Semicolon Spring 2020

An Arts and Humanities Student’s Council Publication...

Volume 7

Issue 2

Spring 2020

Copyrights remain with the artists and authors. The responsibility for the content in this publication remains with the artists and authors. The content does not reflect the opinions of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council (AHSC) or the University Students’ Council (USC). The AHSC and the USC assume no liability for any errors, inaccuracies, or omissions contained in this publication.

Cover Art by: Dhvani Mehta

Letter from the Editor...

As I am reaching the end of my term as Editor-in-Chief, and the end of my time at university, the theme of Transformation feels more and more relevant to my life. Walking through the university buildings, still and silent now that classes have been cancelled and most are self-quarantining in their homes, feels like the most shocking transformation of all. It’s a strange time and a stranger place to be writing my final editor’s letter, but also one that makes it increasingly clear how valuable all the work put into these Spring 2020 editions of Semicolon and Symposium, by both our talented contributors and our amazing pubs team, has been.

The works in these publications represent some of the best writing and thinking on our campus, and it has been a privilege to be involved in any capacity. In a time of deep uncertainty, it is heartening to see the creativity, the generosity, and the care with which our faculty has taken on the work of looking critically at our world and imagining new paths forward. I witness us doing this work. I see the writers, artists, and activists of our faculty taking the best of what we are learning and creating in class and taking it out into the world around us. I see us take up that work. I see us take it up tentatively, excitedly, with exhaustion, in tension, in the shadow of personal and historical trauma, with grace, with shame, with guilt, with anger. I see you take it up.

Thank you to the Publications Team for their tireless work this semester, and to the greater AHSC for their support through this process. And thank you, reader, for picking up this publication and allowing it into your world.

Best, Roshana Ghaedi Editor-in-Chief

What we’re about...

Semicolon is the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council’s bi-annual journal of peer-reviewed

academic writing. Semicolon aims to showcase the best writing and thinking by students at Western University. We are looking for the productive, for the considered for the critical analysis of our world and the stories we tell ourselves about it.

Semicolon is published bi-annually by the arts and Humanities Students’ Council of the

University of Western Ontario. Semicolon is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Student Donation Fund. The Publications Team would like to thank the Donations Fund Committee, the students who submitted their creative works, and the rest of the Publications Committee who volunteered for the creative review board.

To view previous editions or for more information about Semicolon, please contact the Arts

and Humanities Students’ Council in Room in University Collage room 2135.

Special thanks to the Publications Committee...

Editor-in-Chief: Rose Ghaedi Academic Managing Editor: Courtney WZ Creative Managing Editor: James Gagnon Copy Editor: Neha Khoral Layout Editor: Jess Attard General Members: Amelia Eqbal, Denise Zhu, Francesca DeNoble, Lela Burt, Mia Sutton

Mr. Wonka’s Slave Factory

By Taylor Seifert Congratulations, you have found the golden ticket into Mr. Willy Wonka’s slave factory.

Mr. Wonka, in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, uses the Oompa-Loompas he finds from Loompaland as slaves to operate his famous business. While Willy Wonka presents an intriguing factory of creation and delight, he actually promotes a violence within his factory toward the unwilling servants. Waving the golden tickets allow the children to experience the horrors within the factory. Willy Wonka colonizes the Oompa-Loompas, and then forces them to live a violent life in slavery. The violence demonstrated in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is evident in how he treats individuals as slaves, or as second-class peoples. There are parallels to the slave trade because he owns them, imports them, and they are considered to be sub-human. In addition, there are tones of racism throughout, drawing parallels towards slavery in the setting and treatment of the Oompa-Loompas. Once inside the deceivingly dreamy factory, readers are exposed to the realities of the hardships the workers entail. Among the rooms of chocolate production and evaluation, strict punishments are delivered within the structure of the factory. In addition, Mr. Wonka treats his workers as persons foreign to him, justifying their maltreatment. It is easy to imagine the factory as inventive and sweet; however, it is important to read beyond the gluttony, and behold the terror and violent treatment that the Oompa-Loompas encounter by their master, Mr. Wonka.

Mr. Wonka’s chocolate factory is a facility where chocolate is made by captive OompaLoompas. It is an isolated building within a town, gated with strict security measures. The gates also keep the wider society from finding the secrets of the horrid slave labour. While entering the factory, one hears the “loud creaking of rusty hinges, the great iron gates” (Dahl 56-57). Mr. Wonka has durable walls to keep others out, comparable to prison walls. The Oompa-Loompas are slaves, and an allegory for colonialism. It is noted the Oompa-Loompas were found by Mr. Wonka in their home, and taken to work in his factory. This literary work parallels the historical example of slaves taken from their homes to work for privileged, Western people. In addition, the Oompa-Loompas are accustomed to a warmer climate, which is why the factory needs to be kept at a high temperature.

Mr. Wonka states; “I have to keep it warm inside the factory because of the workers. My workers are used to an extremely hot climate” (60). This can be similar to the warmer climate of Africa. Africa is known for the cocoa bean, a connection to the Oompa-Loompas, who love to indulge in chocolate as it is a reminder of their home, where they were withdrawn from. It is also a racist assumption that his workers prefer the climate in which they came from, as if he is providing them a favour by maintaining it. Mr. Wonka violently removed his workers from their homes, and uses violent language describing his experience, claiming that they are “imported direct[ly] form Loompaland;” he treats his captees as less than human (68). He believes the Oompa-Loompas can be imported, like food or commodities are imported, therefore rendering his workers as equal value to objects; this is reflected in his treatment of them.

Within the establishment, Willy Wonka motivates the Ooompa-Loompas working for him with subtle hints of torture. The torturous tools are disguised in the excitement of the discovery of chocolate. Different rooms in the chocolate factory are used to torture the Oompa-Loompas; for example, the whipping room, with a sign claiming; “Whips-All shapes and sizes” (86). While the whipping room could be disguised as a room for whipped cream, it clearly states there are different sizes of whips, which can be used on slaves of all sizes. Mr. Wonka has the desire to keep the factory a secret from the outside world; therefore, he disguises slavery and designated rooms in his factory, so that at first reading, one would not necessarily believe that such a man could possess such cruelty as to have a room designated to whip his workers. In addition to the whipping room, there are reports of metal sounds coming from other rooms: a “strange clanking noise” (104). This noise could be perceived as another torture device used by Mr. Wonka. Also, the Oompa-Loompas are forced to have ropes tied on them. Charlie sees “Oompa-Loompas… all roped together” (122). These ropes are symbolic of their constraint and lack of freedom. The ropes keep them in the factory and bound to their work.

With physical constraints and abuse, the Oompa-Loompas must also endure mental and verbal abuse from Mr. Wonka. He uses the Oompa-Loompas for their knowledge in chocolate to further his agenda of economic gain. He makes them serve not only the chocolate production, but also his every

wish at the snap of his finger. Willy Wonka “clicked his fingers sharply… immediately an OompaLoompa appeared” (76). Mr. Wonka insults the workers, and clearly demonstrates to the children that they will do whatever he wishes. This displays his control over them. While the children make mistakes, Willy Wonka sends the Oompa-Loompas to fix his negligence. He uses insults such as “‘go and boil your head’,” creating a hostile and violent environment (107). While his insult was not directed at the Oompa-Loompas, it still demonstrates that Mr. Wonka thinks it is acceptable to speak to another, whether it is an equal being or someone he deems as lesser, in such a manner. He compels the Oompa-Loompas to sit and do work all of the time; while he gets to tour around with his guests, they are forced to watch while “a number of Oompa-Loompas were busily painting more faces on more candies” (107). However, it is noted that the faces are all pink, all the same from a privileged culture. At the end of the novel, Willy Wonka gifts the factory to Charlie because the Oompa-Loompas cannot run the factory. “Someone’s got to keep it going-if only for the sake of the Oompa-Loompas” (151). Although they are capable of creating chocolate, and are the backbone of the company, the owner must be someone who is similar to Willy Wonka, and not an Other. The OompaLoompas require someone to rule over them, as they are deemed incapable.

Willy Wonka forces the Oompa-Loompas to be subject to his will, and to change themselves in order to please him. He forces them to change into his lifestyle to better suit him. Wonka even makes them change language, boasting about how “They all speak English now” (71). It is as if there is a complete disregard for the fact that they already had their own culture. This racist behaviour assumes that the Oompa-Loompa language, and non-pink skin, are lesser than Wonka’s. Willy Wonka makes the Oompa-Loompas subject to his testing as well. He creates a violent setting and mindset as he tests on his slaves. He does not treat them as equals, but as test subjects. They are not allowed admittance into the tasting room, but are subject to strict confined areas. “Not even an Oompa-Loompa, has ever been allowed in here” (87-88). They must not be allowed into the room because it is where they go to be punished. Later Mr. Wonka “[dipped] a finger into a barrel of sticky yellow stuff… then he peered anxiously through the glass door of a gigantic oven, rubbing his hands and cackling in delight” (88). This is a parallel to Nazi Germany, the torture of Jewish peoples in concentration camps; being burned and gassed. Also, yellow has significant meaning for the Oompa-Loompas as they are from

elsewhere, and do not have the same ethnicity as Mr. Wonka. Therefore, it is not hard to believe Mr. Wonka tests on his Oompa-Loompas, and his dangerous, delectable inventions. Willy Wonka openly admits to testing on his workers, and does not believe there is an ethical issue. He boasts about having already “tried [toffees] on an Oompa-Loompa yesterday in the Testing Room;” however it ends badly as each Oompa-Loompa grows a beard (90-91). While this may be treated with a light heart, it is still a deformity being added to the bodies of the Oompa-Loompas. Even more severely, Mr. Wonka “gave some to an old Oompa-Loompa once out in the back yard and he went up and up and up and disappeared out of sight” (106). Therefore, there is a considerable lack of rights for the workers.

They are being tested on without regard for their physical health and safety, and this could also lead to their downfall and even death. The worker who disappeared was alienated from his other species in Loompaland when Mr. Wonka forced them to come work for him, and then again, he is being discarded from the factory where all of his other companions are. He is not being set out for freedom, as he is victim of a fatally destructive experiment by Mr. Wonka. In addition, Mr. Wonka justifies the harm that his inventions cause the children by reassuring that the symptoms were already known.

After the child, Violet gets transformed into a giant blueberry, he says, “[it] always happens like that… I’ve tried it twenty times in the testing room on twenty Oompa- Loompas” (98). Mr. Wonka is previously aware that his product has negative consequences, yet he allows the Oompa-Loompas to continue testing on his inventions when he knows the risk. One Oompa-Loompa’s life is not enough, he needs twenty plus to continue to validate his supposed genius mind, regardless of the impact on his helpless victims.

In conclusion, Mr. Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl, creates a violent atmosphere in his chocolate factory. Mr. Wonka colonizes and captures the Oompa-Loompas to be his servants and slaves. He uses the Oompa-Loompas at his disposal to become a more famous chocolatier. He constructs the walls of his chocolate factory to keep the Oompa-Loompas from leaving and creates a hostile environment from within them. In addition, he treats the OompaLoompas as his captors and makes them subject to his will. While Mr. Wonka may need a child to take over his beloved chocolate factory to keep business flourishing, he is actually grooming a young person’s mind to believe that using the Oompa-Loompas for their labour, despite their well-being,

is acceptable. But it is a chocolate factory run by slaves, who have been taken from their habitat to be forced to work for a conceited and ruthless businessman. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory holds horrors beyond imagination suffered by the Oompa-Loompas, in order to manufacture the delightful taste of chocolate. Violence is not justifiable, even if it is used by heroes. Mr. Wonka is the candy man, running a chocolate factory and producing delicious delights for all, but not necessarily enjoyed by the workers. His actions do not become morally justifiable just because, after all, everyone loves chocolate.

References Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Puffin Books, 1964.

Eyes Are the Window to the Zeitgeist: How Mabuse, der Spieler Reflects the Interwar Period through Ambiguity

By Jenny Yang

In a time of sociopolitical strife, the 1922 release of Fritz Lang’s Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), seems to not only reflect the history of what came before it, but even predict what will come after. With Germany just emerging from the First World War, yet already leaning toward the Second, Mabuse’s story seems to be a proto-film noir that contains remnants of German Expressionism. Both genres carry postwar pessimism, and the former is inspired by the latter. Mabuse is a renowned yet unknowable criminal, one that the audience comes to identify with through his point of view. It is in this way that the film showcases the hypocrisy of the era, in both spurning and embracing outcasts. The cast of characters in Mabuse offers a snapshot of peoples, events, and attitudes of the time, but sometimes the representations contrast one another. For instance, Mabuse carries both stereotypically negative Jewish traits, and also the manipulative power of Hitler, all features that complicate Mabuse’s themes, while allowing it to explore a world of both postwar and prewar moral ambiguities.

From the very beginning, Mabuse’s enigmatic persona is established, and the ability to pin an identity on him is later further confused when he dons various disguises. As a film of four hours, it is divided into two parts, both titled very appropriately as “A Picture of the Time,” and “Inferno: A Game for the People of Our Age.” It opens with Mabuse’s hands as he gathers literal pictures of himself in disguises. It then dissolves into a medium shot of him shuffling the photos like a deck of playing cards or “cartes de visites, hand-sized… theatrical portraits of… performers,” which is what Mabuse is, as the title of the film, Spieler, holds the double meaning of both “gambler” and “actor” (Gunning 99). His manipulation of these portraits highlights how his crimes are like a game to him, and how he lacks a solid identity. As State Prosecutor von Wenk and Mabuse’s mistress Cara Carozza note, Mabuse looms over the city, but is untouchable. The dissolve into his disguises confuses his identity, giving him a ghostly quality that appears more later in the film. Siegfried Kracauer divided films of 1920-1924 as falling under the world, being ruled by either tyrants or chaotic instincts, and Mabuse—while classified as the former—arguably carries traits of both (77). His resemblance to

Hitler, and his domineering nature, does suggest tyrannical rule, but he is also promoting the abject moral depravity that Nazis believed the Weimar Republic was so subject to. Like to those loyal to him, Mabuse is not easily categorized, even in connection to one of history’s most notorious dictators.

The competence of Mabuse as a criminal mastermind is seen through his first scheme and its success, the resulting chaos of which would have been all too familiar to Germans watching at the time. He first steals very important documents on business between Holland and Switzerland, showcasing how, like Hitler, his focus may be on Germany, but his actions carry international influence. The discord his crime causes is also highly relevant, showing “the beginnings of the Weimar Republic and the burdens it was compelled to bear from the start—the Versailles peace, reparations, the catastrophic inflation” (Palmer et al. 828). Mabuse stands still in a swarming mass, watching as the stock falls before he buys. He then sells after the documents are found and prices rise, now standing above the chaos. He is a puppet master, controlling events and people, like Hitler.

But for a 1920s audience, his cunning and monetary shrewdness would perhaps remind them of the negative stereotypes associated with Jews. The ability to mirror such events, such as the assassination of Germany’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Walther Rathenau, which occurred on June 24, 1922, who was in fact Jewish, are part of why film reviewers call Mabuse a premonition and archive of the time (McGilligan 86).

The power of Mabuse also stretches beyond what is real, taking on the mythic quality that Hitler carried before the German people, but also in a way reflecting the fearful beliefs of Jews being capable of practicing black magic. As mentioned before, Mabuse as a ghostly figure is a recurring image. Two examples include his face overlaid on the stock market after it closes, and when he attempts to hypnotize Wenk at the Palais Andalusia, where his disembodied head “float[s] uncannily in a black void,” and his gaze “bear[s] down… with a hypnotic willpower” (Gunning 109). That entire confrontation takes on a rather Expressionist quality, where Mabuse’s powers of hypnosis are on display to a magical degree. The focus on the power of his vision emphasizes the “hypnotic production of visual, filmlike hallucinations; and medical theories of hypnotism, formulated contemporaneous to the emergence of cinema, lend[ing] themselves to a reading as an implicit

conceptualization of film” (Andriopoulos 25). After Mabuse shows off some sparkling Chinese glasses from Tsi-Nan-Fu during a game of cards, emphasizing vision, the words haunt Wenk, with their unfamiliarity appearing like magic words. Such a fear and even excitement over the unknown and the “bad” was prevalent at the time, with Jews being a main target in Germany. And yet, the hypnotic ability of Mabuse also represents Hitler, whose passionate speeches and writings would enrapture German citizens. Hitler was “transformed by the circumstances attending the Depression in Germany into a figure of Napoleonic proportions,” but he himself was an outsider from Austria, despite his desire for a pure Aryan race (Palmer et al. 828). Like the real world, the world in Mabuse is also quite complicated.

Given the ambiguity of Mabuse himself, the film’s other characters, and even its own placement in genre, is hard to pinpoint, perhaps as a result of its creation in a period between two major World Wars. When meeting Count Told, Mabuse is asked about Expressionism. He scoffs, “Expressionism is just a game…but why not? Everything is just a game today!” Lang may be revealing his own opinion of the artistic movement as overdone, as it had been growing since 1910, and exploded after the First World War, but it is still seen in Mabuse’s interior set designs in decor and lighting, along with Cubism (Ott 101). One thing that carries over is Mabuse’s use of hypnosis, which is seen in older films like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene, 1920), showing how history repeats itself with events being a chain reaction, such as the consequences of the First World War leading to the Second. Mabuse condemning his henchman, Spoerri, for using cocaine even makes him more morally acceptable to be the compelling protagonist, especially since Wenk lacks the edge of future, hard-boiled detectives in films noir to be interesting.

The ability to root for Mabuse may be a reflection of the cultural pessimism in Germany after the First World War where the theories of “human aggression—what Freud began to call the death instinct— [prevailed and] could never be completely tamed” (Palmer et al. 723). Everything in Mabuse has another side to it—disguise is key. Not only does the title character partake in it, Wenk and the gambling dens do as well. The women of the film, Carozza and the Countess Dusy Told, also pretend to be someone they are not to manipulate a situation for the men they work with. It is in this way that Mabuse is a kind of proto-film noir, but without pre-existing tropes to follow, it can truly explore its

characters.

With how Mabuse is in between various genres, movements, and character types, it portrays women in a manner that is both, at once, progressive and regressive. One interesting character is Countess Told, a respectable woman who would at first glance be the good girl of any noir. But she actually frequents gambling dens, even as she does not participate in the gambling itself, telling Wenk she needs entertainment for her “weary blood.” Carozza, lovesick and loyal to Mabuse, is ordered by him to seduce Edgar Hull, the rich man he targets for the first part of the film. But unlike selfish femmes fatale incapable of love, Carozza’s love is so pure it moves Countess Told into refusing to help Wenk any further. Both women are not the most progressive of characters, with Carozza’s identity revolving around Mabuse and Countess Told backing out of the action until Mabuse kidnaps her, but they are layered—arguably even more so than the men. As established, Wenk is not particularly interesting as a hero, and Hull gets killed. Mabuse himself is less of a person and more of a myth, “a document of what happens to the human spirit when it feels abandoned to wander in a desert of eroded values” (Ott 100). This reflects how Hitler tried to minimize his status as a mere human, such as by hiding his relationship with Eva Braun. And like Braun, Carozza ultimately sacrifices herself for Mabuse, even after he abuses her affections. It can also be interpreted that Mabuse dehumanizes himself, creating a monster to be hunted, the way Jews were during the Third Reich. Mabuse tells Countess Told the only interesting thing in the world is to gamble with people and their destinies—but then he falls for her. He tries to hide her away in a round room, where “the circle… becomes a symbol of chaos… [resembling] a whirlpool” and “one may plunge into chaos; one cannot move on in it” (Kracauer 74). As Carozza says, Mabuse dangerously gambles using himself, but having given into one of his more human desires, he sets up his own downfall.

Adding to the constant doubleness shown in Mabuse, while he can use hypnosis, he is actually also a doctor of psychoanalysis, allowing him to manipulate science to make himself seem more credible. This mirrors Hitler’s usage of eugenics to justify the Final Solution. Haunted (quite literally) by when he cheated at cards and lost his wife, Count Told seeks Mabuse’s help without

realizing it was he who was responsible for both, since Mabuse’s status as a doctor makes him appear trustworthy. During a presentation on psychoanalysis, Mabuse performs his powers, mixing science and magic. He refers to it as a “typical mass suggestion similar to that at the basis of the tricks of Indian fakirs,” which again suggests a foreign, unknown mysticism as he creates an illusion of an exotic group in the desert. It resembles a very short film within a film, a mise en abyme, and a callback to the spectacle of the early “cinema of attractions.” It also references German cinema reform groups who feared cinema was capable of mass hypnosis and moral decay, with the lower class being especially susceptible (Andriopoulos 27). Such loss of willpower is seen when Wenk is called up to be in Mabuse’s act, where he once again tries to hypnotize him, this time into suicide via driving his car off the Melior reservoir. “Melior” (Latin for “better”) is superimposed on the screen, another use of exotic words to add eeriness, reminiscent of the words “you must become Caligari” being superimposed on the images in Dr. Caligari. When even this attempt is foiled, Mabuse is finally cornered by Wenk.

As his empire crumbles around him, Mabuse is punished for his crimes, but even then, his legacy lives on in such a fashion that demonstrates how the past influences the future. While his subordinates are shot or arrested around him, Mabuse goes underground, mirroring Hitler’s suicidal retreat into his bunker as the Soviets closed in on Berlin in 1945. He hides in a secret room where his counterfeiters are literally blindly working. They represent how people who perpetuate ideologies may do so blindly, just as they do with Mabuse’s fake bills, and the Germans did with Hitler’s views. Mabuse truly begins to spiral, like the Expressionist chaos of the circular room he trapped the countess in. Now he is trapped. The cowering blind workers “confront him with an image of absolute powerlessness, the inverse of his former glory [as t]hey cannot see, and he cannot fascinate them” (Gunning 114). His own eyes fail him as he envisions his victims, forcing him to play cards, and accusing him of cheating, causing a machine wheel to transform into a monster as he goes insane.

He has been confronted with the fact his kingdom is now worth nothing, like his counterfeit money; the things he commanded, such as vision, machinery, and money, have now turned on him (116). But as the sequel Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933) shows, Mabuse’s keeper in the mental asylum, Dr. Baum, admires Mabuse until he envisions fusing with his ghost,

leading to a whole new cycle of chaos. The sequel is thus even more closely tied to Hitler, as the script “reflect[s] a Germany that writhed—even more than in 1922—in the grip of sociopolitical crisis” (McGilligan 166).

After the First World War, Germany was under international scrutiny, with the focus only intensifying as Hitler rose to power. As the world of German citizens became increasingly turbulent, the art of the era reflected that. Expressionism in cinema, such as in Dr. Caligari, display a reality lacking stability. Writers like Siegfried Kracauer would eventually make connections to the interwar period, referring to films like Mabuse as prophecies of Hitler. While later writers like Andriopoulos could disagree using hindsight, it is still true that Mabuse resembles the climate it was produced in, and its effect is heightened by its historical context (22). Like Mabuse’s eyes, the film is multi-faceted with deep, nuanced characters in a familiar, yet still warped world. Mabuse is many things to many people—his different identities represent the unknowability of his nature—he is a tyrannical ruler, yet he runs a world driven by instincts and chaos; he can manipulate magic and science; he spurns love only to want it elsewhere; he is a force of nature, and yet is still human. He looms over the world, and yet also hides down below, still capable of falling yet with an impact that outlasts even him. Situated in the interwar period, while fascism spread throughout Europe, Mabuse and his eyes offer a peek into the chaos of the 1920s zeitgeist, becoming a part of the evolutionary link between Expressionism and film noir.

Works Cited Andriopoulos, Stefan. “Suggestion, Hypnosis, and Crime: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).” An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, edited by Noah Isenberg, Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 13-32.

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). Directed by Robert Wiene, DeclaBioscop, 1920.

Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. British Film

Institute, 2000.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. New edition ed., Princeton University Press, 2004.

McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Ott, Frederick W. The Films of Fritz Lang. The Citadel Press Secaucus, 1979.

Palmer, R.R., et al. A History of Europe in the Modern World. 11th ed., McGraw-Hill Education, 2014.

Reimagining Indigenous Histories through the Science Fiction Genre

By Faith Clark

Métis writer Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 novel, The Marrow Thieves, is set in a near-future,

dystopian Canadian landscape, where everyone except Indigenous people have lost the ability to dream; Indigenous peoples are hunted for their bone marrow, which contains the dreams that settler Canadians so desperately desire, but which also encompasses the essence that can set Indigenous peoples free. In comparison, Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor’s 2016 short story “I Am … Am I” explores Indigenous communities’ history with settler colonialism through the creation of an Artificial Intelligence program that comes to understand, and question, the treatment of Indigenous peoples throughout history by the ancestors of those settlers who created the AI. Science fiction is a literary genre based on future scientific or technological advances, and major social or environmental changes and, thus, does not appear, at first, to be compatible with Indigenous values and beliefs, such as respect for the land and all of the beings that inhabit it. Yet, both of these texts utilize the science fiction genre as a means of communicating Indigenous stories and histories to settlers in an authentic, but digestible, manner that they will be receptive to.

In the introduction to her book Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, Grace Dillon posits that the science fiction genre “allows authors to recover the Native space of the past, to bring it to the attention of contemporary readers, and to build better futures” (Dillon 4). North American readers of today are obsessed with the dystopian, post-apocalyptic story (think of The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc.); the modern literary world is defined almost entirely by imagining what would happen if the world, as human beings know it, came to an end. Science fiction stories follow an apocalypse wherein the land has been destroyed, and “Native/ Indigenous/Aboriginal sustainable practices constitute a science despite their lack of resemblance to taxonomic western systems of thought” (Dillon 7). Thus, who better to write science fiction than Indigenous peoples who have already lived through an apocalypse of sorts, “the Native Apocalypse” (Dillon 8)? The genre typically revolves around a post-apocalyptic world, where disease and/or foreign attack (both of which Indigenous populations are painfully acquainted with) have decimated

a population that is now working to rebuild their community—sound familiar? In an interview, Drew Hayden Taylor states, “I like the concept of having no boundaries, of being able to create and develop any character, any environment or setting I want” (Taylor in Dillon 1). There is the suggestion, then, that just as the English language has often restricted Indigenous authors’ ability to express Indigenous concepts effectively, the science fiction genre provides ways of articulating Indigenous experiences in ways that other genres of literature cannot. Accordingly, The Marrow Thieves is on the very edge of the science fiction genre, as close to not-science-fiction as one can get within the genre. There is this one small scientific element—that “dreams get caught in the webs woven in [Indigenous peoples’] bones” and are extracted by settler colonialists for their own purposes, but all the other actions that revolve around this supposedly fictitious plot are plausible in the readers’ real world and have been happening to Indigenous peoples for centuries (Dimaline 19). This is just something that they have “survived before” and “will survive again” (Dimaline 33).

In this sense, Indigenous writers’ use of the science fiction genre signals that both settler and Indigenous peoples must look to the future possibilities for their world in order to effectively understand and convey the harms done to Indigenous communities in the past (and present). For settlers who have very little knowledge of Indigenous history, the atrocities done to Indigenous populations (through the residential school system, the reservation system, and the granting or withholding of Indian status, just to name a few) do not seem like they could possibly exist in real life, especially in a ‘good and democratic’ society, such as Canada. Yet, these evils seem more plausible in science fiction, where anything is possible. Science fiction “confronts the structures of racism and colonialism and sf’s own complicity in them” because it forces readers to become self-aware of the implications for how their society utilizes power and technological advances to exclude and abuse ‘Others’ (Dillon 10-11). It is more digestible for settler readers to witness the future possibilities for Indigenous peoples than to hear about the past realities that have been occurring right under their noses for centuries. A pertinent scene to understanding the effectiveness of science fiction in The Marrow Thieves comes when Miig is telling Story:

“Then the wars for the water came. America reached up and started sipping on our lakes with great metal straws. And where were the freshest lakes and the cleanest rivers? On our lands, of course. Anishnaabe were always the canary in the mine for the rest of them. Too bad the country was busy worrying about how we didn’t pay an extra tax on Levi’s jeans and Kit Kat bars to listen to what we were shouting.” (Dimaline 24) This is a world that is familiar to settler readers and, thus, is not too far removed from their own where, through lack of education, there are many misconstructions about Indigenous peoples, such as the belief that they do not pay taxes. The novel forces settlers to pay attention to what is going on around them, because it is not only Indigenous populations that are affected by the government’s racism and lack of proper environmentalism. Settlers believe that they can use metal straws instead of plastic ones, and then put the climate change discussion aside, but Dimaline calls them out in this passage, emphasizing the fact that a metal straw is a Band-Aid on the gaping wound that is the environmental issue in Canada. Readers are unsettled by the novel, but the familiarity of the chocolate bar debate adds some comic relief that allows them to blame the Americans (foreigners) as the ones who are stealing from Indigenous lands, and carry on with the story relatively unphased.

In contrast, in “I Am … Am I,” Taylor raises similar imagery but to a different end. Dr. Chambers tells the AI, “You have no reason to feel guilty. This is not your fault. This is not my fault. Much of this happened a long time ago. Before either of us existed. It is tragic but not your responsibility,” to which the AI responds, “Whose is it?” (Taylor 43). Again, the author is negotiating spaces of the past through a futuristic setting, which both allows settlers to accept the story in their present state (as they are neither past nor future), but also forces them to think about their role as both past and future players in Indigenous relations with settler colonialists. Taylor’s short story unnerves readers who are hit with the question ‘whose responsibility is it?’ to which they inevitably must answer ‘themselves,’ but still allows them to claim plausible deniability to the treatment of Indigenous peoples through the character of Dr. Chambers. She refuses to accept the simple observations of the AI, who sums up all of the horrors inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in one neat little paragraph— “Residential schools. Alcoholism. Cultural diaspora”—and she argues that, “it’s a little more complex

than that” (Taylor 42). It really is not, but this claim allows the author to educate readers on the actions of the past, while still allowing readers to remain in the protective bubble of literature. It becomes easier to accept that these things could be true when it is written in science fiction because, as Isaac asserts, “That stuff we heard? Miigwans, that’s just too ridiculous to be true” (Dimaline 106).

In today’s world, it is the “ridiculous” that is believable, and Indigenous authors are using that to their advantage.

As seemingly accessible and inclusive to Indigenous experience as the science fiction

genre appears to be through these texts, historically it has “narrated the atrocities of colonialism as ‘adventure stories’” (Dillon 2). Thus, not only are Indigenous sci-fi writers retelling their peoples’ experiences through the genre, but they are also reclaiming a genre (like so many others) that has made light of the trauma done to Indigenous communities. It seems natural to claim that “Native beliefs and robotic ethics [don’t] usually cross paths,” because colonial scientific practices deviate so far from Indigenous beliefs about the land and its spirit (Taylor 40). Yet, the countless references to Indigenous histories throughout the novel fit comfortably in the science fiction genre because of their horrific absurdity. There are direct allusions in The Marrow Thieves to so many struggles that Indigenous people face, most explicitly the residential school system—“He escaped from one of the satellite schools… based on the old residential school system”—but also issues like colonizers stealing from Indigenous lands—“they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves”—and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls—“It began as a rumour… whispered every time one of us went missing” (Dimaline 5, 88, 89). White settlers, particularly in Canada, have no direct frame of reference in their own lives for the atrocities that are expressed in these texts, and so it is easier for them to understand and empathize when articulated through the fictitious lens of Artificial Intelligence programs, and people in white vans stealing someone’s bone marrow.

These authors work to combine Indigenous ceremonies with colonial practices—such as when Miig places the technologically constructed glass vial of marrow in amongst his sacred tobacco— as a means of being granted access into a world where their voices may be heard (Dimaline 204).

Dimaline also makes reference to an Underground Railroad of sorts when the group meets the people with Isaac who get children out of the schools “through a series of friends and allies” (Dimaline 226). The Underground Railroad and the horrors of slavery are certainly familiar to almost every person living in Canada, so by aligning Indigenous experiences with something deemed universally wrong, settler readers can begin to understand the gravity of what has been taking place in their own country. To a similar extent, the AI in Taylor’s story declare, “I wanted to have a spirit … I felt a sense of comradeship [to Indigenous cultures]. But they are not alive anymore. Destroyed. Killed.

Forgotten. All by your people. The people who created me” (Taylor 43). In this line of thinking, Taylor forces readers to ask themselves why settlers can so easily accept this artificial ‘other’ that they have constructed themselves, but not the ‘other’ that has been living amongst them for centuries. The authors integrate Indigenous traditions into the language of the settler so that they are not immediately dismissed in colonial culture. However, when Dimaline appoints such importance upon traditional languages—making “old-timey” ways of living and dreaming the key to collapsing the settlers’ system—she not only emboldens Indigenous readers to hold onto their culture because tradition is how their identity is protected, but also demonstrates to settler readers that Indigenous people are not going anywhere (Dimaline 172).

The science fiction genre allows for the merging of past, present, and future, so there is no

community better suited to write science fiction, as the horrors that other authors must come up with in their imaginations are realities that Indigenous people experience every day. Science fiction can do more than simply entertain settler readers who have never known the generational trauma that Indigenous peoples face; it can also give Indigenous peoples a space to express and live within that trauma in a way that is perhaps less painful than looking wholly to the past. Both texts deal with the concept of dreams where “the dream world is in fact the real world” and those who cannot dream are “just meaty machines with a broken gauge” (Taylor 38, Dimaline 88). Settler colonialism has made Indigenous peoples afraid to dream of a better future for themselves—“Maybe she had a bad dream and … they took her”—but the science fiction genre has granted new possibilities for reclamation, reconciliation, and recovery (Dimaline 94).

Works Cited Dillon, Grace. “Imagining Indigenous Futurisms.” Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012, pg. 1-12.

Dimaline, Cherie. The Marrow Thieves. Cormorant Books, 2017.

Taylor, Drew Hayden. “I Am … Am I.” Take Us To Your Chief, Douglas & McIntyre, 2016, pg.

24-45.

Becoming More: Materiality and Multiplicites in Sense 8

By Mia Sutton What is human? An ability to reason? To imagine? To love or grieve? If so, we are more human than any human ever will be… Watch a flock of birds or a shoal of fish move as one and you glimpse where we came from. Ask how aspen trees feel trauma hundreds of miles apart, or how a mushroom can understand the needs of a forest… you’d begin to grasp what we are.

Sense8, s01e10 Media depictions of the posthuman tend toward binary opposites: positive or negative; optimistic or fearful; a source of hope or a terrifying possibility. Rather than presenting the posthuman solely as a figure of perversity, discomfort, and anxiety or purely as a figure of fantasy, Sense8 explores the tension that is essential to ongoing and uncanny creation. It delves into spaces of unease, and acknowledges the potential and possibility that bursts from these spaces. The series is an exploration of trauma and struggle, as well as an orgy of optimism, a literal cluster-fuck of the seemingly impossible and of ecstatic becomings. Through examining the tension between Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus in terms of the body, boundaries, and consciousness, I argue that Sense8 vibrantly depicts the posthuman, celebrating its transgression of limitations while still acknowledging the trauma and tension essential to its becomings.

In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles expresses an anxiety regarding the figure of the posthuman, which “both evokes terror and excites pleasure” (4). She establishes a distinct tension between two visions of the posthuman, one nightmarish and the other dreamlike. Her nightmare is a “culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being… seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality” (5). Her dream, held up against this nightmare, is “a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies… that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being,

and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity” (5). Hayles anxiety regarding the posthuman is focused on its dismissal of the body and other worldly limitations.

Boundaries -- of body, of space, and of time -- give shape, structure, and meaning to life. There is something unsettling for Hayles in the “great dream and promise of information… that it can be free from that material constraints that govern the mortal world. The clear implication,” she writes, “is that if we can become the information we have constructed, we can achieve effective immortality” (13). Hayles complicates this ideal, highlighting the necessity of materiality, reminding the reader “that for information to exist, it must always be instantiated” (13), regardless of the medium. Whether consciousness is embodied or translated to a digital realm, there must be a container, whether body or computer.

The shape and form, Hayles argues, is essential to that which it contains. She views the “conceptualization that sees information and materiality as distinct entities” as a “separation [that] allows the construction of a hierarchy in which information is given the dominant position and materiality runs a distant second” (12). Materiality, she argues, is not distant from information, or even secondary to it. Hayles rejects this binary division, instead holding the materiality of life as essential to and as essential as information: [Hayles] reject[s] the equation of consciousness with information and insisted on the embodiment of human being… [also arguing] that texts are comprised of their materiality as much as by their information. Just as the embodied subject emerged from the possessive individualist concept of the self, so the idea that texts can be disembodied and identified by only qualities of their language-use is the heritage of a specific cultural framework. (Vint 123) For Hayles, all information, be it consciousness contained in the body or writings inscribed in a book, are defined by their materiality. The cultural framework that dismisses the embodiment of a text is the same one that dismisses embodiment as essential to identity. While she notes the potential for “effective immortality” and freedom “from the material constraints that govern modern life,” she is wary of dismissals of the body’s importance to consciousness, arguing that “for information to exist, it must always be instantiated” (Hayles 13). She expresses shock that some might think consciousness

could be translated to a different form without changing in essence. Embodiment is, in all forms, the means by which we locate ourselves in the world, the means by which we engage with the world.

Just as “the transformation of a print document into an electronic text is ‘a form of translation’” (Vint 124), transferring consciousness into another form must essentially alter consciousness itself.

There are ways to push at the boundaries of embodied life without transgressing the limits Hayles holds to be vital. Whitney examines the ways in which Merleau-Ponty, in his Sorbonne lectures reflecting on Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage,” interrogates the distinction of individuals as established by bodily boundaries. “To have the felt sense of my body as my own,” he writes, “it is not sufficient to perceive the contours of my skin. Nor is it sufficient to have beliefs about correct property lines… the easiest way to demonstrate this is to point out that my bodily boundaries do not always align with my felt sense of them” (138). To illustrate this concept, Whitney cites an anecdote of Paul Schilder, mentioned by Merleau-Ponty on multiple occasions. Schilder describes the sensation of holding a pipe, pressing his “fingers tightly against the pipe” and looking “intently at the picture of [his] hand in the mirror,” feeling that “sensation of pressure… not only in [his] actual hand but also in the hand in the mirror” (142). This sensation of doubling rejects the “boundaries of the visible body as the hinge of inner and outer space… as the limits of what can be felt from within vs. seen from without” (137). There is, instead, a blurring between self and other. It is “not unique to the mirror image, but can also be found in our perceptions of others” (143). Whitney sees this doubling or narcissism “not [as] alienation in the Lacanian sense,” describing it instead as “an affective investment in the experience of ownness, not as an impossible unity, but as a playful plurality. It is a self-love whose object is multiple” (145).

Shooting off “playful plurality” and multiplicities, I move to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, who, having been “already several” at the time they wrote the text (Deleuze and Guattari 1454). David Fancy examines the opening lines of A Thousand Plateaus: The epigraph draws our attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of normative notions of bounded identity and subjectivity in favour of something more expansive, multiple and, ultimately, more playful. In their thinking around subjectivity, identity, and individuation,

Deleuze and Guattari turn away from the possible -- that which on some level has already been conceived, such as the normative bourgeois individual subject or any other self-contained object of scrutiny -- towards that which resonates with unexpected potential. (93) Deleuze and Guattari’s text is charged with energy as they explore concepts of multiplicities, of connectivities, urging readers to “reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied” (Deleuze and Guattari 1455). They advocate enthusiastically for becoming multiple, stating that they each were several before combining their voices, making for “quite a crowd” (1454).

