressed this tendency best in his advice to Thomas Moore, author of the famous oriental poem, Lalla Rookh, to stick to the East; the oracle Stael told me it was the only poetical policy. 12 One of the works of this period, Walter Scotts The Talisman, which deals with the Crusades, is one of the great achievements of the orientalist novel and one that provided a valuable model in this field.
The Oriental Tale and the European Novel

Martha Conant says that the Arabian Nights [...] is a treasure-house of stories perhaps unsurpassed in literature, rightly adding that historians of fiction have not fully recognized the role of the oriental tale in providing the element of plot to the European novel. Doubtless, the development of studies of literary orientalism in the field of fiction will modify the prevailing view of the rise of the European novel and of the art of the novel as an international form. The clear influence of the easteren setting on the works of the great writers of the eighteenth century, the age of the rise of the European novel, like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Johnson, Goldsmith and others, is firm proof of
G. M. WICKENS, Lalla Rookh and the romantic tradition of Islamic literature in English, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 20 (1971), p. 61.
12
the importance of the oriental dimension in the formation of this new art. Again as Martha Conant says, by the time Zadig appeared, the European critic of manners and thoughts in the guise of an Oriental had become a conventional type in the oriental tale. 13 Critics call these works tales with an eastern frame or tales of pseudoorientalism, because they use eastern characters and settings for their own purposes that may have little to do with the East. Although superficially correct, this observation ignores, in my opinion, an essential aspect of this oriental tendency in eighteenth-century writers and thinkers during the age of Neo-classicism and Enlightenment in Europe, which may, when fully investigated , force us to re-appraise the very concepts of Neo-classicism and Enlightenment themselves. One of the best ways of dealing with this issue may be through scrutinizing the contradiction that Martha Conant herself falls into. She is quite right in saying that the orientalism and pseudo-orienalism of the eighteenth century paved the way for the use of oriental material by the romantics, and in citing as evidence the well- known and significant influence of Beckfords Vathek on the early works of Byron and the spell cast by the Arabian Nights on Scott and Wordsworth early in their childhood. From the romantics to the great realist novelists, and by way of Scotts historical novels, this influence continued to be clear and acknowledged by Dickens, Thackery, Meredith and others. At the same time, it is clear that Conant feels somewhat embarassed by the orientalist phenomenon. Her insistence that this orientalizing tendency is a part of the romantic movement and that the history of the oriental tale in the eigteenth century might be considered as an episode in the development of English romanticism, reveals her belief that orientalism, in essence, does not suit the spirit of Classicism and Enlightenment rationalism which were exclusively linked, according to conventional wisdom, with Graeco-Roman civilization. But this is contradicted by the numerous examples given in her own book. There is no evidence that the classical and Enlightenment ideals of Johnson, Goldsmith, Beckford, Voltaire or Montesquieu in any way hindered their orientalizing tendency. Even writers most representative of neo-classicism like Addison or Pope did not escape the oriental influence, and Pope, as Conant herself acknowledges, had contemplated writing what he called a wild Eastern tale, just as Johnson and Goldsmith were later to do. There is also the additional fact that these tales first achieved popularity , not in England, but in France, the true homeland of the ideals and principles of Classicism in that age.
13
CONANT, The Oriental Tale, cit, p. 134.
Therefore, it is not correct to say that the oriental tale, which predates romanticism by more than a hundred years, was an expression of the romantic spirit. It is also incorrect to say that the writers of that age all men of the Enlightenment and of Classicism were somehow rejecting their ideas or suppressing their true beliefs in writing those tales. It seems to me a more accurate explanation to say that those writers and thinkers had assimilated the oriental dimension and could portray it in their tales and philosophic writings in a way that harmonized well with their literary and intellectual outlooks. And if we feel any disharmony here, then what needs to be reconsidered is our own explanations for the spirit of that age and for the concepts of Classicism and Enlightenment. In other words, the view of the eighteenth century as totally self-enclosed and exclusively tied to Graeco-Roman culture is false, and the rationalist foundations set up in that age enabled the writers and thinkers to understand and portray many strange or unusual experiences including the field of the Orient and of Eastern literatures.These foundations gave rise to the works of orientalist scholarship and translation that appeared in such profusion in precisely this epoch. Only from this perspective can we regard the products of that time, like the oriental tale, as a prelude to romanticism which was truly the epoch of the great flowering of literary orientalism.
Orientalism and Romanticism

In 1800, Frederich Schlegel declared that the highest forms of romanticism were to be looked for in the East. Thirty years later, the period which marks the end of romanticism in European literature, Victor Hugo summarized this great turning towards the East by saying: Au sicle de Louis XIV on tait hellensite, maintenant on est orientaliste. 14 It is surprising that this oriental dimension of romanticism has not been given the attention it deserves, even though orientalism is a basic element of romanticism and not merely an external aspect of it that can be set alongside the yearning for the Middle Ages or the search for the exotic. One of the greatest objections to Edward Saids Orientalism is that he regards romantic orientalism as just another rung in the ladder of western distortion and misunderstanding of the East, all the way from Aeschylus to Bernard Lewis. In the process, great imaginative writers like Scott and Goethe and great thinkers like Schlegel and Marx, who sympathized and identified with the East and contributed greatly to its understanding, are thrown overboard. In general, Said emphasizes the negative aspects of romantic orientalism so that he can fit it within his frame of hostile, western
14
SAID, Orientalism, cit., p. 51.
orientalism. As we said earlier, Said reduces orientalism to an abstract category or a set of structures inherited from the past, as he expresses it in his Foucaultean terms, and insists on not distinguishing between different orientalists and different stages of orientalism; when there was a break in the development of orientalism between the early and middle nineteenth century (the Golden Age of orientalism) and the modern orientalist movement (antagonistic and colonialist in essence) that began in its final decades. Romantic orientalism did not pave the way to hostile orientalists like Renan, Gobineau or Bernard Lewis. On the contrary, it was the culmination of all the previous positive trends from the Renaissance until the end of the eighteenth century, and the great advance along the way of the scientific investigation of the East. Edward Saids sympathetic identification with the East, which is the essential element of romantic orientalism, has roots in the previous epochs, especially in the works of great writers like Shakespeare and Goethe, just as it extends to the works of post-romantic writers like George Eliot and Flaubert, Gogol and Tolstoy. This turning to the East appears not only in the early romantic literatures like German or English, it also covers the late romantic literatures like Russian (Pushkin), French (Hugo) and American (Emerson and Thoreau). We have already quoted Hugos thesis on Hellenism and Orientalism, but we must not forget that it was Emerson who said that all philosophy, of East and West, has the same centripetence and that, there is no remedy for musty, self-conceited English life made up of fictions, hating ideas like Orientalism, that astonishes and disconcerts English decorum. For once there is thunder he never heard, light he never saw, and power which trifles with time and space. 15
The Oriental Renaissance

In reality, this great turning to the East covered not only the romantic movement, but extended over the whole of the nineteenth century in something resembling an intellectual renaissance. Looking at romanticism within the perspective of this wide, intellectual movement that Raymond Schwab has called the Oriental Renaissance gives it new dimensions and deeper meanings. And here Edward Saids role in drawing attention to this oreintalist and his major work, La Reniassance Orientale, must be pointed out,in spite of their totally opposed conclusions. 16
15 16
Cited in CHRISTY, The Orient, cit., pp. 1, 260.
R. SCHWAB, La Renaissance Orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950). For Saids views see Raymond Schawb and the Romance of Ideas in E DWARD SAID, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), pp. 248-67.
Said describes Schwab as an orienteur rather than an orientaliste,a man more interested in a generous awareness than in detached classification. This is what qualifies him to study this unique phenomenon that he calls the second Renaissance which, unlike the classical Renaissance [that] immersed European man within the confines of a selfsufficient Graeco-Latin terrain, deposited the whole world before him. 17 Edward Said describes La Renaissance Orientale as the peak of Schwabs literary research. He calls it an encyclopedic works that begins from the study of the phenomenon of European awareness of the Orient and the movement of integration by which Europe received the Orient into the body of its scientific, institutional and imaginative structures to the positive changes that this new knowledge of the East brought about. 18 The book then deals with case histories and personal testaments of more than forty different thinkers and writers who were influenced by the East, and with the social and cultural relations of which these influences were a part. After that, the book leaves the area of scientific institutions and social salons for the field of imaginative writing and literary orientalism, discussing in detail the influence of the Orient on the works of great French writers like Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Michelet, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire and others. The book also deals with those writers in whose works the East had different reflections, leading generally to division and opposition instead of the previous sympathetic identification, and these include, primarily, Gobineau (author of the doctrine of the inequality of races) and German and Russian writers. According to Schwab, the coincidence of the advent of Romanticism and Orientalism in the West, gave the former its complex dimension and led it to the reformulation of human limits. 19 In spite of Schwabs relative reglect of the economic and political factors in the orientalist movement, his elucidation of it as an intellectual movement, makes his work a unique, orientalist effort, because it is built on a comprehensive, humanist outlook and because Schawb regards the Orient, however strange and unfamiliar it may at first seem, as complementary to the West and vice versa. The theme of La Renaissance Orientale is no less than the reeducation of one continent by another (and this re-education includes the areas of religion, linguistics, archaeology, philosphy, art, science and literature). In its stimulating and comprehensive treatment of this wide topic, the book in turn becomes a part of those great works that arrange and re-arrange a particular cultures sense of its own identity. 20
17 18 19 20
Ibid., p. 250. Ibid., p. 260. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 259.
The Talisman and A Passage to India

One of the great works of literary orientalism is Walter Scotts historical novel, The Talisman, which occupies a prominent place in the romantic movement and in the development of the European novel. The sympathetic identification with what is supposed to be hostile, which appeared in high literary form in works like Othello and Antony and Cleopatra and, later, in the oriental tale of the eighteenth century and in the works of the romantic poets and thinkers, acquires a concrete, historical dimension in this novel, which treats, in the new style of literary realism, historical events that revolve around a principal character who, for many centuries, was regarded by the European West as a great symbol of the hostile East. Salahadine al-Ayubi had previously appeared in English literature, particularly because of his relationship with Richard, the Lionheart, the leader of the largest European Crusader. The portrayal of this Islamic leader had been, as expected, distorted and hostile, from its first appearance in the fourteenth-century poem entitled Richard, the Lionheart, that portrayed Salahadine as a hateful coward and extremely ugly-looking. 21 Thus Salahadine continued to symbolise the Islamic enemy in all ages. Of the writers who followed the same path were John Lydgate and Joshua Sylvester who accused Salahadine of treachery, cruelty and tyranny. But although English writers were particularly hostile to Salahadine, a positive side to his character gradually emerged after the sixteenth century in the writings of Painter and Greene. The change, however, remained distorted, and English writers continued to be influenced by religious bigotry and Crusader sentiments until the appearance of Gibbons The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which opposed all that had preceded it in restoring historical truth and presenting a sympathetic, indeed glorifying, image of Salahadine. But the great, literary portrayal of Salahadine and his historical confrontation with the Crusaders is Walter Scotts novel, The Talisman. Here, we will not go into the details of this novel (familiar to readers and cinema-goers alike). What we want to point to is the reversal of the previous, hostile image, and the great success that the novel achieved in its total and objective representation of Salahadine and the Muslims, which corrected, in the minds of ordinary people and intellectuals, the previously distorted and hostile picture. Thus, it performed a great service both to the East and to historical actuality.
See DHIYA AL -JUBOURY, Salahadine al-Ayubi and the English Writers, Afak Arabiya, 2, 1976, pp. 142-47 (in Arabic).
21
E. M. Forsters novel, A Passage to India, occupies a prominent place among the modern works of literary orientalism. It continues along the same lines as such great literary works as Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and The Talisman in its sympathetic identification with the East and its resistance to hostile and misleading concepts and portrayals. The novel, dealing as it does with the years immediately following the First World War, creates a contemporary political framework within which colonialism and racism are confronted directly and in an artistically effective manner. There is no doubt that Forsters position, at such a time, was courageous, and that the novel as a whole is a potent condemnation of the British, colonialist rule in India. And although written from a liberal, one may say bourgeoishumanist viewpoint, it is, in that respect, in the tradition of the greatest literary works from Shakespeare to Tolstoy, and far removed from modern distortions and falsifications. One of the novels strong points is that Forster recognizes the importance of this viewpoint in its historical context and, thus, understands at the same time its modern limitations.
Romantic Orientalism: The Cases of Scott and Goethe

