Sexual textual politics Feminist literary theory.doc

Sexual/ Textual PoliticsToril MoiFor Showalter, the only way a feminist can read the book properly is by remaining “detached from its narrative strategies”; and if she manages to do so, she will see that Room is in no way a particularly liberating text: “If one can see A Room of Ones Own as a document in the literary history of female aestheticism, and remain detached from its narrative strategies, the concepts of androgyny and the private room are neither as liberating nor as obvious as they first appear. They have a darker side that is the sphere of the exile and the eunuch”. For Showalter, Woolfs writing continually escapes the critics perspective, always refusing to be pinned down to one unifying angle of vision. This elusiveness is then interpreted as a denial of authentic feminist states of mind, namely the “angry and alienated ones”, and as a commitment to the Bloomsbury ideal of the “separation of politics and art”. This separation is evident, Showalter thinks, in the fact that Woolf “avoided describing her own experience”. Since this avoidance makes it impossible for Woolf to produce really committed feminist work, Showalter naturally concludes that Three Guineas as well as Room fail as feminist essays.The major drawback of this approach the crypto-Lukácsian perspective is surely signaled in the fact that it proves incapable of appropriating for feminism the work of the greatest British woman writer of this century, despite the fact that Woolf was not only a novelist of considerable genius but a declared feminist and dedicated reader of other womens writings. It is surely arguable that if feminist critics cannot produce a positive political and literary assessment of Woolfs writing, then the fault may lie with their own critical and theoretical perspectives rather than with Woolfs texts. But do feminists have an alternative to this negative reading of Woolf? Let us see if a different theoretical approach might rescue Virginia Woolf for feminist politics.Showalter wants the literary text to yield the reader a certain security, a firm perspective from which to judge the world. Woolf, on the other hand, seems to practise what we might now call a “deconstructive” form of writing, one that engages with and thereby exposes the duplicitous nature of discourse. In her own textual practice, Woolf exposes the way in which language refused to pinned down to an underlying essential meaning. According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, language is structured as an endless deferral of meaning, and any search for an essential, absolutely stable meaning must therefore be considered metaphysical. There is no final element, no fundamental unit, no transcendental signified that is meaningful in itself and thus escapes the ceaseless interplay of linguistic deferral and difference. The free play of signifiers will never yield a final, unified meaning that in turn might ground and explain all the others. It is in the light of such textual and linguistic theory that we can read Woolfs playful shifts and changes of perspective, in both her fiction and in Room, as something rather more than a willful desire to irritate the serious-minded feminist critic. Through her conscious exploitation of the sportive, sensual nature of language, Woolf rejects the metaphysical essentialism underlying patriarchal ideology, which hails God, the Father or the phallus as its transcendental signified. But Woolf does more than practise a non-essentialist form of writing. She also reveals a deeply sceptical attitude to the male-humanist concept of an essential human identity. For what can this self-identical identity be if all meaning is a ceaseless play of difference, if absence as much as presence is the foundation of meaning? The humanist concept of identity is also challenged by psychoanalytic theory, which Woolf undoubtedly knew. The Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, published the first English translations of Freuds central works, and when Freud arrived in London in 1939 Virginia Woolf went to visit him. Freud, we are tantalizingly informed, gave her a narcissus.For Woolf, as for Freud, unconscious drives and desires constantly exert a pressure on our conscious thoughts and actions. For psychoanalysis the human subject is a complex entity, of which the conscious mind is only a small part. Once one has accepted this view of the subject, however, it becomes impossible to argue that even our conscious wishes and feelings originate within a unified self, since we can have no knowledge of the possibly unlimited unconscious processes that shape our conscious thought. Conscious thought, then, must be seen as the “overdetermined” manifestation of a multiplicity of structures that intersect to produce that unstable constellation the liberal humanists call the “self.” These structures encompass not only unconscious sexual desires, fears and phobias, but also a host of conflicting material, social, political and ideological factors of which we are equally unaware. It is this highly complex network of conflicting structures, the anti-humanist would argue, that produces the subject and its experiences, rather than the other way round. This belief does not of course render the individuals experiences in any sense less real or valuable; but it does mean that such experiences cannot be understood other than through the study of their multiple determinants-determinants of which conscious thought is only one, and a potentially treacherous one at that. If a similar approach is taken to the literary text, it follows that the search for a unified individual self, or gender identity or indeed “textual identity” in the literary work must be seen as drastically reductive.It is in this sense that Showalters recommendation to remain detached from the narrative strategies of the text is equivalent to not reading it all. For it is only through an examination of the detailed strategies of the text on all its levels that we will be able to uncover some of the conflicting, contradictory elements that contribute to make it precisely this text, with precisely these words and this configuration. The humanist desire for a unity of vision or thought (or as Holly puts it, “for a non-contradictory perception of the world”) is, in effect, a demand for a sharply reductive reading of literature-a reading that, not least in the case of an experimental writer like Woolf, can have little hope of grasping the central problems posed by pioneering modes of textual production. A “non-contradictory