Just as in becoming several one is no longer one but rather many, blurring with other identities, texts, too, are assemblages, which “Deleuze and Guattari stress… should not be thought of as static but rather as a dynamic process of becoming of components in a state of ongoing organisation and arrangement (Fancy 99). Their text, they note, and any book “is an assemblage” and “as such is unattributable” (Deleuze and Guattari 1455), an amalgamation of thoughts and ideas that stretch back in time. Deleuze and Guattari, in their writing, “have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away” (1454). Just as it is impossible to credit any thought, sentence, or even word to either Deleuze and Guattari, as it is a union of their writings, it is also impossible to attribute the text as a whole to Deleuze and Guattari themselves, as their thoughts have been shaped by their engagements with others’ thoughts. They have been “aided, inspired, multiplied” and as such they are no longer themselves. The text is a blending not only of their thoughts but of countless others. In this way, the very process of thinking is one of connectivity, wherein ideas have the potential to impact others years, decades, and even centuries later.

Connectivity is a key point in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, even beyond a formal level.

They describe the “rhizome” as “an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system” (1459). In summarizing its “principle characteristics,” they write: “unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature” (1458). Further, the rhizome “has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu)

from which it grows and overspills” (1458). The rhizome, in essence, ever extends outward, a structure defined by connectedness and expansion: the rhizome proceeds conceptually… as a manifestation of the principle of ‘multiplicity’, the treatment of the multiple as substantive, so that ‘it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object… expos[ing] ‘arborescent pseudomultiplicities’ for what they are: fake coherences that are in fact run through by other rhizomatic structures. The rhizome speaks to connectivity, but against traceable linear histories or genealogies, and as every part of the rhizome may and must be connected to any other part, the result is a decentred milieu, with no distinctive beginning, core or endpoint. (Fancy 98) The rhizomatic model of connectivity eliminates the hierarchies imposed by arborescent models, which pretend to contain multiplicities. Rhizomatic structures, however, are not a means of containment. They facilitate expansion, outward growth. And while trees and their roots -- and other tree-like structures -- are grounded in their history, vertically and temporally defined, rhizomes have no history, existing beyond the confines of time. Deleuze and Guattari “represent the rhizome as a continually changing matrix of organic and inorganic components moving in symbiotic and non-parallel concert, always in a state of becoming, leading to the transitory discovery of as-yetuntravelled routes” (98). The transitory and transgressive attributes of the rhizome might worry Hayles, but Deleuze and Guattari are ecstatic; they see it as the means of “all manner of ‘becomings’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1459).

Attached to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome are the concepts of deterritorialization and of the “Body without Organs,” which are closely related to each other and to the rhizome.

Deterritorialization is the process of moving from a space of comfort to one of unfamiliarity. It can be framed in a negative way, as the forced departure from a home, or it can be framed, as Deleuze and Guattari present it, as a choice to move into the unfamiliar, into uncomfortable, into a space which bursts with potential. “Through the process of territorializing and deterritorializing,” Fancy explains, “things must form into coherences or assemblages,” which are in essence “increase[s] in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections”

(99). Through constant processes of becomings, “[t]hese assemblages of rhizomatic becomings have a relationship both with the strata and the Body without Organs… a non-formed, non-organised, deterritorialized and destratified body” (100). The Body without Organs is a figure of resistance, ever striving toward liberation from bodily restraints which shape thought and desire. In its striving, however, it never achieves complete liberation. “Consistent with [Deleuze and Guattari’s] resistance of binarising logic,” the Body without Organs, though “deterritorialized and destratified,” “cannot break away entirely from the stratifications and systems from which it desires to free itself” (101).

The posthuman, in accordance with Deleuze and Guattari, is both deterritorialized and reterritorialized, a figure of liberation that is restrained. It is difficult to imagine a figure without organs but still contained in a body. The posthuman is thereby a figure which resists interpretation, something which Deleuze and Guattari argue for enthusiastically with ecstatic nonsense: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple be multiplicities! Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns the point into a line! Be quick, even when standing still! Line of chance, line of hips, line of flight. Don’t bring out the General in you! Don’t have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon. (Deleuze and Guattari 1462) Their writing vibrates with urgency, but it seems unclear what exactly they are urging. Perhaps most puzzling is the line: “Don’t have just ideas, just have an idea.” Fancy points out that within their text “repetition itself -- formerly understood to be an act of affirmation of the Same -- results in differentiation: the act of thinking becomes an act of creating the new. In short, if repetition cannot solely lead to the Same, it must then issue from and lead to difference” (96). In repeating, they seek to emphasize difference. Clearly there is a difference between having just ideas and just having ideas, just as there is a difference between ‘multiple’ and ‘multiplicities.’ While Deleuze and Guattari do not explain how you might be the Pink Panther, they urge you to do so with a vibrant energy. Perhaps what they are urging is to become, as they are here, incomprehensible. The posthuman, one (or many) might argue, is incomprehensible, evasive, unattributable. It is territorialized and deterritorialized and

reterritorialized. It is resistance; it is restraint. It is everything and it is nothing.

With Deleuze and Guattari’s ecstatic model of the posthuman in mind, as well as Hayles’ more nervous vision, I turn to Sense8, a series which is bursting with energy and potential, true to Deleuze and Guattari’s posthuman, but without shattering that which Hayles holds to be vital. The posthuman in Sense8 is defined by its ability to extend beyond the self, to cross the boundaries and limits which define human being and unlock unimagined potential, while still restrained by these same boundaries and limits. It is free and restrained, mortal and unending. The posthuman in this series takes the form of ‘Sensates’ -- also known as homo sensorium -- that form ‘clusters’ of eight. A cluster is intimately connected, able to share knowledge, skill, memory, and sensation, and able to ‘visit.’ “Visiting,” we are told, “is not calling or texting someone. It’s not something you make happen. It is something you let happen” (s01e04). It is instinctual and at times incomprehensible. Visiting allows Sensates to manifest elsewhere in a non-body which allows them to cross geographical boundaries and language barriers, all without moving an inch. Visiting goes against the typical model of disembodiment which makes Hayles anxious. The visitor retains their sense of materiality, grounded in the body and material surroundings of the Sensate they visit. Wolfgang sits in a shoe shop, able to feel mud and dirt clinging to his socks when Capheus is instructed to remove his shoes and walk away from the main road. Will wakes up on a couch and feels the handcuffs around Nomi’s wrists restraining him.

These sensations are visceral and real. Rather than disembodied, they are re-embodied. As Whitney describes it, they feel everything doubly. Visiting allows the cluster to feel more, to become more.

They are not ungrounded; they are regrounded. They are able, as Deleuze and Guattari urge, to “[b] e quick, even when standing still” (1462). The Sensates are able to connect to and visit any Sensates outside their own cluster that they come into contact with, an ever expanding collection of rhizomatic connections facilitated by the ‘psycellium,’ a small biological difference which sets them apart from the closely related homo sapien.

While the series is framed as a celebration of the potential of the posthuman, a means of extending beyond the self in an incredible way, the series is defined by the tension between homo sapien and homo sensorium, between that which is human and that which becomes more. One

particular group of humans, Biologic Preservation Organization (BPO), is positioned in direct conflict with a cluster of Sensates. As the name of the organization suggests, they are dedicated to preserving the human race, a task they hold vital. BPO’s drone project is headed by Milton Brandt, commonly referred to as Whispers. Some call him the Cannibal, a name he earned by committing ‘cluster-cide,’ hunting down and killing the other seven members of his cluster. He continues to hunt his own kind with BPO, tracking down Sensates to lobotomize for the drone project. The lobotomized Sensates, or zombies, can be used to carry out assassinations and other acts of political control, completely untraceable. While the cluster and other Sensates present a positive model of the posthuman, Whispers is the perverse and transgressive figure that causes anxiety and even horror. Whispers and BPO are in direct opposition with other Sensates. This opposition is not binary however, as Whispers is himself a Sensate. The possibility of binary is further collapsed by relationships between Sensates and humans throughout the series. Sense8, rather than resorting to a reductive story of good versus evil, progress versus established power, explores the vast diversity of both human and posthuman, presenting both as both positive and negative, demonstrating immense difference and similitude between and within the two groups.

The cluster at the forefront of the series consists of: Riley, an Icelandic DJ living in London; Will, a Chicago cop; Capheus, a van driver in Nairobi; Wolfgang, a Berlin criminal; Kala, an Indian pharmaceutical worker; Sun, a martial arts expert and businesswoman from Seoul; Nomi, a transgender hacker in San Francisco; and Lito, a closeted homoxexual actor from Mexico. With their differing languages, skills, knowledges, and ethics, the cluster is able to accomplish more together than they would be capable of disconnected. As they face challenges and trials throughout the series, the cluster becomes more and more entangled. They become, as Deleuze and Guattari might put it, an assemblage, reaching the point not “where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I” (Deleuze and Guattari 1454). There actions are no longer attributable, as they draw on one another’s strengths, skills, knowledge, and even morals. When Sun is almost murdered in prison, her cluster comes to her aid: Will and Wolfgang combine their fighting skills with hers; Nomi hacks the prison system; Capheus hotwires and drives a prison van; and even Lito’s acting skills prove to be necessary to get past the checkpoint. Sun later states: “I did not think

I would survive prison… And the truth is, I did not. We did” (s02e12). Through their rhizomatic connections, they are able to become so much more than themselves and doing so they are no longer themselves. When Lito, recently and very publicly outed as gay, encounters a homophobic reporter at a premier, the entire cluster speaks together against her discrimination. Together, their voices overlapping and melting together, they answer the question “Who am I?” with a flurry of thoughts, feelings, and a variety of perspectives. It is a fitting response, given their interconnectedness. They have been “aided, inspired, multiplied” (Deleuze and Guattari 1455).

The Sensates benefit from the “great dream and promise of information” that Hayles is wary about, “achieving effective immortality” in a certain way (13). Hayles expresses a dread of a posthuman which is “seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality” (5).

Sense8 presents a more natural, organic form of immortality. Jonas, another Sensate and a mentor to Will, explains that while “a genetic birth transfers genes,” a “sensate birth transfers sense experience and memory. You are Angelica’s children,” he explains, “so parts of her consciousness still echo in you” (s02e01). Even though Angelica killed herself just after giving birth to the cluster to protect them from Whispers. She appears throughout the series, almost like a spectre. She manifests, however, not as a ghost but as a memory. She is not haunting; she just remains. Sensates are mortal in that they suffer bodily deaths and, without a body to contain their consciousness, they are no longer living. A part of them lives on, howevers, through the cluster(s) they birth and are part of and the Sensates they encounter throughout their lives. This is an organic, embodied form of immortality, dependent on the bodies of those who remember the dead Sensate. In the same way, the cluster accesses unlimited power, within limit. Just as their form of immortality extends past the limits without bending or breaking them, the Sensates are able to access, to a degree, unlimited power. They are able to draw on each other’s strengths to exceed the limits of their bodies. They are able to visit the Sensates they are connected to, but only the Sensates they are connected to. While they are always able to expand their circles, they are also finite.

Whispers, conversely, takes possibilities both of unlimited power and disembodied immortality to a rather unsettling extreme. Through committing cluster-cide, he “experienced his

cluster’s deaths both as murderer and murdered. A dread of dying has poisoned his soul” (s02e12).

His fear of death, of his own mortality, motivates him to participate in the drone project. By creating zombies for BPO, Whispers is able to inhabit their mutilated frontal lobes, scattering and dispersing himself around the world, unlimited and infinite. His efforts exemplify everything which Hayles fears in the posthuman. Hayles describes her nightmare as “a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being” (5). Whispers, in becoming infinite and immortal, treats other bodies as disposable. He kills without remorse, uncaring toward both mind and body - which Hayles argue are essential to each other. Whispers has been “seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality,” failing to recognize the necessity of material connections. He views his ability to connect as a tool to extend himself, rather than to connect to others. Whispers is the perverse posthuman which populates the majority of media dealing with the concept, unnatural and immoral, destroyer of human and non-human alike. Unlike the cluster’s collaborative collectivity, Whispers’ extension is not a rhizomatic assemblage, but rather a virus, as he robs others of their autonomy and agency in order to escape the limits of life and death.

Sense8, through its engagement with concepts such as connectivity, disembodiment, and multiplicities, is a celebration of becoming. Throughout the series, we see the cluster growing and evolving. The endless potential offered by this portrayal of the posthuman is not, however, limited to Sensates. The series concludes with Nomi marrying her distinctly human girlfriend Amanita, where she expresses her unease with vows, with promises of forever: I’m afraid of things pretending to be permanent because nothing is permanent. My life, especially these past two years, is a testament to the fact that things change, people change.

But with you… that doesn’t scare me. It actually makes me happy. It makes me excited… because I can think of no better life than watching Amanita Caplan change… watching her evolve and grow. I want to see everything that you become. (s02e12) Nomi’s vows exemplify that the potential of the posthuman is something we can access too. To become posthuman, according to Sense8, A Thousand Plateaus, and How We Became Posthuman, is to become connected, to extend beyond yourself without leaving yourself behind. It is to become

multiple, an assemblage. The series ends in a grand celebration, with BPO under new and promising leadership and the Sensates free to live without fear. After the Paris sky explodes with fireworks, the series finale ends with an explosive orgy, bringing together Sensates and their human counterparts, a mass of entangled flesh and feelings. While the series demonstrates the possibilities unlocked by the Sensates, it also shows the ability for humans to participate. While the Sensates are able to listen to the same song through their psychic connection, through the use of wireless headphones, their human companions are able to join the experience. Similarly, Amanita compares the Internet to the psycellium, “where memories and moments of our lives exist beyond us” (s02e07). Sense8 is an ecstatic celebration of the potential of humans and nonhumans alike, driven by tension between the two but endlessly enthusiastic and optimistic.

Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “A Thousand Plateaus.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Leitch, Vincent B. et al. W. W. Norton & Co, 2010, pp. 1454-1462.

Fancy, David. “Difference, Bodies, Desire: The Collaborative Thought Of Gilles Deleuze And Félix Guattari”. Science Fiction Film & Television, vol 3, no. 1, 2010, pp. 93-106. Liverpool University Press, doi:10.3828/sfftv.2010.6.

Hayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 2010 Straczynski, J. Michael and The Wachowskis, creators. Sense8. Anarchos Productions, Javelin Productions, Studio JMS, Georgeville Television, Venus Castina LLC, Elizabeth Bay Productions and Unpronounceable Productions. 2006. Netflix, http://www.netflix.com/ watch/798356483?

Vint, Sherryl. “Embodied Texts, Embodied Subjects: An Overview Of N. Katherine Hayles”.

Science Fiction Film & Television, vol 1, no. 1, 2008, pp. 115-126. Liverpool University Press, doi:10.3828/sfftv.1.1.9.

Whitney, Shiloh. “Merleau-Ponty On The Mirror Stage: Affect And The Genesis Of The Body Proper In The Sorbonne Lectures”. Journal Of Phenomenological Psychology, vol 49, no. 2, 2018, pp. 135-163. Brill, doi:10.1163/15691624-12341344.

Transforming Powerlessness into Agency in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

By Isabella Kennedy

Set in the highly contradictory post-war society of 1950s America, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar exposes the agonizing experience of women who were stifled by a society structured against their feminist dreams of equal treatment and opportunity. The novel’s perplexing heroine, Esther Greenwood, has been the topic of much literary and feminist debate as scholars strive to piece together meaning from her disoriented narrative that slips in and out of mental health breakdowns. However, instead of examining Esther’s mental deterioration, this paper takes on the positive feminist perspective pushed forward by scholar Marta Caminero-Santangelo in the conclusion of her work, The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive. Caminero-Santangelo encourages us to “privilege the forms of agency” that women, both fictional and real, partake in, and not the cages of insanity that society traps them within (Caminero-Santangelo 181). In reading Esther’s narrative as a transformation story from powerlessness into agency, we can open up “an imaginative space for women to be able to escape from madness by envisioning themselves as agents” over their bodies and futures (181). Esther’s experience of extreme depression in the text results from the powerlessness she feels over her own body as a young woman living in 1950s America. When she feels like she does not have control over her body or life, Esther becomes powerless and, through that, vulnerable to the mental illness that threatens to overtake her throughout the novel. It is only through her understanding of the controlling aspects of her society that she can begin to reclaim her body and her agency, overcoming her fears of motherhood and sexuality, and controlling the madness that accompanied them.

In The Madwomen Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity is Not Subversive, Caminero-Santangelo discusses how most of the discourse surrounding female madness in literature revolves around the predominant reading of madness as rebellion, that madwomen choose insanity as an opposition and critique to the oppressive patriarchal social order of their times. This discourse, Caminero-Santangelo

argues, “is fundamentally misguided, since the symbolic resolution of the madwoman as an alternative to patriarchy ultimately traps the woman in silence”—she becomes powerless in society (4). I fully agree with this argument, and with Caminero-Santangelo’s later reading of the central “bell jar” image as a metaphor for Esther’s madness—the bell jar, the insanity, descends and Esther becomes “an object rather than a subject and agent” in her life (30). These significant insights concerning female madness and Esther have helped shaped my arguments in this paper. However, one aspect of my interpretation of The Bell Jar diverges from Caminero-Santangelo’s: I believe that Esther’s experience of madness cannot be separated from her experience as a young woman in 1950s America, unlike Caminero-Santangelo’s argument in her work. Despite the fact that Esther’s madness becomes uncontrolled, dangerously spiralling from its initial societal causes, it is only through her final understanding of her 1950s society that she begins to exert agency within her life and over her experiences of madness. Through the help of electroshock treatments and therapy, Esther beings to recover her mental health; however, it is her perspective of her society that truly changes her mental state in the novel, and that change gets her on the path towards full recovery.

The first half of the novel depicts the conflicted female sexual landscape in 1950s society, a landscape critical to understanding Esther’s initial feeling of powerlessness over her body, sexual choices, and future. In her critical research of white, middle-class women in 1950s America, Wini Breines adequately describes this environment: “The growing significance of sexuality in the youth culture and the sexualization of popular culture unfolded amid prudish families and narrow, even cruel, sexual norms. Thus girls were encouraged to pursue the sexual cues that assailed them but were threatened with the loss of respectability (and acceptable futures) if they did so.” (Breines 87) Thus, young women’s bodies had become the battlefield on which the conflict of America’s changing sexual norms played out. This cruel duality of sexual expectations described by Breines pervades

Esther’s experience in New York. She works for a popular fashion magazine that exploits her body “as free advertising” for beautifying (sexualizing) products like makeup and clothing, but she also remains constantly aware of her mother’s expectations of her, clear through the virgin-praising articles like “In Defence of Chastity” she sends her (Plath 13). At the same time, New York pop-culture bombards Esther with sexual consumerism that aims to “control the body (hair, smells, pimples, breasts)” by projecting “the ideal female image,” one that is completely unattainable for Ester, and for most young women (Breines 104, 95). She hears popular male singers yearning for “a true-blue gal who promised she would wait,” and watches romance films where the sexualized “black-haired girl” never marries the “nice football hero” (Plath 23, 46). These songs and images are always in conflict with themselves: they sexualize images of and language about women, while also upholding the oppressing societal expectation of female virginity and chastity. As a result of these conflicting messages, the unattainable ideal of femininity, Esther feels “dreadfully inadequate” (77) as a woman. In fact, the big commercialized Ladies’ Days event meant to push “pretty” young ladies towards “glossy kitchens,” actually ends with Esther being horribly “poisoned” (32, 50). This consumerist idea of the ideal woman, one both sexy and sexless, cooking in the kitchen for a husband, poisons Esther and she literally loses control over her body, vomiting until she almost dies in the hotel (51). She becomes an object, passive, and not in control of her own body and, through that, vulnerable to mental illness and thoughts of suicide. That feeling of powerlessness persists as she believes the other women in the novel, the ones who have found their places, identities, and futures, in society are also not agents in their own lives, but simply products of society’s structures.

Throughout the novel, Esther thinks about sex and the models of female identity available to her if she decides to have it, identities represented through the other women characters in the text. In the beginning of the novel, Esther sees “the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed [to her] the only really significant difference between one person and another” (Plath 82). The way that Esther emphasizes this “boundary line” between virgins and non-virgins shows that she views losing virginity as a “spectacular change” in personal identi-

ty (82). However, she quickly realizes that, in her society, sex only offers two identities for women: one of wifehood and pregnancy, or one of sexual deviancy and sickness. The former finds models in Betsy, the “Pollyanna Cowgirl” who aspires “to be a farmer’s wife,” and in Dodo Conway, the diligent Catholic wife and mother (16, 98). They represent chastity before marriage, and uncontrollable motherhood within it. Both are rejected by Esther in the novel: Betsy for tirelessly “trying to save” her from sex and Dodo for having an “excessive,” or uncontrollable, number of children (16, 113). Esther has not yet gained the perspective to voice, as she does later in the novel, that her society keeps the threat of “a baby hanging over [her] head like a big stick, to keep her in line,” so, when she encounters Betsy and Dodo in the beginning of the text, she only understands her feelings of disgust and powerlessness (203). To Esther, the “the idea of serving men in any way” is disgusting (77). She wants control, agency, over sex and her body, and also her future as a woman, but these two women are models for one of the limited options she can see if she chooses to remain a virgin until marriage. She would inevitably marry someone like Buddy Willard, and either have no control over the amount of children she would have like Dodo, or no agency over her future like Betsy, who only wants a husband, and not a career. The other models of female identity and sexuality also do not appeal to Esther, as they too offer no way to agency.

Doreen, though coming across like a woman in control, is actually sexually exploited throughout the novel. Unlike Joan, who Esther also considers sexually deviant because of her lesbianism, Doreen represents a more available model of female identity that premarital sex with men can offer Esther, one she realizes is connected to abuse and exploitation. In the novel. Doreen lounges in semi-transparent “full-length nylon and lace” dresses and acts “dumb as a post” instead of her “witty sarcastic” self whenever men are around her—she exists solely for their pleasure; she has no control over her body or mind, the men do (14, 17, 14). She even voices this powerlessness when she pleads Esther to stay at Lenny’s house with her because she “wouldn’t have a chance” if Lenny tried to take advantage of her (23). Doreen laughs after this remark, but the underlying message is that she

would not be able to escape from sexual abuse. And she does not; later that same night, she returns to the hotel completely intoxicated and unable to stand up by herself, forcing us to imagine what may have happened to her powerless body at Lenny’s house (28). Esther then associates Doreen’s sexual behaviour with this kind of sexual sickness or abuse in the novel, reinforced by the fact that Doreen introduces Esther to Marco, the “woman-hater” who brutally attempts to rape her (103). Through meeting Doreen and Marco, Esther realizes that having sex does not necessarily mean she has agency or control over her body. It is also important to mention that during the New York photoshoot where the women are told to choose props that represent their futures, Doreen only picks a future that gets “her hands on a sari,” a materialistic and exotic item of clothing, and not a future that she truly wants (98). As a sexually exploited object, Doreen’s future is distinctly absent in the text. Esther learns, from the way Doreen has sex, that abuse seems inevitable and a future uncertain. As a result of seeing these two failing models of femininity, in her eyes, Esther feels that she can never have control of her body or sexual identity. She also does not want to be Jay Cee, who she views as successful, but also as sexless: she “tried to imagine Jay Cee… in bed with her fat husband, but [she] just couldn’t do it” (15).

These women all offer Esther identities she feels are ones she does not want. These pressures trigger her mental breakdown, and it is only through her understanding that sex does not have to be structured in these ways that she becomes an agent and free in her life.

As previously mentioned, Esther’s experiences in New York, and as a young woman in 1950s America, triggers a mental breakdown that eventually, as Caminero-Santangelo writes, “surpasses its social causes and can no longer be fully accounted for by them” (47). As her mental health deteriorates, her experience of madness “defies rational explanation,” and separates from her, the world1 (Caminero-Santangelo 46). However, as Esther struggles towards mental stability through medical electroshock treatments and other therapy, her conversations with Dr. Nolan help her understand her world in a new perspective. She begins to realize the previously discussed ways 1. See Caminero-Santangelo’s argument and textual evidence on this point on pages 46 and 47 of The Madwoman can’t speak.

in which society tries to exert power over her appearance, sexuality, and future. It is Esther’s new perspective that gives her the freedom, the agency, she needs in order to get onto the path towards full recovery, beginning with Esther’s deconstructing of her understanding of sex, and the aforementioned models of femininity it offers her.

Near the end of the novel, when Esther is on electroshock treatment and beginning to become more mentally stable, she still feels trapped by her understanding of sex, and the limited female identities it seems to offer to her. Esther, like most young women, wants to experience sex, but believes she cannot without either becoming a mother like Dodo, or under the control of a man like Doreen is. Dr. Nolan offers her birth control as a way of escaping these identities that Esther feels are the only options for her. Since Esther was always taught “there was no sure way of not getting stuck with a baby,” and to her motherhood was synonymous with giving up control to “being under a man’s thumb,” she never thought she could take control over that part of her body and the future that accompanied it (Plath 81, 203). When Dr. Nolan informs Esther that society is filled with “propaganda” meant to exert control over women, Esther begins to see the ways in which she can become her “own woman” in society despite how she was conditioned and raised (204, 205).

The scene where Esther gets fitted for her diaphragm emphasizes this personal agency: “I climbed up on the examination table, thinking: ‘I’m climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex” (204-5). Notice the repeated verb—she is taking control, actively “climbing” away from her feelings of powerlessness, and towards a future she never envisioned for herself before, one that gives her the power to decide when and if she becomes a mother. She also repeats the word “freedom” five times in her description of this scene, which again emphasizes her liberation from societal pressure and control. This pivotal moment then translates into her having sex for herself, and her taking control afterwards, showing she will not be exploited like Doreen.

When Esther decides to lose her virginity with Irwin near the end of the text, she shows her newly found agency and power. Firstly, she describes her sex with Irwin without mentioning any of his pleasure, instead it focuses on her being “rapt and naked,” and using Irwin to finally take the “millstone” weight of her virginity off of her own neck (210, 209). She uses him in the moment. It can be argued that her hospitalization afterwards is her losing control of her body and sexual experience, or even some sort of bloody revenge from society for having sex, but I interpret this scene as being essential for Esther’s transformation into agency. As a result of her going to the hospital, she can later call Irwin to make him pay for the hospital bill. She exerts power over him by calling him and forcing him into “writing a cheque” to pay the hospital (222). The blood that she loses translates into her agency over Irwin, and she becomes “perfectly free” after the whole experience (222). The agency she shows here brings my argument to the much-contested final scene of The Bell Jar. In seeing Esther’s narrative as transformational, from powerlessness into agency, the final scene of the novel can only be read as a demonstration of Esther’s new world perspective and her place within it. In this scene, she describes herself as being “born twice,” the first time being her actual birth and the second is this moment, this transition back into the real world and away from the asylum (224). Her first life holds all the societal conditioning, the impossible expectations of female identity and sexuality, and the cruel madness that life triggered. However, her understanding of this moment as her second birth conceptually must mean that her first life has died, or was transformed.

The death imagery while Esther attends Joan’s funeral right before this final scene supports my reading. In placing the funeral scene, and its images of the “black, six-foot-deep” grave and the “tombstones rising out” (223) of the snow, right before Esther’s rebirth, it is impossible not to read Esther’s life in New York, and all her experiences afterwards, as dead. Not vanished completely, however, but dead and remembered—a “part of [her]” (218). In this final moment, she begins life again, this time with the understanding of the world she lives in, and the ways she has control over it and herself. She

steps forward, towards this new beginning, wearing a bold red suit that is as “flamboyant as [her] plans,” and the same “black shoes” that were once filled with her virginal blood after she decided to have sex on her own terms (224). She guides herself out of that old perspective and life “by a magical thread,” like Theseus guiding himself out of the dangerous Labyrinth of Crete, and steps bravely into her new life (224). This very life is eluded to near the beginning of the novel when she states that she is “all right” and can deconstruct the controlling products of commercialism into something for her own “baby” to play with (13). She has made the “active creative transformation” (Caminero-Santangelo 181) in her life, and has become the powerful agent and woman she was meant to be.

In the modern-day world, what can Esther’s transformation in The Bell Jar offer us? It is clear from recent feminist movements, like MeToo, that the conflicted sexual landscape and social structures around us have not changed much, despite women’s restless fight to do so. With photoshop-perfected Instagram models and sexualized popular rap lyrics, young women in America have just as many reasons to feel as powerless as Esther does throughout this novel. While we may not all have the bell jar of mental illness hanging threateningly over us, that powerlessness can still render us objects, and not agents, in our own lives. In reading the The Bell Jar as Esther’s transformation towards agency, we can envision that previously mentioned safe and “imagined space” that Caminero-Santangelo pushes for: it is through the open door that we as women, like Esther, must decide to step through and, in doing so, choose to become agents over our own bodies and lives.

Works Cited Breines, Wini. Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female In the Fifties. Beacon Press Books, 1992.

Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwomen Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive.

Cornell University Press, 1998.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. 1963. Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2018.

An Insectile Existence: Existentialism in The Metamorphosis

By Audrey Bang No interpretation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is complete without the lens of existentialism. By considering the perspectives of scholars such as Albert Camus and Søren Kierkegaard, Gregor Samsa’s plight shifts from a mere ‘sad story’ to a philosophical call to arms.

The Metamorphosis demonstrates the need for existential philosophy by displaying the terrifying responsibility, absurdity, and brevity of life. In light of these existential concepts, like existence itself, narrative analysis apart from the ontological proves to be futile.

Contrary to the story’s title, The Metamorphosis is not a tale of change or transformation.