The talisman is, first of all, a great testimony to Scotts thoroughgoing research and his uncompromising respect for historical truth. The novel is the first work in English, and perhaps in any European language, that presents an accurate picture of those renowned episodes from the Crusades. Preceded only by Gibbons treatment in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the Talisman is also a good example of how romantic orientalism built upon, and advanced, the achievement of the Enlightenment in this field. Scotts unprejudiced understanding of and sympathetic identification with, the historical and outwardly antagonistic figure of Salahaddine continues, in literary terms, the model already established by Shakespeare in Othello. And it was a historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, not a literary critic, who stressed that Scotts novels made a revolution not only in literature but in the study of history, that Scott was a historic innovator in much the same manner that figures like Montesquieu, Herder and Hegel, and that Scott, more than any other writer, forced the transition from eighteenthcentury philosophy of history the philosophy of Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Robertson to a nineteenth-century philosophy of history the philosophy of Macauly, Carlyle, Ranke. 22 Technically, The Talisman is one of the best-constructed of Scotts works. It has a tight plot that succeeds very well in combining dramatically
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER, Sir Walter Scott and History, The Listener, 86:19 (August l971), p. 226.
22
the political theme with the romantic love story. The main characters are all subtly drawn, the scenes are full of action and chivalric heroism carries the day. Yet, however pioneering we know Scott to have been in the creation of this kind of historical realism, 23 the greatest achievement of the work still seems to me to lie in its content, i.e. its moving and truthful recreation of a hitherto alien and hostile world through the sheer effort of what might be called imaginative sympathy. In a significant introduction, dated 15th July l832, Scott conveys his full awareness of the key works of romantic orientalism produced by his contemporaries and mentions by name Southeys Thalaba, Moores Lalla Rookh, and Byrons Eastern poems. in addition to Thomas Hopes Anastasius (1819) and James Justinian Moriers Haji Baba of Isphahan (1824). The achievement of such prominent contemporaries, set beside his own lack of acquaintance and experience of the East as manifested in Tales of the Crusades (1825), led Scott to put on the mask of modesty and conclude that the Eastern themes had been already so successfully handled by those who were acknowledged to be masters of their craft, that I was diffident of making the attempt. 24 It is clear, however, that Scott was also fully aware that he was not competing with the romantic poets, but was really blazing a new trail. In creating the historical novel, virtually single-handed, Scott offered his own pioneering contribution to the Romantic Movement, of which this new literary form was such a characteristic product. That much is beyond dispute and is generally agreed to be Scotts singular achievement. What I want to underline here is Scotts precise reason for deciding to write this particular novel, a work which was to become, in my view, one of the masterpieces of literary orientalism. Scott, in that same introduction, continues to say that he finally settled on a particular period during the Crusades an era to which he returned from time to time throughout his literary life because it offered a particular contrast that, in his view, promised to contain materials for a work of fiction, possessing peculiar interest. This contrast, between Richard I and Saladin (Salahadine) was one in which, in Scotts own words, the Christian and English monarch showed all the cruelty and violence of an Eastern Sultan; and Saladin, on the other hand, displayed the deep policy and prudence of a European sovereign. 25 This central role-reversal, so reminiscent of Shakespeares dramatic strategy in Othello and Antony and Cleopatra, is indeed the key to the
See, of course, the chapter on Scott in George Lukacss The Historical Novel (l937) for the best description of this achievement.
24 25 23
WALTER SCOTT, The Talisman,@?@, p. 2. Ibid.
novel. Shakespeare had turned the seemingly antagonistic (i.e. the Black, oriental Othello) into the recipient of our sympathy and identification and made the white Iago the villain of the piece, who, furthermore, possessed all the qualities usually attributed to the stereotyped black characters in Elizabethan drama. Similarly, it is the world of the oriental Cleopatra (and her maids) that is characterized by heroic self-sacrifice, while Antony, Augustus and indeed all the major Roman figures are entangled in a web of intrigue, deceit and treachery. Here, in a different context, Scott is giving historical reality, in fictional form, to a very similar sort of reversal. The deviation effect, to borrow a term from the Russian Formalists, created by this double reversal, lies at the heart of all these works, and the use of this effect, one might add, for the purpose of creating a sympathetic identification with the East, is a major characteristic of romantic orientalism In appearance, Goethes orientalism presents an antithetically contrasting case to that of Scott. Here, it seems that most of Edward Saids strictures against romantic orientalism apply the spiritual alienation, the recourse to the Orient as a refuge, the idealist dream of regenerating a sickly West through oriental injection, and so on. 26 Goethes case is one of clear infatuation that involves an almost Wertherlike loss of identity. What we are witnessing is much more than sympathetic identification; it is, in fact, something approaching a total surrender. However steeped in learning, Goethes orientalism, it could be argued, does not spring from knowledge progressively obtained through positive reasoning. Its real impulse lies in a state of alienation from the West that has led to an almost mindless abandonment to the East and a consequent immersion, even drowning, in it. There is no actual contact with any real Orient, Said would argue: what is at issue in not really the Orient so much as the Orients use to a modern, but sick, Europe. 27 This is not an Orient that is to be tangibly and directly experienced; it is one only to be written about and idealized. According to Said, the Orient, representing the permanently alien and perverse, is here warded off again, but this time, by means of the peculiarly poeticized and mystical romantic discourse. Unlike Scott, and the British romantics generally, whose visions of the Orient , no doubt due to stronger and older political involvement in the region, always had more concrete and tangible shapes to them, the French and the German romantics, particularly the latter, were much more airy and philosophical. This may also explain why Goethes
26 27
SAID, Orientalism, cit., pp. 113-15 and 167-68. Ibid., p. 115.
attitude towards Scott, by all measures a kindred spirit, remained until the end, in spite of a certain affection, cool and derogatory. 28 All this may be said to be the case against Goethe, as part of a total rejection of romantic orientalism along the lines argued by Edward Said. The actual facts, however, do not bear this out. Certainly there are mystical elements in Goethes orientalism which are very much part and parcel of German romantic orientalism. Ideas of the East as the mystical origin and as a power for spiritual regeneration introduced by Frederich Schlegel, had certainly left their imprint on Goethe. But Goethes first turning to the East goes back much earlier and the force behind it was Herder, who had already become young Goethers mentor in 1770 another clear indication of the links between romantic orientalism and the Enlightenment. Goethe had also read Lessings Nathan der Weise (1779), with its plea for religious tolerance and its wise and noble portrait of Salahadine. But, more importantly, he was fully acquainted with 18th century orientalist scholarship which provided him with at least one favourite book of poetry, Hammer-Purgstalls translation of the Diwan of Hafiz. Goethe studied Hebrew from the age of thirteen and began translating from the Bible shortly afterwards. Later, he also studied the Koran, in Latin translation, and attempted to translate parts of it himself. He also studied the Classical odes of Arabic poetry in Joness Latin translation and translated passages from them. After Goethes return from Italy in 1791, Herder advised him to study Indian and Persian literatures, which he did, retaining particularly strong feelings for the latter all his life. 29 Goethes vision of the East, then, is based on a careful and diligent study of the oriental scholarship available at the time, and an immersion in Eastern literature, particularly poetry, from a very early age. To turn now to the second objection to Goethes orientalism, it is true that the alienation crisis that he experienced following Napoleons downfall led him to write his orientalist Diwan as a kind of spiritual pelgrimage to the East in fact, a Hagire or permanent migration from the West. The idealistic and subjective elements are very clear in Geothes own description of his state:
I had a strong feeling of necessity for escape from the real world that is full of dangers threatening it from every side, both secretly and openly,
28 See R ENE W ELLEK , A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 1, (Cambridge University Press, l981), p. 225, which quotes Goethes judgement of Scott: I would always be amused by him, but could never learn anything from him, I have time only for the most excellent.
See ABDUL-RAHMAN BADAWIs introduction to his Arabic translation of Goethes West-Oslicher Diwan (Cairo, l944), p. 4.
29
in order to live in an imaginary world where I can enjoy refuge and dreams to the extent that my strengths can withstand it. 30
And it certainly could be argued that it was a matter of chance that this refuge was the East; for, having no relationship with any real world and serving only the purposes of providing a means of escape, any other place and any other idea could have served just as well. Again, this case, which can certainly be argued to some extent, seems to me to entail a trivialization that does not do justice to Goethe. The essence of Goethes literary orientalism lies in his concept of world literature (Weltliteratur) and in his dream of a unity of East and West in universal brotherhood, as the title of his Diwan is clearly meant to indicate. It is true, as the famous opening lines of the Diwan express it, there is the intention of a remedial journey to the East, even if only in the mind:
North, West, and South disintegrate Thrones burst, empires tremble Fly away, and in the pure East Taste the Patriarchs air.
But the real search is for a new unity of East and West and for a spiritual regeneration of humanity through transcending the petty differences and antagonisms in achieving it. Goethe chooses the following verses from the Koran to express it:
God is the Orient! God is the Occident! Northern and Southern lands Repose in the peace of his hands. 31
Conclusions
In the end, it might be useful to go back to the terms orientalism and literary orientalism, around which this essay has revolved. The orientalist initially meant the person who loved the East and sympathized with it. Then the word began to mean the one who studied the East, and investigated the areas connected with it. Finally, it acquired the meaning of the antagonist to the East, working in the service of its colonizers.
30 31
Ibid, p. 7.
The first two lines are clearly taken from the Koran (Surat al-Baqara, verse 109). Both passages are in SAID S translation, Orientalism, cit., p. 167.
There have been various and divergent reactions to orientalism and the orientalist: they include the acknowledgment of a sympathetic, literary orientalism; a (sometimes excessive) respect for scholars and researchers, as well as a (sometimes unwarranted) rejection; an openminded investigation of the opinions of hostile orientalists; and an appreciative recognition of the efforts of others in the fields of editing, translation and research. As far as literary orientalism is concerned, there is no disagreement on the meaning of the term, but what awaits study and investigation is the wide area which it covers. Even preliminary studies and the gathering of information are in the early stages. The comprehensive study, with the necessary theorization, of the image of the East and of the influence of the Orient on all the major European, literatures, in addition to American and Russian literatures, is the great challenge that awaits researchers. The essence of romantic orientalism is to present, through the act of imagniative sympathy, a truer picture of the East. This is a huge step towards a clearer understanding of the Orient, in a process that began in the Renaissance and advanced during the Enlightenment. This, of course, makes it the reverse of what is popularly understood to be romanticism and, by extension, romantic orientalism, that is to say, the search for the exotic, the celebration of the unfamiliar, even the deviant, for its own sake, mystification, idealist schemes of regeneration, and empty speculation. It is also, of course, opposed to Saids dismissal of it as yet another manifiestation of western misunderstanding of, and hostility towards, the East. The crucial advance in understanding brought about by the imaginative sympathy of the creative artist, as can be clearly seen in the cases of Scott and Goethe, paved the way to the second key aspect of literary orientalism, namely, its rejection of an existential and ineradicable distinction between East and West, and the implicit advance of the contrary hypothesis based on an essential, underlying unity of East and West.
REVIEWS
DORIS DOHMEN, Das deutsche Irlandbild: Imagologische Untersuchungen zur Darstellung Irlands und der Iren in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Studia Imagologica, 6). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994. 254 pp. ISBN No. 90-5183-753-4 (CIP). The present study is firmly rooted in the critical concept of Imagology, as developed by Hugo Dyserinck and refined, with reference to Ireland, by Joseph Th. Leerssen. Although if taken to its extremes it tends either to the banal or the obscure, Imagology has contributed considerably to our understanding of the way we see others and ourselves by identifying our heterostereotypical and autostereotypical images. Dohmen attempts to survey the presentation of Ireland in German literature (i.e. books; excluding periodicals and newspapers), initially claiming completeness for her approach (p. 13); but predictably such claims have soon to be reduced in favour of representative selections, with a strong emphasis on German travel literature. She surveys her material in five chronological chapters of which the last, on the twentieth century, is by far the most detailed. Within each chapter, after a summary introduction, she paraphrases or summarizes a number of individual works. Most of the material for this study had already been surveyed in Patrick O'Neill's exemplary and much more comprehensive study Ireland and Germany: A Study in Literary Relations (1985), but it is here analysed with reference to specific categories of Imagology such as 'otherness'. Dohmen shows that the impressions of a journey are frequently instrumental in confirming preconceived ideas and that a number of repetitive determinants, such as race, religion, climate, politics and history, have influenced the views of Ireland presented in these books. She demonstrates convincingly that they have been strongly coloured by the authors' Protestant or Catholic convictions, and that they are frequently linked to a pro-English or anti-English stance, although it seems to be a simplification to claim that an author's conviction of the superiority of Protestantism inevitably (notwendig) results in a negative image of Ireland (p. 35) or that a favourable attitude to England is bound to (zwangslufig) lead to an image of Irish barbarism (p. 33).
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Some details in Dohmen's study require modification. It is, of course, an unwarranted euphemism to speak of Irish 'parliamentary independence' in 1782 (p. 32); it is misleading to refer to the 'classical' view of Ireland (pp. 12, 187); the twelfth-century Norman landing in Ireland can hardly be called an 'English invasion' (p. 34); the reference to the Stage Irishman (p. 37) indicates that Dohmen is not familiar with this persistent theatrical stereotype; and the term 'Paddyimage' she employs throughout remains extremely vague. One wonders whether the term 'Volk' can in any sense be applied to the Celts (p. 46); it is doubtful whether the view of Ireland that Pckler-Muskau encountered in Irish Big Houses was still influenced by an Anglo-Norman image (p. 64); Freiligrath's description of Ireland may have served primarily (vorrangig), but certainly not exclusively (allein) as a criticism of England, as stated only a few lines apart (p. 94); the term 'English government' is somewhat irritating when applied to the nineteenth or twentieth-century situation; it comes as a surprise to find the Irish referred to as 'dreaded pirates' in early times (p. 155); and to single out Flann O'Brien, of all people, as an example of a "Renaissance" (?) of Irish literature in Germany (pp. 159, 191) indicates a rather limited awareness of the post-1945 German reception of Irish literature. The crucial problem of Imagology is, of course, its refusal to recognise the role of factual reality in the formation of images; in a phrase by J.T. Leerssen, endorsed here on p. 174, "the imagologist need not be concerned with the referential claim of a given image". Quite often Dohmen discounts personal evidence in favour of a stereotypical reaction; she does not credit the authors with having written from their individual experience but postulates an adherence to traditional images instead and consequently forgoes the opportunity to distinguish between observed reality and stereotypical prejudice. According to Dohmen, those writers who have found tranquillity and peace in Ireland are simply subject to an 'Ossianic image'; those who have encountered poverty and distress perpetuate an image of barbarism; and those who stress the religious traditions of the country succumb to an 'insula sacra image'. It remains undecided how such an approach can be squared with Dohmen's declared intention to analyse images of Ireland as to their 'causes of origin and tendencies of development' (p. 14); surely one of their causes of origin has to be seen in factual reality, from which their development cannot be totally separated either. One further problem is that of evaluation. Although ostensibly Dohmen pursues a purely descriptive approach and avoids all evaluation of the books under scrutiny here, there is a persistent thread of subtextual assessment running through the whole study. It gives the book the probably unintended - appearance of arrogance towards those poor benighted travellers who went to Ireland too early to profit from the
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blessings of Imagology and therefore do not come up to the standards the author has set up. This impression is intensified by Dohmen's implied assertion that she writes from a 'supranational' position (pp. 13, 189), and is the first to do so. The book concludes with an impressive 55-page bibliography which lists a considerable number of German books about Ireland. Unfortunately some sections are less satisfactory than others, especially the brief section on German literary criticism (pp. 244-246) which lists probably less than five per cent of the material available and, in its selection of obscure and out-dated studies, conveys a scandalously distorted picture of the work of German scholars on Irish literature. University of Wuppertal HEINZ KOSOK
E. D. KARAMPETSOS, The Theater of Healing. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. vii + 137 pp . ISBN 0-8204-2651-2. In the opening lines of his book, Karampetsos sketches the philosophical backdrop and the parameters to his analysis. It was Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, whose call for a poetic vision of a metaphysical theatre capable of healing the existential problems of his time helped provoke a revolution in Western drama. Playwrights were inspired to write plays about the audience, about its problems, hopes and fears. He focusses on Yeats, Artaud, Brecht, Genet, and Ionesco as the vanguard in this revolution men who found ways to present the abstract forces of modern society in a form which permits the spectator to contemplate and find ways to master them. What linked their drama, Karampetsos argues, was a common faith in the liberating potential of new myths and rituals appropriate to the needs of their audience; in the process, the gods and heroes of classical myth have been replaced by a more contemporary vision of the forces which govern our lives. Instead of anthropomorphic gods, they bring to the stage images of man-made forces (economic, political, technological, and social) grown to superhuman proportions and, out of control, turning their power on their makers. In an introductory chapter, Karampetsos outlines the social and cultural characteristics of ritual and myth, underlines their importance to the growth of the Western theatre, and notes the major developments in the inception of a new form of modern drama which incorporated elements of