perception of the world,” for Lukács Marxist opponent Bertolt Brecht, is precisely a reactionary one.The French feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva has argued that the modernist poetry of Lautréamont, Mallarmé and others constitutes a “revolutionary” form of writing. The modernist poem, with its abrupt shifts, ellipses, breaks and apparent lack of logical construction is a kind of writing in which the rhythms of the body and the unconscious have managed to break through the strict rational defences of conventional social meaning. Since Kristeva sees such conventional meaning as the structure that sustains the whole of the symbolic order-that is, all human social and cultural institutions-the fragmentation of symbolic language in modernist poetry comes for her to parallel and prefigure a total social revolution. For Kristeva, that is to say, there is a specific practice of writing that is itself “revolutionary,” analogous to sexual and political transformation, and that by its very existence testifies to the possibility of transforming the symbolic order of orthodox society from the inside. One might argue in this light that Woolfs refusal to commit herself in her essays to a so-called rational or logical form of writing, free from fictional techniques, indicates a similar break with symbolic language, as of course do many of the techniques she deploys in her novels.Kristeva also argues that many women will be able to let what she calls the “spasmodic force” of the unconscious disrupt their language because of their strong links with the pre-Oedipal mother-figure. But if these unconscious pulsations were to take over the subject entirely, the subject would fall back into pre-Oedipal or imaginary chaos and develop some form of mental illness. The subject whose language lets such forces disrupt the symbolic order, in other words, is also the subject who runs the greater risk of lapsing into madness. Seen in this context, Woolfs own periodic attacks of mental illness can be linked both to her textual strategies and to her feminism. For the symbolic order is a patriarchal order, ruled by the Law of the Father, and any subject who tries to disrupt it, who lets unconscious forces slip through the symbolic repression, puts her or himself in a position of revolt against this regime. Woolf herself suffered acute patriarchal oppression at the hands of the psychiatric establishment, and Mrs Dalloway contains not only a splendidly satirical attack on that profession (as represented by Sir William Bradshaw), but also a superbly perspicacious representation of a mind that succumbs to “imaginary” chaos in the character of Septimus Smith. Indeed Septimus can be seen as the negative parallel to Clarissa Dalloway, who herself steers clear of the threatening gulf of madness only at the price of repressing her passions and desires, becoming a cold but brilliant woman highly admired in patriarchal society. In this way Woolf discloses the dangers of the invasion of unconscious pulsions as well as the price paid by the subject who successfully preserves her sanity, thus maintaining a precarious balance between an overestimation of so-called “feminine” madness and a too precipitate rejection of the values of the symbolic order.It is evident that for Julia Kristeva it is not the biological sex of a person, but the subject position she or he takes up, that determines their revolutionary potential. Her views of feminist politics reflect this refusal of biologism and essentialism. The feminist struggle, she argues, must be seen historically and politically as a three-tiered one, which can be schematically summarized as follows:(1) Women demand equal access to the symbolic order. Liberal feminism. Equality.(2) Women reject the male symbolic order in the name of difference. Radical feminism. Femininity extolled.(3) (This is Kristevas own position.) Women reject the dichotomy between masculine and feminine as metaphysical.The third position is one that has deconstructed the opposition between masculinity and femininity, and therefore necessarily challenges the very notion of identity. Kristeva writes: In the third attitude, which I strongly advocate-which I imagine?-the very dichotomy man/ woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics. What can “identity,” even “sexual identity,” mean in a new theoretical and scientific space where the very notion of identity is challenged? (“Womens time”, 33-4) The relationship between the second and the third positions here requires some comment. If the defence of the third position implies a total rejection of stage two (which I do not think it does), this would be a grievous political error. For it still remains politically essential for feminists to defend women as women in order to counteract the patriarchal oppression that precisely despises women as women. But an “undeconstructed” form of “stage two” feminism, unaware of the metaphysical nature of gender identities, runs the risk of becoming an inverted form of sexism. It does so by uncritically taking over the very metaphysical categories set up by patriarchy in order to keep women in their places, despite attempts to attach new feminist values to these old categories. An adoption of Kristevas “deconstructed” form of feminism therefore in one sense leaves everything as it was-our positions in the political struggle have not changed-but in another sense radically transforms our awareness of the nature of that struggle.Here, I feel, Kristevas feminism echoes the position taken up by Virginia Woolf some sixty years earlier. Read from this perspective, To the Lighthouse illustrates the destructive nature of a metaphysical belief in strong, immutably fixed gender identities-as represented by Mr and Mrs Ramsay-whereas Lily Briscoe (an artist) represents the subject who deconstructs this opposition, perceives its pernicious influence and tries as far as is possible in a still rigidly patriarchal order to live as her own woman, without regard for the crippling definitions of sexual identity to which society would have her conform. It is in this context that we must situate Woolfs crucial concept of androgyny. This is not, as Showalter argues, a flight from fixed gender identities, but a recognition of their falsifying metaphysical nature. Far from fleeing such gender identities because she fears them, Woolf rejects them because she has seen them for what they are. She has understood that the goal of the feminist struggle must precisely be to deconstruct the death-dealing binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity.