Utopian Fiction is a Literary Space for Feminist Theory to Take Place

Thomas More's Utopia

Utopian narratives have historically provided a place for social dreaming, a space defined in historical materialism.  Dating back to utopia’s literary origins in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and then through four hundred years of subsequent development, this traditional Utopian space has often proposed a better place for man to [en] act his ideas of social harmony, often leaving women’s roles generally absent or, at the very least, [en] chained to those ‘natural’ roles chiefly defined through biological imperatives.  In other words, literary utopias have a history of both reducing and reinforcing women’s lack of agency within these Utopian societies. In “Woman on the Edge of a Genre: The Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy” M. Keith Booker notes: “despite consistent focus on sexuality in dystopian (and utopian) fiction, the major works of the genre have done little to challenge conventional notions of gender roles […] [and] have been typically places where men are men and women are women…”(337).  It is for this  reason that writers, chiefly of the 1960’s and earlier 1970’s, started writing feminist utopias, sometimes known alternately as critical utopias, to redress the imbalance.  These utopian spaces emerge in their respective narratives as liminal spaces to challenge or redefine ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ roles of women within utopian fiction.

Bodies That Matter

Judith Butler states in Bodies that Matter “Literary narrative [is] a place where theory takes place” (182). This idea is again applicable to Feminist Utopian Fiction.  Feminist Utopian literature was used as a proving ground for social theories that were not yet within the realm of actual possibility for women such as Russ and Piercy as they were writing in a time of social and political unrest in the 1970’s.  Feminist Utopian narratives therefore are spaces as Butler notes where ‘theory takes place’ or is in the process of being examined and unpacked by the authors of these narratives. These writings perform important work through the interrogation of cultural order within the space of utopian fiction.   Feminist Utopian authors create worlds within their narratives to demonstrate future possibilities for women to gain agency that are not defined by their biological sex. This is what is missing for women writers within the traditional dystopian fiction format that was evident within Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), a dystopian society were women are reduced to breeders for a race. Burdekin’s work was only able to articulate the dangers of male supremacy through the reduction of women within the narrative, but, within the confines of her dystopic world she was unable to resolve or locate hope for the women of Swastika Night within the traditional format of dystopian fiction. This is the ‘x’ factor of gender and sexuality that can be redeployed through the queering of the roles of gender and sexuality within critical or feminist utopian narratives.  With Feminist Utopian fiction Russ and Piercy demonstrate how gender and sexuality can be redefined within the queer space of feminist utopian literature, thereby creating theoretical models for how gender and sexuality are

The Judith Butler Reader

performances that can be denaturalized.  Sarah Salih writes in The Judith Butler Reader:

Butler has collapsed the sex/gender distinction in order to argue that there is no sex that is not always already gender.  All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence (and there is no existence that is not social), which means that there is not a “natural body” that pre-exists its cultural inscription.  This seems to point towards the conclusion that gender is not something one is, it is something one does, an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, “doing” rather than a being (55).

Marge Piercy

Butler’s collapse of the sex/gender distinction in her theory of performativity articulately describes the collapse created in Russ and Piercy’s narratives in which sex and gender are acts of doing, and the ‘natural’ roles of sex and gender in each narrative are redefined by the distinction of these collapsed orders.  In creating these distinctions, feminist utopian writers such as Russ and Piercy demonstrate that language can define sex and gender within the liminal space of the utopian narrative, proving that Feminist Utopias are a literary space in which critical theory not only takes place but is foundational to the emancipation of women [en] chained.

Joanna Russ "When it Changed"

How to Supress Women's Writing: By Joanna Russ

SF and Utopian fiction have its traditions deeply rooted in the patriarchal and heteronormative constructs, it is a literary space that M. Keith Booker notes: where ‘men are men and women are women’, as these narratives have default sex and gender roles. Through the space of the Feminist Utopia, Russ is able to rail against these predominant patriarchal, heteronormative constructs that have dominated this form of literature, and that have also shaped Russ’s contemporary society.

Joanna Russ uses the mode of feminist utopian fiction to resignify sex and gender outside of the heteronormative and patriarchal constructs.  As Russ states ‘almost all of the characterlogical sex differences we take for granted are in fact learned and not innate’ (Russ).  Russ writes “When it Changed” in 1972 and creates a working model of social theory within her feminist utopian narrative.  This is the type of writing that in 1993 Butler acknowledges in: Bodies that Matter, that authors such as Russ made critical contributions to the work in gender studies through the creation of these literary worlds, as she states literary narrative ‘is [a] place where theory takes place’. 

Woman on the Edge of Time

Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is a Feminist Utopia that provides two main narrative structures within the novel, one that highlights contemporary New York in 1977, a society that exists as a racist, sexist, patriarchal, capitalist structure.  At the the same time Piercy advances another world through her protagonist’s time travel to Mattapoisett which reflects an ideal utopian society.  Mattapoisett is an egalitarian society where sex and gender are re-signified, in a cultural construction in which no individual is ‘othered’.  

 Russ and Piercy’s Feminist Utopias demonstrate the efficacy of the critical utopia to create liminal places and spaces for feminist writers to locate agency and hope.  Sex and gender are as Butler’s theory notes culturally inscribed performances to which authors such as Russ and Piercy use the queer space of the Feminist Utopia in the 1970’s as a proving ground for the social models of feminism, gender and queer studies that had yet to be located in contemporary society and were only still in the realm of possibility within the space of these literary worlds.  The Feminist Utopia is a literary space in which critical theory not only takes place but is foundational to the emancipation of women [en] chained.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Booker, Keith, M. “Woman on the Edge of a Genre: The Feminist Dystopias of Marge Piercy.”  SF-TH Inc. Science Fiction Studies, 21:3 (Nov., 1993): 337-350. Jstor. Web. 31/01/2011.

Burdekin, Katherine.  Swastika Night. New York, New York: The Feminist Press, 1985.

Butler, Judith.  Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Ibid. edited by Sara Salih The Judith Butler Reader Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.

Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time.  New York: Fawcett Books: Random House, 1976.

Russ, Joanna.  “When it Changed”. Web: http://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/russ/russ1.html

V for Vendetta: The Graphic Novel’s use of Words and Images

Allan Moore and David Lloyd's V For Vendetta

Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta creates through the graphic novel form a sense of the near future, yet with haunting images of the past, positioning the reader into a sense of ‘mingled exoticism and familiarity’ (Moore, 270) while blurring the lines of the real to create a surreal setting.  Realism is a mode of writing that functions to create a “reality”.  The graphic novel dramatizes the limits of realism by breaking the “rules” or “poetics” of realism through its multi-modal structure of the graphic form. According to Abrams Glossary Literary Terms realism: “is an elastic and ambiguous term in writing to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact way […] In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events”.   

V For Vendetta Graphic Image

For this reason, Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel V for Vendetta departs from the “rules” and “poetics” of realism as it takes the reader from the real into the surreal through the multiple levels of modality that are presented to the reader through this graphic mode of narrative.  The graphic novel is a narrative that is driven not only through the text of the novel written in each of the panels, but also through the visual acuity that the reader must perform in interpreting the use of colour and shadows to assimilate what is being viewed in each frame, as these visual layers add to how we interpret and read through image, as well they create a psychological dimension to the narrative.

As a graphic narrative, V for Vendetta creates a liminal space to demonstrate the potential locus for humankind’s destruction through fascism, and then locates hope for the future through anarchy; in doing so, this narrative takes the reader from the real into the realm of the surreal. The format of the graphic novel adds layers of inter-textual meanings through the written and visual medium. 

Graphic Panels from V For Vendetta

Each panel in V for Vendetta narrates as the reader must decode the meaning through their visual acuity.  The panels are differentiated through the use of dark and light and bright and muted colours to bring together both image and text.  The fluid use of these narrative forms are at times observed singularly, as some panels only narrate image.  How each frame is constructed impacts, directs, and situates the narrative to the reader.  The use of the visual image and words in V for Vendetta reveals how the graphic narrative is multi-textual form of the novel that blurs the lines of the real as this narrative form exposes its fictional devices and lays bare the “poetics” of illusion which are produced by the graphic novel with the clashing of images with words.

As Roland Barthes articulates the contemporary writer is someone who strives for authentic writing, while knowing that all forms, all modes of writing will eventually be assimilated by and into Literature (24, Barthes/Allen).  This is precisely what the graphic novel offers to its reader as it articulates progress within thought, but also in the world as its literary form is the literal clash of the long prose narrative that was novel with that of the graphic image.  The result is this new third term known as the graphic novel, the synthesis of both the image and the written word, therefore the graphic novel is a dialectic mode of writing in which to counter and present literature.

V

Allen Moore and David Lloyd’s collaboration in V for Vendetta creates a novel that exposes two forms of narrative with graphic images and fiction.  The graphic novel form not only challenges the “poetics” of realism through the use of image and text, but it also reveals how the graphic narrative operates as a multi-textual form of the novel.  This narrative form exposes its fictional devices and lays bare the “poetics” of illusion which are produced by the graphic novel with the clashing of images with words.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Abrams, M.H. Glossary of Literary Terms. 9^th ed. Boston: Wadsworth Learning, 2009.

Barthes, Rolland and Allen, Graham. Routledge Critical Thinkers Series. London: Routledge Publishing, 2004.

Moore, Alan and David Lloyd.  V for Vendetta. New York: DC Comics, 2005.

Queer Theory in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

 

Giovanni's Room

In Giovanni’s Room James Baldwin uses the space of the novel as a place to enact Queer Theory, Judith Butler states in Bodies that Matter “Literary narrative [is] a place where theory takes place” (182).  Baldwin reveals how literature is the perfect conduit to explore the ins and outs of human sexuality by demonstrating the impact it has on identity within the symbolic order. Baldwin presents the struggles of the homosexual within the heteronormative construct and how disembodying these experiences can be. Judith Halberstam writes in “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”: “the idea that the body centred identity creates a model that locates sexual subjectivities within and between embodiment, place and practice” (5).

 Baldwin takes these ideas of embodiment, place and practice of homosexuality that Halberstam is writing into theory in 2005, and creates social theory through literature in

James Baldwin

1956.  Baldwin sets the scene of future social theory in his narrative about the body being inscribed into the heterosexual practices and maps it out with his character David, in Giovanni’s Room. This narrative evokes the issues of a man struggling with his own sexual identity within the heteronormative construct. Giovanni’s Room is the physical space in which Baldwin depicts the struggles of homosexuality and how homosexuality operates in and out of the heteronormative construct.  When Michael Warner coined the term ‘heteronormativity’ in 1991, he created a term in which to define how heterosexuality operates as a seamless performance within our society. Heteronormative culture according to Warner is one that privileges male over female, and where the male is the subject and the woman, is the object.  In the introduction to Judith Butler’s: Variation on Sex and Gender, it states: “One way of overcoming the Cartesian mind/body dualism is to argue that sex is already gender, since the body/mind split no longer makes sense if you claim, as both Butler and Beauvoir do, that gender is a way of ‘doing’ the body.”  As Butler notes: “we can only know sex through gender, and although we ‘become’ our genders, there is no place outside this gender that precedes this becoming.” (21)  For David there is no place outside of his gender or the heteronormative construct that precedes his becoming.  David can only locate his identity within his male hetero image, yet that image creates his dichotomy, he wants to hold the position of subject, the hetero male, but he enjoys having sex with men. To not occupy the subject position for David is something he cannot accept, within the room and in the bed of his male lovers, David for a time can relinquish his power to another man, but, this is a temporal space that is short lived as David can perform homosexual sex in the bed, but he cannot perform as a homosexual man outside of the bedroom.  This does not fit the performance that David wishes to project out in the world: that of the hetero male, and for this reason he cannot maintain the relationships with men outside of the bedroom.  This is why the bed and the room that contains these acts are very symbolic to the novel.

Giovanni's Room Penguin Edition

David cannot accept being outwardly homosexual in the public sphere as Baldwin demonstrates within the narrative; David finds it an impossible task to identify as a homosexual male because in doing so he relinquishes his male ‘hetero’ identity which is the identity or signifier of power and privilege. In The Rectum as a Grave? Leo Bersani writes about romantic taboo of taking the passive role in sex.  Bersani uses Foucault’s example of ancient Athenian sexual politics: “… the honourable sexual behaviour consists in being active in dominating and penetrating, and in thereby exercising one’s authority… in other words the moral taboo on ‘passive’ anal sex in ancient Athens is primarily formulated as a kind of hygienics of social power to be penetrated is to abdicate power” (Bersani, 19).  Bersani notes that in an interview, Foucault openly praised sado-masochistic practices as they help to alleviate men from feeling that the passive role in homosexual sex is demeaning (19).  This position of the penetrated and the powerless are the social theories of homosexuality that Baldwin is writing about in Giovanni’s Room.   David sees his manhood as being penetrated and powerless in his sexual experiences with both Joey and Giovanni as he is unable to signify himself into the subject position. These relationships remove David from the privilege of the heteronormative construct as he tells Giovanni after his failed attempt at domestication: “You want me to stay here and wash the dishes and cook the food and clean this miserable closet for a room and kiss you when you come through that door and lie with you at night and be your little girl” (142).  David cannot signify his power as a ‘man’ from this position, he therefore rejects Giovanni to regain control within the ‘het’ culture, one that includes a wife and children in order signify his manhood.

 David loses his sense of manhood and needs to re-enter the heteronormative construct: “I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea.  Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning […] Beneath the joy, of course was anguish […] by then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing our balance, dignity and pride” (Baldwin, 72). David sees the equilibrium of his manhood coming undone in his sexual experience with Giovanni as he is unable to signify himself into the subject position.

James Baldwin reveal his poetic talent as a writer in Giovanni’s room but also his power to use literature in 1956 to create a space in which to unpack the larger issues of identity for homosexuals within the heteronormative construct.  Within the narrative Baldwin reveals the ideas that are later theorized into the academy.  As Judith Butler eloquently confirms in Bodies that Matter that: “Literary narrative [is] a place where theory takes place” (182). Baldwin writes Queer Theory into being 1956 with Giovanni’s Room as a social theorist and political activist well ahead of his time.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Random House, 1956.

Bersani, Leo.  Is the Rectum a Grave?  Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 2010.

Butler, Judith.  Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Ibid. “Variations on Sex and Gender. Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault (1987)” The Judith Butler Reader. Ed.Sarah Salih. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Halberstam, Judith.  In a Queer Time and Place: Trasgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.  New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Warner, Michael. Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory.  Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

The Cultural Ideology of Slavery In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The National Era published Uncle Tom's Cabin in a series

First Draft of Uncle Tom's Cabin

 

“I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.” Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first abolitionist novel to criticize the institution of slavery and was the best-selling novel of the 19^th century.  It is classed as a sentimental novel as it depicts the reality of slavery while suggesting that Christian faith and love can help overcome the institution of slavery. Shirley Samuels, states in her introduction to Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America that in nineteenth-century America sentimentality appears not so much a genre as an operation or a set of actions within discursive models of affect and identification that effect connections across gender, race, and class boundaries. The sentimental complex also situates the reader or viewer: that is, the act of emotional response the work evokes also produces the sentimental subject who consumes the work. This production crucially involves a movement of sympathy, in all its anxious appeals, across race, class, and gender lines. (Samuels, 6)

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been considered an agent of social change as the book’s  impact was attributed to Abraham Lincoln famous quote “So this is the little lady who started this ‘great war’ (the civil war).”  On this historical account, Stowe’s novel can be attributed to the idea that literature is a place where social theory takes place, however it is also a novel that has popularized negative stereotypes of the black identity.  James Baldwin wrote that Uncle Tom’s Cabin perpetuated the black identity as ‘other’ as the novel enforces the ideology of whiteness and blackness through the subject/object or master/slave positions.  Baldwin wrote in his book Native Son that structuring of the black character as ‘other’ only serves to perpetuate the negative ideology of black people and continues antislavery or antiracist discourse:

 It is the peculiar triumph of society – and its loss- that it is able to convince those people of whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree; it has the force and the weapons to translated its dictum into fact, so that the allegedly inferior are actually made so, in so far as the societal realities are concerned (Baldwin 1984, 20).

 Uncle Tom’s Cabin as sentimental fiction produced as Shirley Samuels notes: “ the culture of sentiment that mobilizes both a rhetorical configuration of emotional excess and a problem of the body and what it embodies: its gendered, racialized, or national affiliation, and what, following Pierre Bourdieu, might be called the position or disposition of the sentimental subject, the “habitus” of sentimentality.” (Samuels, 6) The logic of sentiment, and its cultural work, is interesting as Beecher Stowe’s novel seems on the surface to have been a positive step for slavery, yet the cultural work produced by its popularity reinforces the inferior status that James Baldwin also addressing.  

Gayle Wald wrote in Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture Sentimentality:What might be called the aesthetics of sentiment appear in advice books, statues, photographs, pamphlets, lyric poems, fashion advertisements, and novels, this last the category most frequently examined for its signs and registers (9). These are the signs and registers of the material culture produced by  Uncle Tom’s Cabin that have held a legacy of placing the black identity as ‘other’ despite the books intentions to emancipate slavery, its success in popular culture has held the black identity in chains with the negative images and sterotypes produced.

 Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s success produced the manufacture of cultural commodities, these objects of material culture  are used to position race and enforce the message of whiteness and blackness by reinforcing the ideology of black as ‘other’.   As Toni Morrison suggests in Playing in the Dark:

The Africanist character as surrogate and enabler has been at the heart of American literature’s development – including, and perhaps especially, that literature written by whites – then surely Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been a prime example of the process through which white writers have used black characters so that “the American [white] self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution but a progressive fulfillment of destiny (Morrison,52).

Morrison is addressing the power of these literary characters and the images produced by them. In this Critical Approaches class we learned how the tools of visual rhetoric have the power to reinforce an ideology and ‘encode the identities of real people’ (Humphreys).  These images continually reinforce the master/ slave dynamic to interpellate the black image back into the era of slavery.  If Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an abolitionist tool to incite emancipation, the material culture produced by the novel’s success had the opposite impact as it keeps the black identity interpolated into slavery.

Mass-market objects are another language to encode and decode – they are visual images that represents signs – in a system in which we can place value on one another. These are the social norms that are realized in the day to day workings – the commodity culture of ‘things’ perform cultural work.

Here are some advertisements that have performed this interpolation of the black identity.

"Topsy Tobacco"

"Uncle Tom's Health Food"

"Uncle Tom's Cabin Smoking Tobacco"

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

James Baldwin speaks about the black identity ‘being formed in a certain crucible’and the social injustice that still represses the black identity in America.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Baldwin, James.  Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press, Boston: 1955; reprint, 1984.

Humphreys, Sara.  Critical Approaches to Literature: Objects and Subjects: Lecture Notes. 2011.

Morrison, Toni.  Playing in the dark : whiteness and the literary imagination / Toni Morrison. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass:1992. Digital

Samuels, Shirley. Culture of Sentiment : Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America.Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press, USA, 1992.

Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Line : Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture.Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2000.

 http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/tomituds/toadsf.html

Literature Is A Liminal Space For Theory to Take Place…

Judith Butler wrote in Bodies that Matter that: “Literary narrative [is] a place where theory takes place” (182).  Butler’s writing has inspired this idea for exploration in my blog.  When we analyze narratives in our study of literature it seems there are always critical theories to apply to our analysis.  This may be because the literary narrative is an ideal space and place to redress the body politic of our cultural ideologies as narratives can work to shed light on the ruptures in the social fabric or serve as a tool to subordinate or reinforce them. 

James Loxely writes in Performativity: “Our identities are not given by nature or simply represented or expressed in culture: instead culture is the process of identity formation […] So culture is a process, a kind of making, and we are what is made and remade through that process” (118). 

Literature is an integral part of our cultural identity.   Literary narratives play a very persuasive role within our material culture, as their impact is often a vehicle for social change, this I believe is what Butler means by the narrative being a place where theory takes place.  In the first three books that I wish to evaluate for their cultural and theoretical importance will be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as well I will investige the multi-modality of the graphic novel in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta as a literary form. 

 These literary spaces work well for the exploration of issues of race, class, sex and gender as a place to promote social agency and also as a space that can reinforce stereotypes that enchain us to these binding social ideologies of the present and of the past. 

 In unpacking different literary forms I hope to uncover how narrative functions as a social tool to redefine or even subordinate an individual’s identity.  I will focus on how literary narratives work to stabilize and destabilize cultural ideologies, and in turn have an impact on us as social beings.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Loxley, James. Performativity.Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2007.http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ocultrent/Doc?id=10152387&ppg=128

Butler, Judith.  Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993.