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both. Mallarm and Jarry loom particularly large as early shapers, dramatists who realized that to create metaphysical theater, it was not necessary to turn to ancient myth and legends. It was enough to perceive the abstract, universal human reality beneath the surface reality of everyday life and to bring that to the stage. As Karampetsos puts it, Yeats and Artaud took up and developed this tradition by reminding playwrights that the theatre contains elements of the sacred, the ability to give concrete expression to our metaphysical thoughts, the ability to create new myth and rituals for our time. In four central chapters, the author presents a cogent and accessible survey of the work of Brecht, Genet, and Ionesco as playwrights who exploited elements of myth and ritual in order to create a metaphysical theatre capable of dramatising the contemporary human condition and of influencing the spectatorial consciousness. With Brecht, of course, the mythical vision of the forces which define modern man was largely Marxs, and Karampetsos shows how Brecht utilized epic technique and the A-effect in an attempt (not always successful) to create tendentious ritual. Genets healing vision, Karampetsos believes, recasts the essential patterns of human behavior, and resolves around self versus other, sham and illusion against the authentic being behind the mask. Genets particular contribution was to deconstruct modern myths, to expose how they support social, political and racial structures leading to the oppression of one group of people by another. Karampetsos draws on the work of R. D. Laing to illuminate what he sees as the mythical and ritual nature of Genets mask-destroying plays. Finally, in Ionesco, Karampetsos presents the modern playwright as the shaman in search of the archetypal elements of a theatrical language, and at the heart of whose plays is the conflict between life and death, eros and thanatos. According to this reading, Ionescos elemental protagonists are out to make the world less menacing and alienating, to make sensible and comprehensible the absurdity of an existence controlled by the neurotic fear of death, to compel a liberating encounter with it. I can recommend The Theater of Healing as a clear and persuasive text, relevant to anyone interested in the history of the twentieth century stage, in the impact of myth and ritual on the literary imagination, and in the development of a political theatre. Karampetsos offers critiques of a large number of the major plays, with a sure sense of their place in the wider theatrical trends. One of the best things in the book is Chapter IV, Tyranny: A Laboratory for the Theater of Healing, in which the author puts his concept to the test of; he draws on his first-hand experiences in 1973 to document the story of the Athenian theatre under the Colonels junta. Karampetsos looks at the plays of Kampanelis, Skourtis, Rialdi, and
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Karras, all of whom create ritual and myth [...] from the obsessions of their contemporaries, and whose abstract characters and situations are expressions of recurring elements in the history of the Greek nation which the military dictatorship only served to accentuate. Karampetsos leaves the reader with an upbeat sense of the enduring validity of his metaphysical theater of healing and its potential to transform our hearts and minds. Kuwait University KENNETH PAYNE
Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Mosley. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. 206pp. ISBN 0-8386-3588-1 It is not surprising, given the relative frequency of editions and translations, and its cinematic and operatic adaptations, that Bruges-laMorte should attract the lion's share of attention in this collection of critical essays. But it is a pity that Rodenbach's poetry, some dozen collections of which punctuate his writing career from its beginning (1877) to its end (1898), should be the subject of only one article, that of Patrick Laude, who derives two versions of poetry, the semiotic and symbolic, from a comparison of Maeterlinck's and Rodenbach's preoccupation with the enclosed spaces of aquarium, hothouse and diving bell. But this very welcome collection rightly publicizes itself as "the first book in English on Georges Rodenbach" (11), which in itself creates a problem of strategy: how to combine the scholarship of the contributing experts with the business of promotion, of identifying and contextualising. The bulk of this task of reconciliation falls to the editor, Philip Mosley, whose opening essay on Bruges-la-Morte weaves a suggestive thematic tracery around the novel, enabling it to traffic with other contemporary writers, painters, musicians, places. Joyce Lowrie's "Ophelia becomes Medusa: Reversals and Ambiguity in Bruges-la-Morte" absorbingly tracks the dialectical dynamics of the masculine and feminine, the fluid and the petrified, and investigates the novel's chiastic rhetoric and structural mises en abyme. There follow two closely related studies of Le Carillonneur. The first, by Robert Ziegler, proposes that the submergence of artistic identity in the unison of a collective, time-honoured creation facilitates the transcendence of time, while Paul Gorceix concentrates on the transformation of the bell from object to "bicephalous symbol [...]
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generating sexual fantasies and immorality" and yet remaining "a genuine mark of purity and moral elevation" (96). Donald Friedman explores the paradisal ("the suavity of the faded and superannuated"; "narcoticized disincarnation") and infernal ("the spleenscape of transfixed pain") aspects of the dead city in Rodenbach, Hellens and Lemonnier (and Khnopff, incidentally), in a prose sometimes overwritten, but always heady. Khnopff appears again, alongside Moreau, Redon, Munch, Hammershoi, Gall, Osbert, Son, Van de Velde, in Dorothy Kosinski's headlong tour of the Symbolist psychological landscape, which deftly extracts common denominators from a wide variety of styles and media. Peter Barta compares Rodenbach's Bruges with Bely's Petersburg as fictional protagonists, finding in Bruges "a dead crystallized idea" far removed from the monster Petersburg's commitment to devour its own children; but there are sufficient narratological and thematic links to justify the comparison. Finally, Michle Langford uses Truffaut's La Chambre verte (1978) to draw out the underlying preoccupations in Roland Verhavert's film adaptation of the novel, Brugge-die-Stille (1981). Although this collection is not edited for continuity - Bachelard's description of Bruges-la-Morte as the "ophlisation d'une ville entire" is cited in four of the essays, plot-lines are repeated - it can profitably be through-read, thanks to the many imbrications of its essays and an analytical index which gives the reader valuable help in linking together textually separated insights. The critical apparatus is especially useful: of two appendices supplied by the editor, the first expands the filmography of Bruges-la-Morte (including both 'lost' and unrealized versions) and pursues other filmic echoes, while the second explores Rodenbach in music, and particularly in Korngold's Die tote Stadt, based on Rodenbach's own dramatization of Bruges-la-Morte, Le Mirage (1901); the bibliography is of immense aid to the reader first coming to Rodenbach, and the generous footnotes throughout provide plenty of leads to pursue. University of East Anglia CLIVE SCOTT
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DAVID MEAKIN, Hermetic Fictions. Alchemy and Irony in the Modern Novel. Keele: Keele University Press, 1995. 221 pp. ISBN 1-85331150-2. David Meakins stimulating study focuses on the ancient science of alchemy, the mysteries of which, since its origins possibly dating as far back as 3000 BC in Egypt (referred to by the Arab world as Al Khem, hence the etymology of the word) have never ceased to inspire scientists, psychoanalysts, mystics and writers alike. It is with the last group that Meakin is particularly concerned, as he traces the development of the integration of alchemical models in the modern novel, and their changing functions, pacing through an impressive catalogue of hermetic writers, from Goethe to Umberto Eco, and featuring the big names of modern fiction Joyce, Proust, Thomas Mann, to name a few, right up to Michel Butor. Not only does Meakin embrace an impressive time-span, but chooses to include two works of lesser status, Gustav Meyrinks The Angel of the Western Window and Lindsay Clarkes The Chymical Wedding in a refreshingly broad-minded approach. Impressive in its scale, Hermetic Fictions is no less so in the breadth of its scholarship, as Meakin unearths alchemical reference after alchemical reference in the 150 or so novels under his gaze, conveying to the reader as he does so a genuine sense of archaeological excitement and wonder. Of course, Meakin is not the first to look at many of his chosen authors from an alchemical perspective, and duly acknowledges previous explorers of the terrain, but it is in his analysis of the playful, mediating, syncretic in other words, ironic properties traditionally attributed to the alchemists god Hermes, and the development and constitution of the modern novel, that Meakin accomplishes a series of agile and spectacular mental leaps, a coniunctio worthy of the alchemists themselves. To define the modern novel, as Meakin does, in Lukcs terms of a reflection of humanitys transcendental homelessness, with irony attempting to straddle the gap with the irretrievably past world of the epic, is, of course, to present just one side of the story, and in this case Lukcs theories are not altogether convincingly complemented, despite Meakins assurances that they will be, by Bakhtins definition of the genre in terms of polyglossia. Nevertheless, Meakins argumentation is both sound and charismatic. Given the cerebral bravura of the opening chapters, The Alchemical Model, and Writing about Alchemy/Writing as Alchemy, in which Meakin establishes and elaborates on his theoretical foundations (for which he also draws on the writings of Jung, Eliade and Bachelard), the following discussions of individual authors can at times seem a little plodding, (as in
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the short chapter on Hesses Glass Bead Game, undoubtedly the weakest), and as one waits for the various intellectual elements to be syncretised into a powerful mix. This is left for the reader to do: Meakin furnishes his adept with an infinitely fascinating materia prima and initiates him into the mysteries of the art; Hermetic Fictions is a magnum opus, anything but hermetic, and will undoubtedly inspire further research in this field. University of Edinburgh NATALYA TODD
MARTIN J.G. DE JONG, Le prsent du pass. Essais de littrature compare. Namur : Presses universitaires de Namur, 1994. 496 pp. ISBN 2-87037-195-0 Writing now with the experience of forty years research and teaching, Martin De Jong has assembled fourteen articles in his volume Le prsent du pass. The range of material on which De Jong writes carefully and critically is rewarding and impressive. These studies explore a large family of texts in order to demonstrate how reading for comparisons elucidates our understanding of writings internal and external systems of signification and communication. At the same time this volume has a particular, but not exclusive, focus. In most of the essays, the aim of the essays is to make up for literary criticisms neglect of literature in Dutch by placing selected authors in an international context or by giving them prime position in individual essays. There are essays which are organised around the poetess and hermit Bertken of Utrecht (c. 1426-1514), the poet and scholar Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), the biographer and proto-theorist Lodewijk van Deyssel (1864-1952), the novelist and essayist Maurice Gilliams (19001982) and the militant poet Henri Marsman (1899-1940). There are also studies of Mishima and Dazai, Eco and Paz, Mulisch and Vonnegut; the essay on Eco includes an extract from an interview given in 1971, shortly after the launch of Versus. Membership of De Jongs family of letters is therefore chronologically open. In his choice of topics and frames of comparative reference, de Jong privileges writers dedicated to la posie pure. His authors are shown to be highly self-conscious practitioners of writing, austere, romantic and often experimental. The studies of Gilliams and Van Deyssell offer patient and
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clear expositions of their aesthetic interests: for the former, the potential for musical structure in modern writing, based on Bachs The Art of Fugue; for the latter, the formal consistency and logic of le sensitivisme, which endeavours through synaesthesia to find in the material world a transfiguration of personal angst. While he reconstructs the theories of Gilliams and Van Deyssel, De Jong provides brief comparisons with Proust, Rilke and Robbe-Grillet which help to situate the ideas of the Dutch authors. To make the comparisons work, De Jong is sometimes forced to simplify and does not have enough space to negotiate the critical contexts of the authors offered for comparison. The chapter which discusses Octavio Pazs interest in Tantrism also mentions Bilderdijk, Lucebert, Claudel and Juan Ramon Jimnez. Interesting and potentially useful surveys of literary history are offered to the reader. The enthusiastic promotion of connections by De Jong as reader reflects his theory of intertextuality. Citing Goethe, Gide and Valery, De Jong argues that writers, as readers, respond unconsciously and indirectly to previous literature. As a reader De Jong has in mind limmense richesse de la tradition (p. 381), but in these essays he does not explore the tensions of tradition and does not go as far as some readers will wish n his discussion of the theoretical problems of locating and classifying internal structures in texts. A comparative literary history, Le prsent du pass situates selected Dutch and Flemish writers in a European, American and Japanese context. However, not all of the essays fit into this general description of the volume. An engaging portrait of Osamu Dazai can be found in the first essay, which compares and contrasts him with Mishima, arguing that for Dazai the figure of the mask remains an ironic shield for the personal and aesthetic lack in his own work. The title of Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose is discussed in the context of the novels eroticism and fragility. Ecos portrait of Borges in the character of the librarian Jorge da Burgos is considered somewhat distasteful; readers will note the humour in De Jongs selection from his 1971 interview with Eco. Perhaps the most successful essay uses biographical information about Willem Bilderdijk to explain how a poem from 1796 stages the fracture experienced by the poetic voice. Gently mocking the nationalistic idolization of Bilderdijk by certain Dutch critics, De Jong shows that Bilderdijks feelings for Katharina Wilhelmina Scheickhardt led him to produce an uncharacteristically distracted and moving translation of one of Fnelons Mditations. This collection of essays presents De Jong as a reader with the subtle and generous sensibility of an old master, humanely promoting the cause of his special interest in literature in Dutch. University of Edinburgh NIGEL SAINT
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KAREN HADDAD-WOTLING, LIllusion qui nous frappe. Proust et Dostoevski. Une esthtique romanesque compare. Geneva : ditions Slatkine, 1995. 581 pp. ISBN 2-85203-474-3. For a Proustian and someone who should know more about Dostoevsky, Lillusion qui nous frappe provided an illuminating commentary on these two authors. Karen Haddad-Wotlings project is staunchly comparative, the skilful marshalling of her study developing from the material to the theoretical, persuasively establishing Dostoevsky, alongside Baudelaire, as a formative influence for Proust. She begins by establishing and evaluating the context in which Proust read Dostoevsky which texts were available in translation and how they were received critically in France, Gides Dostoevski. Articles et causeries (published in 1923) being the most influential. Proust too had intended to publish an essay on Dostoevsky, yet, inevitably, his reading was drawn into the fabric of la cecherche. HaddadWotling analyses these references and readings, most striking of which is the episode in La prisonnire where the narrator lectures Albertine on Dostoevsky. This, one senses, is where the projected essay ended up, although why it was voiced as dialogue rather than absorbed into the more authoritative consciousness of the Proustian I is less easily answered. LIllusion qui nous frappe rather leaves this puzzle behind, preferring to move to a wider analysis of the novelists aesthetic practices and theories. Thisviewing of la recherche through a Dostoevskian lens allows fascinating and provocative readings of less well-known passages, such as the episode in which the narrator feels he is guilty, namely his relations with Albertine, allows us to reconsider Marcels later claim that he is not only responsible indirectly for Albertines death rapprochant la mort de ma grand-mre et celle dAlbertine, il me semblait que ma vie tait souille dun double assassinat que seule la lchet du monde pouvait me pardonner ( la cecherche du temps perdu, ed. J.-Y. Tadi [Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothque de la Plade, 1987-89], vol. IV, p. 78) but also directly guilty of translating it into art. According to the amoral law of textual production, death directly facilitates the writing of la cecherche. Such are the connections made possible by reading through the notions of crime and punishment. HaddadWotling also compares character portrayal, plot, and the devices used by both authors to structure their novels, through the concepts of symmetry, repetition and the visual arts. Prousts own striking formula, Le ct Dostoevski de Mme de Svign, sets an aesthetic agenda it points up a parity between artists who represent the world as we perceive rather than intellectually process it and such is the agenda followed by this study. LIllusion qui nous frappe establishes a fruitful, if sometimes too detailed and over-affirmative dialogue
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between the two authors. So much so that one almost forgets that Dostoevsky inspired what might loosely be termed modernist writers as diverse as Kafka and Rebecca West. Yet what Marcel articulates in his conversation with Albertine might be viewed not just as an exclusive conversation between two literary greats, but as part of a more widespread chatter about Dostoevsky a feverish European gossip. Virginia Woolf i n her essay Phases of Fiction (in Granite and Rainbow [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958], pp. 93-145), first published in The Bookman (in 1929), chose to group writers, not according to period or nationality, but according to their style, as satyrists, fantastics, poets and so on. Proust and Dostoevsky share the label The Psychologists in her comparative sketch (as, one suspects, does Woolf herself). The Dostoevsky/Proust comparison drawn by Woolf is initially presented as a paradox, not dissimilar from that drawn by Proust between the Russian and Mme de Svign. The terms of Woolfs paradox, however, depend on a symbolic opposition between East and West, whereby the East, somewhat questionably, represents the primitive, violent, abject, insane, and the West civilization, the intellect, the socialized mind. Her simultaneous fear and excitement at the recognition of a project common to both Proust and Dostoevsky that of tracking the movement of the mind is understandable, for it is a recognition which collapses the East/West opposition, or at least means it has to be internalised perhaps as the opposition between conscious and unconscious. But Woolfs essay is a sketch only and, clearly, opening out the Proust/Dostoevsky comparison in this way risks lapsing into Zeitgeist. Haddad-Wotlings comprehensive and sensitive study will be of interest to scholars of Proust and Dostoevsky, but also provides a firm foundation which can only help towards a wider understanding of the relation between Dostoevsky and his modernist readers. Somerville College, Oxford NICOLA LUCKHURST
CONTRIBUTORS TO NEW COMPARISON 22

ABDULLA AL-DABBAGH is Associate Professor of English, University of Jordan. R. K. BRITTON teaches at the Northern College for Residential Adult Education, Barnsley. FRANCESCA COUNIHAN teaches in the Department of French at Maynooth Univerity College, Co. Kildare, Eire. ELAINE JORDAN is Reader in Literature at the University of Essex. ROBERT IGNATIUS LETELLIER is a member of the Salzburg Centre for Research in Early English Literature. MARIA ALINE SEABRA FERREIRA teaches in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. P. M. WETHERILL is Professor of French in the Victoria University of Manchester. GINA WISKER is Principal Lecturer at Anglia Polytechnic University.
DIARY
The BCLA diary aims to provide information concerning forthcoming BCLA and ICLA activities. It also serves as a forum for discussion concerning the activities of the Association, the articles published in its journal, and any other issue of interest to students of comparative literature. Communications for the diary (including notices and short accounts of non-BCLA events which may be of interest to comparatists) should be sent to Maurice Slawinski, Department of Modern Languages, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, England, not later than 28 February (for inclusion in the Spring issue) and 31 August (for inclusion in the Autumn issue).
Forthcoming BCLA events
Workshop Conference
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND THE NEW MEDIA

University of Luton: Putteridge Bury Conference Centre 11-12 April 1997 Speakers include: DUNCAN CHRISTELOW (Chadwick Healey Ltd) MARYLIN DEEGAN (De Montfort) TRACY MCKENNA (Glasgow) MIKE FRAZER (Oxford) THEODORE SCALTSAS (Edinburgh) ALEXIS WEEDON (Luton) CTI (Oxford) will be providing demonstrations. For further details about this Conference, and registration forms, contact Dr Barbara Heins, Email Barbara.Heins@luton.ac.uk, or Sara Manzoor, Conference coordinator, University of Luton, 75 Castle Street, Luton Bedfordshire LUG 3AJ
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VIII BCLA INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE University of Lancaster 15-18 July 1998
LEGENDA
Reading and Writing Myth
CALL FOR PAPERS

Key Words: Apocalypses Bestiaries Codes Ciphers Conspiracies Desire Epiphanies Eros and Thanatos Fins de Sicle First and Last Words Ghosts Ghouls Goblins Hearts of Darkness Innocence and Experience Imagined Worlds Jouissance Kaos Limits Metamorphosis/Apotheosis Millennia Nightmares Origins Palimpsests Quests Ritual and Romance Revolutions Romantic agonies Sailing to Byzantium Telling tales/tellers of tales Theophanies Urban myths/myths of urbanity Visions and Prophecies Writing children/writing for children Xanadu Xenia to Xenophobes Requests for information and offers of papers (provisional titles and 100-200 word abstract) to the conference organiser, Maurice Slawinski, Dept of Italian Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, tel. 01524 593001, fax. 01524 843934, Email M.Slawinski@lancaster.ac.uk. Details of conference fees and accommodation will be available in early June 1997
BCLA Publications
New COMPARISON
NC 23 (Spring 1997) will be devoted to Comparative Literature in India, under the guest editorship of Dr Harish Trivedi, Department of English, University of Delhi. NC 24 (Autumn 1997) will include papers from the 1996 Workshop conference, Feasts. There will also be an open section, containing articles dealing with any
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topic of interest to comparatists. FURTHER CONTRIBUTIONS TO THIS ARE STILL WELCOME. NC 25 (Spring 1998) will also contain a substantial open section, for which CONTRIBUTIONS ARE INVITED. NC 26 (Autumn 1998) will be devoted to the theme Classicism/Baroque/PostModern. Please send proposals for articles to Maurice Slawinski, Dept of Italian Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN.
Except where otherwise specified, all submissions should be addressed to Dr Leon Burnett, Department of Literature, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ. All articles submitted for publication should be in English, with prose translations of quotations in foreign languages incorporated into the main text (not the footnotes). The New Comparison style sheet is reproduced immediately after this Diary. Please submit type-script/print-out in three copies. Do not send submissions in machine-readable form (floppy disk), but once accepted definitive versions of articles must be on disk (preferred formats WORD FOR WINDOWS 6) and conform to NC conventions; a brief abstract will also be required.
COMPARATIVE CRITICISM
Comparative Criticism is published annually for the BCLA by Cambridge University Press, under the editorship of Dr Elinor Shaffer. Comparative Criticism 18 (1996) Spaces: Cities, Gardens and Wildernesses includes the plenary lectures of the BCLAs 1995 Edinburgh conference, and the winning entries of the 1994 BCLA Translation Competition. Comparative Criticism 19 (1997) will be dedicated to Literary Devolution: Writing Now in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England. Comparative Criticism 20 (1998) will deal with Literary and Philosophical Dialogue.
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In connection with this issue, a COMPETITION FOR NEW PHILOSOPHICAL DIALOGUES, and for new translations into English of philosophical dialogues, past or present, is being sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Skill, the European Humanities Research Centre, Oxford University, and the British Comparative Literature Association. The competition carries with it 5000 in prizes, publication, and the prospect of performance. The winning entries in the Competition will be published in Comparative Criticism 20 The philosophical dialogue has been an important vehicle for European thought of the most adventurous, original and testing kind since Plato. The importance for the Enlightenment of philosophical dialogues such as Diderots can scarcely be overstated. In Britain as in other countries the genre attracted distinguished practitioners who powerfully influenced European thought for example, in literature, Drydens Essay of Dramatick Poesy, in philosophy, Shaftesburys The Moralists and Humes Dialogues on Natural Religion. The literary form of the dialogue is at the centre of the current concern with the role of literary genres, rhetorical practices, and metaphor in the development of philosophical ideas. Entries may be submitted in either of two categories: new dialogues and translations of dialogues. In both cases the target language is English. The deadline for submission is 15 February 1997; results will be announced in Autumn 1997. There is a purse of 5000, to be awarded as the judges see fit. Readings and performances at the Royal Dramatic Theatre Stockholm will be held in connection with the prizegiving in Stockholm. Enquiries and entries (up to 30 pages), accompanied by the entrance fee of 5, should be sent to: Philosophical Dialogues Competition, European Humanities Research Centre, 47 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JF, England
BCLA DISSERTATIONS IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The BCLA invites proposals and submissions from recent doctoral candidates for this series. Dissertations should be of comparative interest, and may include work on regional literatures and the comparison of same-language traditions (e.g. of different francophone or anglophone countries). Please contact Dr Elinor Shaffer, School of Modern Languages and European History, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ.
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Other Events of Interest to Comparatists

University of London INSTITUTE OF ROMANCE STUDIES Forthcoming Events (Unless otherwise stated, all Institute of Romance Studies conferences and symposia are held at the Institute, Senate House, University of London, and further details may obtained from the Administrator, Institute of Romance Studies, Senate House, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU, email irsa@sas.ac.uk)
1. INTERSTICES: A POSTGRADUATE CONFERENCE 27 February 1997 Following the successful 1996 conference, After Theory, this second postgraduate conference will focus on the space between, the relations between disciplines, texts, languages: the interstice. What are the methodological and theoretical consequences of working on and in the space of inter-relation? Does the increasing importance of this space entail the redundancy of previous conceptual apparatuses? This conference aims to explore these questions via a series of presentations of work either recently completed or in progress among current postgraduates. Organiser: DR PATRICK FFRENCH, University College, London.
2. MUSICAL ENTERTAINMENTS AND THEIR LIBRETTI Friday 28 February 1997 This conference will focus on courtly musical entertainments of Early Baroque Italy (including opera), and on the relationship connecting those entertainments with similar musical events in Savoy, France and other European countries. The
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contributions will relate to aspects regarding the literary text, the music and the staging of such entertainments. The aim of this conference is to provide a framework within which to locate, on one side the practical and cultural requirements made by the Italian audience, and on the other side how this Italian model was received abroad, spanning from plain imitation to a freer use of it. Speakers include: Prof. MARIE-THRSE BOUQUET-BOYER (CRNS, Chambry), Prof. PATRICK BOYDE (St Johns College, Cambridge), Dr MARIE-CLAUDE CANOVA GREEN (Goldsmiths College, London); Dr FRANCESCA CHIARELLI (Royal Holloway College, London), Ms SARAH COLVIN (St Johns College, Oxford), Dr JRME DE LA GORCE (Thtre Baroque de France, Paris).
3. THE SELF AND THE OTHER: EUROPEAN OVERSEAS EXPANSION IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE Friday 7 March 1997 This international conference will examine the European perceptions of alien cultures in the aftermath of the Renaissance overseas expansion and the complementary perception of the European as alien by other peoples and cultures. Papers will focus on literature, history and the history of ideas.
4. POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN LUSOPHONE AFRICA Friday 14 March 1997 The postcolonial literature of Angola, Mozambique, So Tome Principe, GuineaBissau and Cape Verde; their origins in historical context and their links with metropolitan Portuguese, Brazilian and Black/African literature. Authors discussed will include Pepetela, Luandino Vieira, Jos Craveirinha and Mia Couto.
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5. EUROPEAN FANTASY LITERATURE Friday 21 March 1997 Science Fiction an obsession with the Future? Fantasy a nostalgia for the past? This conference will explore these generalisations...
6. BLACK SKIN WHITE MASK: FANON IN CONTEXT Saturday 22 March 1997 To mark the completion of Black Skin White Mask, Isaac Juliens feature-length film on Frantz Fanon, this symposium brings together scholars working in the UK on Fanon to look again at his seminal text, Peau noire masques blancs, first published in 1952. Speakers include DAVID MACEY, DAVID MARRIOTT (Queen Maru and Westfield College, London), KADIATU KANNEH (University of Birmingham), FRANCOISE VERGS (University of Sussex).
University of Reading CENTRE FOR ITALIAN WOMENS STUDIES WOMEN AND WRITING IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ITALY Reading/London 21-22 February 1997 GIULIANA MORANDINI, EMMANUELA TANDELLO (University College, London), ANN HALLAMORE CAESAR (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), EMMANUELLE GENEVOIS (Sorbonne Nouvelle), ADALGISA GIORGIO (Bath), FRANCESCA SANVITALE, ELISABETTA RASY, LUCIENNE KROHA (McGill), ANGIOLA FERRARIS (Bari), RICCIARDA RICORDA (Venice), SHARON WOOD (Strathclyde), PAOLO PUPPA (Venice)
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Details: The Secretary, Italian Department, UCL, GowerStreet, London WC1E 6BT. University of Lancaster CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURAL VALUES TIME AND VALUE Lancaster 10-13 April 1997 Time, Consciousness and the Body Narrative and Memory Time and the Political Tempo and Technology Nature and Kairos Speakers will include: BARBARA ADAM, ARJUN APPADURAI, DEIRDRE BODE, MICK DILLON, ELIZABETH ERMARTH, SARAH FRANKLIN, ANNETTE KUHN, ERNESTO LACLAU, SCOTT LASH, ALPHONSO LINGIS, NIKLAS LUHMANN, MICHEL MAFFESOLI, JOHN MILBANK, CHANTAL MOUFFE, PEGGY PHELAN, RICHARD ROBERTS, JOHN URRY, SLAVOJ ZIZEK. Further information and registration: June Rye, Centre for the Study of Cultural Values, Bowland College, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT, Tel. 01524 592497, Fax. 01524 594238, Email J.Rye@lancaster.ac.uk.
Keele University DEPARTMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES ENTERTAINING IDEOLOGIES A Century of European Cinema Keele Conference Centre, 19 April 1997 Speakers include RICHARD DYER on Italian cinema; ROSEMARY STOTT on film in the GDR, STEVE CANON & ELAINE MEYER on Godard; JULIA DOBSON on Hollywood remakes of French films; CARRIE TARR on post-colonialist film; WENDY EVERETT on European Cinema. For further details contact Diana Holmes, Email mla28@keele.ac.uk, or Alison Smith, Email mla22@keele.ac.uk (surface mail address: Department of Modern Languages, Keele University, Staffs ST5 5BG). Or consult web site: http://www.keele.ac.uk/ depts/mlf/rsch/enditol.htm
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UNIVERSIT JEAN MONNET, SAINT-ETIENNE Colloque International de Littrature Compare FIGURES DE LEXCLU Saint-Etienne, 2-4 May 1997 Speakers include: STEPAHNE MICHAUD (Paris III); MARIE-F. BLAISE (Montpellier III); DBORAH LEVY-BERTHERAT (Paris VII); PHILIPPE ZARD (Artois); BARBARA AGNESE (Vienna); NORMAN DAVID THAU (Lyon III); CAROLE KSIAZENICER-MATHERON (Orlans); FLORENCE VINAS (Montpellier); AMELIA SANZ (Complutense, Madrid); M. A. GARCA LARRAAGA (Saragossa); MARTA GIN-JANER (Lleida); GEORGES ZARAGOZA (Bourgogne); GABRIEL SAAD (Paris IV); CRYSTEL PINONNAT (Bretagne); GERT PINKERNELLE (Wuppertal); ALEKSANDER ABLAMOWICZ (Silesia); HANS HARTJE (Paris VII); MICHAL MROZOWICKI (Gdansk; JEAN-BERNARD VRAY (Saint-Etienne); ARLETTE CHEMAIN (Nice); ANNE-CLAIRE JACCARD (Bourgogne); ARIELLE THAUVINCHAPOT (Limoges); AUREL SCOROBETE (Saint-Etienne); CRMEN CORLOTEANU & CRISTINA GRIGORI (Roumanie); VERONIQUE LONARD (Saint-Etienne); AMLIE DJOURAKMOVITH-SCHWEIGER (Rouen); EVELYNE LLOZE (Saint-Etienne); J.P. PICOT (Montpellier); J.-M. GRASSIN (Limoges). Further details/registration, CEP, Universit Jean Monnet, MRASH, 33, rue du OnzeNovembre, Saint Etienne cedex 2 (tel. 77 42 16 66; fax. 77 42 16 44).
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON An International Conference: TIME AND THE IMAGE Institut Francais/Tate Gallery/University College London 28-31 May 1997 Speakers include: PARVEEN DAMS (Brunel University); MIEKE BAL (Cornell University); STEPEHN BANN (University of Kent at Canterbury); RAYMOND BELLOUR
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(CNRS); ANDREW BENJAMIN (University of Warwick); GEOFFREY BENNINGTON (University of Sussex); EDUARDO CADAVA (Princeton University); HOWARD CAYGILL (Goldsmiths College London); REBECCA COMAY (University of Toronto); JOAN COPJEC (Cornell University); SIMON CRITCHLEY (University of Essex; PAUL DAVIES (University of Sussex); THIERRY DE DUVE (University of Pennsylvania); MARY ANN DOANE (Brown University); JONATHAN DRONSFIELD (University of Warwick); ALEXANDER GARCIA DUTTMAN (Monash University); BRIONY FER (University College London); HAL FOSTER (University of California, Berkeley); PATRICK FFRENCH (University College London); MARTIN JAY (University of California Los Angeles); TIMOTHY MATHEWS (University College London); LAURA MULVEY (British Film Institute); MOLLY NESBIT (Vassar College); MICHAEL NEWMAN (University College London); MARIE-CLAIRE ROPARS (University of Paris VII); JOHN SALLIS (Penn State University); RICHARD SENNETT (New York University); SUSAN SULEIMAN (Harvard University); JEFF WALL; MARK WIGLEY (Princeton University); PETER WOLLEN (University of California Los Angeles); DAVID WOOD (Vanderbilt University). Enquiries to Carolyn Gill, tel. 0171 624 9217, fax. 0171 624 09060.
University of Wales Aberystwyth FICTIONS TODAY Aberystwyth 2-4 July 1997 Postmodernism Aids Parody Pastiche Womens Writing Neo-decadentism Graphic Novel Cyberpunk E-texts Post-colonial Writing Fantapolitica Narrative Theory New Literary Movements Multimedia Fin-de-sicle Poststructuralism New Europe Translations Genre Fiction New Writers Enquiries and offers of papers to The Organizers, FICTIONS TODAY, Dept. of European Languages, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales SY23 3DY, or Email Dr. Michael McLoughlin: mcm@aber.ac.uk; Dr Keith Scott: jls@aber.ac.uk; Ms E Cervato: emc@aber.ac.uk.
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University of Lancaster THE RUSKIN PROGRAMME NINETEENTH CENTURY RELIGION Lancaster, 17-19 July 1997 Speakers will include: STEPHEN TOULMIN, NICHOLAS LASH, STEPHEN PRICKETT, JOHN MILBANK. Further information from Mrs Sarah Emslie, Conference Organiser, The Ruskin Programme, Lancaster University LA1 4YT, Tel. 01524 592450, Fax. 01524 843087, Email M.Wheeler@lancaster.ac.uk.
University of Hull DEPARTMENT OF DRAMA TRUE TO FORM: ON STAGE TRANSLATION Hull, 12-14 September 1997 Integrity of the Text Cultural and Political Identities Dynamics of Performance Contemporary Practice This major international conference on translating for the theatre will include contributions from established practitioners, translators, agents, and publishers, as well as academics. Enquiries and offers of papers (with abstracts) to Paula Holdstock, Department of Drama, University of Hull, HU6 7RX. Tel/Fax 01482 466210, Email P.J.Holdstock@drama.hull.ac.uk.
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INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION
XVTH CONGRESS: LITERATURE AS CULTURAL MEMORY Leiden 16-22 August 1997
Plenary Speakers: ANDRE BRINK (Cape Town) LINDA HUTCHEON (Toronto) JULIA KRISTEVA (Paris) Further information from the Congress general organizer, Teo Dhaen, English Department, Leiden University, P.O. Box CP 9515, NL-2300 RA Leiden, Netherlands; tel. 31 71 5272144; fax. 31 71 5272615; email Dhaen@Rullet.LeidenUniv.nl.
STYLE GUIDANCE FOR CONTRIBUTORS

New Comparison is typeset on computer screen by the editors. It is vital that contributors submit copy adhering to these guidelines. This will minimize time and effort, and ensure that the article which goes to press is as accurate as humanly possible with limited resources. 1. General
Copy for publication must be submitted both in hard (print-out) and computer-readable forms. The text should be set out in double spacing, with broad margins. Paragraphs should be indented, but not separated by additional spacing. New sections of text requiring a break should be clearly separated, and not indented. Quotations longer than three lines of prose or two lines of verse should be indented on both sides, and also separated from the main body of the text. Notes to the printed text should take the form of end-notes rather than footnotes. Unless text is being sent by air-mail, please submit the hard copy in triplicate. Electronic copy may be submitted on 5.25" or (preferably) 3.5" disks (HD or DD) in MS-DOS format. MACINTOSH users should take advantage of the facility which allows you to save files in MS-DOS format on MS-DOS formatted disks). The preferred word-processing programme is Microsoft Word (Windows version 6.0 preferred). Text files produced with other word-processing programmes can generally be transferred to Word without losing formatting, but if submitting text in such form, please include also a text-only (ASCII) version as fail-safe, should format-transfer not be possible. Where the word-processing programme has an automatic footnoting facility, this should be used. Titles of books or self-contained literary texts should be in italics or, failing this, underlined, as should words or phrases singled out for emphasis, single foreign words which have not been naturalized into English (e.g. elite, but lan) and foreign phrases (e.g. allegro vivace). No other forms of emphasis (capitals, bold, large print, etc.) should be used, except in quotations from other texts. Do not try to imitate the NC house-style (e.g. small capitals in footnotes). Quotations within the main body of the text should be in double inverted commas, as should words or phrases used in an unusual or improper way, upon first appearence in that acceptation. Quotations within quotations should be in singe inverted commas. To avoid confusion with suspension marks in the original, elisions are marked by [...], but no elision marks should be placed at beginning or end of quotations. Changes or additions within quotations to complete the sense are also to be marked by square brackets. Spelling should follow British conventions. Write numbers one to twenty in full, use numerals thereafter. Write "the sixteenth century" but "sixteenth-century verse" (not 16th). Write 1950s. 2. Languages and Characters. Quotations in languages other than English should only be used when the writing, rather than simply a factual statement, is at issue. NC publishes articles across a wide range of languages, and is read beyond English-speaking and Western-European countries: it should not be assumed that readers are fluent in even the more common Western languages. When quoting in another language, particular care should be taken with accents and other diacritic marks: these often do not survive transfer from one word-processing format to another, and a clearly marked hard copy is indispensable (the editors do not have the linguistic skills of the Apostles after Pentecost!). All such quotations should be followed by an English translation (in the text, indented like the quotation), whose author should be acknowledged in a footnote, as should those of translations cited in lieu of the original text. Quotations in languages employing non-Roman alphabets pose particularly difficult problems and should generally be avoided.
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3. Footnotes and References. Make sparing use of footnotes: they should be used to give necessary bibliographical references or add necessary clarifications which would clutter the main text. They should not be used solely to display erudition, to cite one's friends, or wage war on one's academic foes. The footnote number in the text should generally come at the end of a sentence or period (unless this appears misleading), and come immediately outside the final punctuation mark. A number of references coming close together should be dealt with in a single footnote, where this is possible without loss of clarity. Footnotes should be clear, concise and avoid unnecessary repetition. Texts frequently cited should be footnoted upon first appearance, and given an appropriate abbreviation. Further references should be incorporated in the main body of the article, using the abbreviation, followed by page or line references (use p./pp. and l./ll.). The author's name should immediately precede the title of cited works, to avoid misunderstanding and allow for rapid bibliographical searches. Subsequent footonote references to a work already cited should take the briefest form compatible with clarity: use 'ibid.' where the second reference immediately follows the first; elsewhere use author surname only and short title (e.g. Hegel, Phenomenology, pp. 37-38). Bibliographical references should be complete, and bear in mind readers' possible need to seek the works cited in library catalogues organized on a variety of principles, or through InterLibrary Loans. Page sequence numbers over 99 should be given as, for example, 1020-27, not 1020-7. References should take the following forms: for single-volume books: Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 137-42 (but where the place of publication forms part of the publisher's name e.g. Oxford University Press it should not be repeated. for multi-volume works: Fulvio Testi, Lettere, ed. M. L. Doglio, 3 vols (Bari-Roma: Laterza, 1967), Vol. II, p. 37. for collections of essays as a whole: The Mind of Dante, ed. U. Limentani (Cambridge University Press, 1967). for single chapters in collections of essays: Luce Giard, "Remapping Knowledge, Reshaping Institutions", Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe, ed. S. Pumfrey, P. L. Rossi and M. Slawinski (Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 19-47 (p. 40). for articles in journals: Mark Balfour, "Manfred's Wounds in Purgatorio III", Italian Studies, 48 (1993), pp. 4-17 (p. 15). But where publication is in more than one part annually, and these are separately paginated, the part number should also be given, e.g.: 25:3). Where pagination is separate, but so is the numbering do not detail which issue e.g. "New Comparison, 15 (1993)", and not "15 (Spring 1993)". Please avoid using f/ff. sqr. and passim when indicating page numbers. References to specific pages of text should be as precise as possible. Note also that the place of publication should be given as written on frontispiece, not anglicized.
BRITISH COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION

The British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA founded in 1975) aims to promote the scholarly study of literature without confinement to national or linguistic boundaries, and in relation to other disciplines. The BCLAs primary interests are in literature, the contexts of literature and the interaction between literatures. Through its publications, conferences and other activities the Association encourages research along comparative, intercultural and interdisciplinary lines, as well as in the fields of general literary studies and literary theory; fosters the exchange and renewal of critical ideas and concepts; keeps its members informed about national and international developments in the study of literature; provides a forum for personal and institutional academic contacts, both within Britain and with Associations and individuals in other countries.
BCLA EXECUTIVE President: Peter France (French, Edinburgh) Secretary: Penny Brown (French, Manchester) Treasurer: Leon Burnett (Literature, Essex) Members: Mona Baker (Languages, UMIST); Julia Dobson (Languages and European Studies, Wolverhampton); Howard Gaskill (German, Edinburgh); Stuart Gillespie (English, Glasgow); Barbara Heins (German, Luton); Piotr Kuhiwczak (Comparative Cultural Studies, Warwick); Duncan Large (German, Swansea); Maurice Slawinski (Italian, Lancaster); Barry Wood (English, Bolton Institute); ex officio: Elinor Shaffer (Comparative Literature, East Anglia); Arthur Terry (Literature, Essex).
BCLA MEMBERSHIP Membership of the BCLA is open to academic members of universities and other institutions of higher learning, as well as to graduate students and to other persons with appropriate scholarly interests, both in Britain and abroad. The current subscription rate is 20 for those in employment, and 12 for postgraduates and the unwaged. BCLA membership is for one year from the date of receipt of the membership fee. It includes membership of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), a subscription to New Comparison (BCLA; 2 issues) and a discount on the yearbook Comparative Criticism (CUP). To join the BCLA, please write to the Treasurer, Dr Leon Burnett, Department of Literature, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ.
The BCLA on the World Wide Web Since October 1995 the BCLA has had a set of pages on the World Wide Web. These can be accessed from any networked computer terminal equipped with a Web browser such as Netscape or Mosaic. The home page (http://www.swan.ac.uk/german/bcla/bcla.htm) gives general information about the Association and has hypertext links through to further pages with details of BCLA conferences and competitions, current and back issues of New Comparison and Comparative Criticism, and the Executive Committee. The Other Sites of Interest section features links to a variety of other WWW pages which might be of interest to BCLA members; any suggestions for additional links or other improvements are welcome and should be sent to Duncan Large (d.a.g.large@swan.ac.uk). The BCLA pages are regularly updated: in future this Diary section and abstracts of New Comparison articles will also be available on-line.
NEW COMPARISON 18 (Autumn 1994) Walter Benjamin in the Postmodern: TONY PINKNEY Introduction; NORBERT BOLZ Benjamin in the Postmodern; IVAN SOLL Mechanical Reproducibility and the Reconceptualisation of Art: Thoughts in the Wake of Walter Benjamin; CHRISTOPHER THORNHILL Benjamin and Kraus: The Construction of Negative Language; UWE STEINER Elective Affinity: Notes on Benjamin and Heine; CORNELIA VISMANN Landscape in the First World War: On Benjamins Critique of Ernst Jnger; ANDREW BOWIE Truth, Language and Art: Benjamin, Davidson and Heidegger; ULRICH RFFER Notes on de Mans Reading of Benjamin; JULIAN ROBERTS Benjamin and Common Law Notions of Precedent; RALF ROGOWSKI The Paradox of Law and Violence; HELGA GEYER-RYAN Justice, Literature, Deconstruction; MICHAEL LWY Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. NEW COMPARISON 19 (Spring 1995) Special Section: Eastern Europe: IMOGEN FORSTER Prisoner in the House of Fiction? Albanian Writer Ismail Kadare; BELINDA COOKE Lowells Notebook and the Ghost of Mandelstam; PETER BARTA Re-Figuring the Revolutionary: Blok, Ibsen and Catiline; FUAD ABDUL MUTTALEB Shakespeares Hamlet, Chekhovs Ivanov; BRIGITTE SCHULTZE Wyspiaskis Wesele in English Translation (1990); GEORGE HYDE Phallic Deconstructions: Lawrence, Shklovsky and Rozanov; STEVE GILES Sociological Aesthetics as a Challenge to Literary Theory: Reappraising Mukaovsk. Articles: NICOLA VULPE Gilgamesh as Political Tragedy; LITSA TRAYIANNOUDI Prometheanism: A (Romantic) Discourse of Negation; PHILLIP JOHANSEN Inventing the Other: The Mirror of Technology in Kleists Marionettentheater; WERNER VON KOPPENFELS Miroirs flottants: Reflections of Nature in the Baroque Poetry of England and France; KATHLEEN SHIELDS Three Irish Translations of Rimbauds Bateau ivre; HANI AL-RAHEB The Satanic Verses: Fantasy for Religious Satire. NEW COMPARISON 20 (Autumn 1995) Once upon a time...: Cross-currents in Childrens Literature: PENNY BROWN Introduction; PETER HUNT Childrens Literature: an Historical/Political/Theoretical Overview; KAREN SEAGO Sleeping Beauty, or the Acculturation of a Tale; PETER FRANCE From Russian Tale to English Childrens Story: The Case of Arthur Ransome PENNY BROWN Candidates for my Friendship: Madame de Genlis and Mary; DAVID BLAMIRES Politics, Religion and Family Values in English Childrens Versions of the William Tell Story; DAVID STEEL Hector Malot, Sans Famille and the Sense of Adventure; ANN LAWSON LUCAS The Archetypal Adventures of Salgari: a Panorama of his Universe and Cultural Connections; SUSAN TEBBUTT New Directions in Socially Critical German Jugendliteratur; SIV JANNSON Ambivalence and the Construction of a True Chalet School Girl in BrentDyers Chalet School Books; MIKE ROGERS Emil and the Gestapo; PAMELA KNIGHTS Refashioning Girlhood? Little Women in Lowry and Alcott. NEW COMPARISON 21 (Spring 1996) Cities, Gardens, Wildernesses: DIANA KUPREL, Recreating The First Age of the World: Edenic Speculation, Spectacle and Specularity in Marivaux EMILY SALINES, The Opium Landscape in Translation: Baudelaires and De Quincey YVAN TARDY, From Flnerie to Drive PATRICK BRIDGWATER, Visions of Paradise in German Symbolism and Early Expressionism ANTONIO RIBEIRO, Metamorphoses of the Flneur: from Ringstrasse to Rua dos Douradores ELIZABETH MASLEN, Versions of Paradise: the Uses and Abuses of Heavenly Clichs CHARLES FORSDICK, Beyond the Boundary of the Exotic. Mapping Centre and Periphery in Segalen SUSAN INGRAM, The Garden Within: Locating Hoffmans Lost in Translation EFRAIM SICHER, Paradise Refused: the Flight from Eden in Modern Literature KEN IRELAND, Rococo paradise: Watteaus Cythera in Sahgal and Banville MAUNO HYRYNEN, National Landscape Imagery in the Making of Finland BART KEUNEN The City Image as a Social Strategy of Literary Subcultures.

A Feminine Difference

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A Feminine Difference

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New COMPARISON

A Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies

Number 22 Autumn 1996

EDITORS Leon Burnett

Editorial Assistant Mary Mills (Department of Literature, University of Essex)

ADDRESSES FOR CORRESPONDENCE

Copyright: the authors

Printed at the University of Essex

The British Comparative Literature Association:

Number 22: Autumn 1996

Contributors to New COMPARISON 22

INTRODUCTION: A feminine difference?

New Comparison 22: p. 4

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

New Comparison 22: p. 5

FARZETH MILANI, Veils and words (Syracuse University Press, 1992).

New Comparison 22: p. 6

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

New Comparison 22: p. 7

New Comparison 22: p. 8

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

New Comparison 22: p. 9

Her Own Life, cit., pp.98-99

New Comparison 22: p. 10

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

New Comparison 22: p. 11

New Comparison 22: p. 12

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

Jordan: A Feminine Difference?

New Comparison 22: p. 13

Robert Ignatius Letellier

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

New Comparison 22: p. 15

New Comparison 22: p. 16

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

New Comparison 22: p. 17

New Comparison 22: p. 18

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

Cf. H. MALO, Le Grand Cond (Paris: 1937).

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

New Comparison 22: p. 19

New Comparison 22: p. 20

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

New Comparison 22: p. 21

See PICARD, Les Salons cit., p. 116.

New Comparison 22: p. 22

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

SMITH, Literature and Revolution cit., p. 5.

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

New Comparison 22: p. 23

New Comparison 22: p. 24

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

See LILLEY, Introduction cit., p. xxvi.

Letellier: Cavendish and Lafayette

New Comparison 22: p. 25

New Comparison 22: p. 26