Despite the physical disparities between his human and insectified states, Gregor Samsa’s character remains extraordinarily ‘flat’ throughout the narrative. While lamenting the utter “agony” of his “exhausting profession,” he duly submits to his role as the provider for the family’s needs; he trudges “day in and day out on the road,” failing to contemplate life, purpose, or existence (Kafka 400). As the archetypal ‘good son’ and eldest brother, Gregor’s reactions are easy to predict. Even after the metamorphosis, his first thoughts fly to the five o’clock train, which Gregor must take for “[his] parents’ sake” (400). Gregor has no concept of self, nor of his personal convictions and values. By blindly devoting his life to the Samsa family, he forfeits the responsibility to create an individual identity. When confronted by a crisis not directly linked to his family’s well-being, Gregor’s immediate reaction is to wonder whether he can “go back to sleep for a little while and forget all this foolishness” (400). In a sense, the Samsa family also reflects this sentiment: they move and operate as a single unit, as “all three,” sit “all alone” in the electric tram (433). The critical difference, however, between Gregor and his family is that the latter become active. Sans Gregor, even the Samsas shift from a lethargic, “silent,” leech-like entity to boldly dismissing the lodgers, “swiftly [springing] to [their] feet” to make decisions (414, 433). Gregor’s flatness of character and philosophical negligence are thus interchangeable. He makes no attempt to escape, explain, or remedy his own condition. Even his final attempt to ‘help’ the Samsa family, suicide by hunger strike, is characterized by passivity.

From this existential perspective, Gregor’s physical transformation is less of a ‘metamorphosis’ than a manifestation of mental torpidity.

If Gregor’s metamorphosis is a mere reflection of existential irresponsibility, then this “manifestation” is logical and inevitable: it is anything but “absurd.” Existential absurdity does not refer to the unusual or ridiculous. On the contrary, according to philosopher Albert Camus, the “absurd” is “born of this confrontation” between human desires and “the unreasonable silence of the world” (“Albert Camus”). In Kafka’s world, Frau and Herr Samsa, deluded by “new dreams and good intentions,” are far more absurd than an anthropomorphic dung beetle (433). In the final passage of the novel, Kafka writes, “all three of them left the apartment together… cozily leaning back in their seats, they discussed their… promising opportunities for advancement” (433). The atmosphere of The Metamorphosis visibly shifts in this last paragraph. Throughout the story’s thirty-four pages, Kafka uses words such as “grievous,” “lamentable,” and “repulsive;” his diction, along with descriptions of the apartment’s “all too constant,” “infinitely long, dark gray” surroundings emphasize confinement, mundanity, and restlessness (422, 415, 407). In the final passage, however, words such as “blossomed” and “vivacious” mark the story’s “warm,” sunny mood (433). This passage is fatally optimistic. Like Gregor, Frau and Herr Samsa fail to realize that hope is futile: no amount of career promotions, new apartments, or auspicious marriages can supply a reason for being. With quiet irony, the family’s “promising opportunities” echo Gregor’s own impotent aspirations. He, too, once possessed “particular zeal”, rising “almost overnight from petty clerk to salesman,” showering the family with his “professional accomplishments” (414). Like dung beetles with feces, the Samsa family devours empty promises of financial comfort and social mobility. Neither Gregor’s parents, nor Grete wonder whether they will wake to find themselves transformed into monstrous insects; the possibility never crosses their minds. Though ignorance may appear to be bliss, happy endings do not exist in existential philosophy. Insects or not, like the rest of humanity, the Samsa family is already doomed to the irrationality of death.

Similarly, Gregor’s mundane and senseless existence is incredibly short-lived. While his family’s future continues past the novel’s end, Kafka conveys the whole of Gregor’s fears, hopes,

and aspirations in a matter of thirty-four pages. If Kafka merely wished to display the grotesque, conventional symbols, such as a rat or pig, would have been equally appropriate; however, Gregor’s state as a dung beetle emphasizes the brevity of life. Just as humans consider the lifespan of an insect to be inconsequential, human existence is a mere speck in the infinite sea of time. Kafka makes no mention of Gregor in the final passage, save to observe that “they now wished to take a smaller and cheaper but more convenient and above all more practical flat than their current one, which had been picked out for them by Gregor” (433). Just like the death of an insect, Gregor’s death affects no one.

Neither his parents nor his sister hail Gregor’s selfless deeds. No one cares. In keeping with existential philosophy, Kafka makes no mention of heaven or hell; he does not imply that Gregor is ‘in a better place’. Gregor’s absence from the final passage of The Metamorphosis conveys that death is final, that the concept of ‘legacy,’ one’s deeds outlasting one’s being, is a mere flight of fancy. Both physical and figurative immortalities are fantasy. Like Gregor’s absent corpse, no ‘ex-being’ is ever retrieved from the ontological dustbin.

Without the lens of existential philosophy, readers of The Metamorphosis lose a vital element of narrative—and, ultimately, a vital aspect of life itself. Far from a ‘happy ending,’ Kafka’s final passage proves that blissful complacency is a thing to be feared. An existentialist realizes that Frau and Herr Samsa are no better than their insectified son; on the contrary, all four characters are subject to the absurdity, liability, and transience of human existence. In the words attributed to philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, “life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced” (Leeuw). In an uncaring, irrational universe, Kafka’s readers stand at a crossroads: to either live as an individual or, like the Gregor and the Samsa family, submit to the delusions of an insectile pseudo-existence.

Works Cited “Albert Camus (1913—1960).” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://www.iep.utm.edu/camus/#SSH5ci.

Bausch, Richard, and R. V. Cassill. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Leeuw, Jacobus Johannes. The Conquest of Illusion. A.A. Knopf, 1928.

A “Bearable Weight”: The Normalization of the Intersex Body

By Erin Anderson

In Susan Bordo’s essay “Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body,” she

discusses the body using Foucauldian theories, adapted for examination though a feminist lens. Bordo posits that Foucault’s definition of power as a “network of practices, institutions, and technologies that sustain positions of dominance and subordination in a particular domain,” versus a single overarching entity, can be used to understand the historical and contemporary scrutiny of women’s bodies (746).

However, I will argue that intersex bodies are far more dangerously scrutinized, even with the decrease in non-consensual surgeries on infants, due to the issues of medicalization/demedicalization and residual trauma and stigma. I will also discuss the practice of medical treatment without consent as a human rights issue and how those involved with the intersex community (referred to as “social actors” by Tania Jenkins and Susan E. Short) have been attempting to reduce the harmful treatment of intersex bodies.

As Bordo argues, “’masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’ at least since the nineteenth century and

arguably before, have been constructed through a process of mutual exclusion” (751). So, when an infant is born who does not fit into one of two tidy, gendered boxes, the medical community declares a state of emergency (Jenkins & Short 94). In fact, intersex as a category is “rooted in the very idea of male and female” (Fausto-Sterling 19). Morgan Carpenter, founder of the Intersex Day Project, describes intersex as individuals being “born with sex characteristics that do not meet medical and social norms for female or male bodies,” and estimates that they comprise approximately 0.5 to 1.7% of the population, with over forty possible variations of sex characteristics (74). Yet, for more than half a century, babies born with what doctors considered ‘ambiguous’ genitalia were subjected to unnecessary surgery to ‘fix’ what we now know to be normal and naturally-occurring biological variations, which points to intersex as a social construct (Jenkins & Short 92). Up until the end of the 20th century, ill informed parents were coerced by medical professionals to surgically alter their infants’ genitals to fit into the sex binary of male/female. The practice of infant “gender-normalizing surgery” (Horowicz 186) was based on American psychologist John Money’s nurture theory. Money

argued that gender was malleable until the age of 18 months and advocated for doctors to decide what made the most sense surgically (Fausto-Sterling 20).

However, “as Thyen et al. argue biological sex, psychological factors, cultural, social and environmental influences all contribute to a child’s gender identity” (qtd. in Horowicz 186). It is no wonder, then, that many of Money’s patients and the patients of doctors who subscribed to Money’s ideas are still living with the negative consequences of the medicalization of intersexuality. However, medicalization is not inherently bad. Jenkins and Short define medicalization as “the process by which a condition becomes recognized and treated as a medical problem” and demedicalization as “the process by which a problem loses its medical definition and [therefore] solutions” (91). The pros and cons of medicalization versus demedicalization are still widely debated among the intersex community, medical professionals, and other social actors. While demedicalization may decrease the negative consequences associated with earlier treatment of individuals with intersex traits, it could also result in difficulty obtaining medical treatments for intersex individuals who seek medical intervention.

An example of a problematic aspect of the medicalization of intersexuality is the 2006 Chicago ‘consensus’ statement. The statement, issued by US medical professionals with little consultation from the intersex community, “framed intersex as ‘disorders of sex development’ [DSD]” (Carpenter 75). Carpenter adds: “the statement recommended caution on surgical treatment, but nevertheless facilitates such interventions. A 2016 follow-up statement does the same” (76).

The changing of clinical language without consent from the group it most directly affects only adds to the damage done. As such, the “shift to DSD never received widespread acceptance by intersex individuals, advocates and organisations…as the term is regarded as pathologising and poorly translatable,” Carpenter asserts, citing a 2016 survey of “Australians born with atypical sex characteristics” where “only 3% of respondents use DSD by choice” (77). However, Carpenter notes that the percentage is higher in individuals who use the term DSD when seeking medical attention, which reinforces the power of medicalization.

Despite recent improvements in the treatment of individuals with intersex traits, many adults

still carry scars—physical, mental, and emotional—of a time when surgery was the cultural norm.

Bordo reiterates Foucault’s ideas about the “intelligible body,” that it is made up of “our cultural conceptions of the body, norms of beauty, models of health, and so forth. But the same representations may also be seen as forming a set of practical rules and regulations…becoming…a socially adapted and ‘useful body’” (754). Previous aversion to gender ambiguity by the medical community, demonstrated through the prevalence of ‘normalizing’ surgeries performed (most often on infants), symbolized a cultural fear of the loss of the gender binary.

As Carpenter notes, this ‘normalizing’: “include[d] feminising and masculinising surgical and hormonal interventions, and gonadectomies, often during infancy, childhood and adolescence, before the recipient [could] consent and without firm evidence of necessity or good surgical outcomes” (75).

According to Davis and Wakefield, “intersex adults, who had their bodies surgically and hormonally modified as children, were left extremely scarred by such procedures and the absence of complete diagnosis disclosure,” including but not limited to “loss of sexual pleasure, emotional pain” (50).

John Money’s harmful approach even surpassed the intersex community. David Reimer, born Bruce Reimer, lost his penis as an infant after it was burned beyond repair during a routine circumcision. Coerced by Money’s authority as a medical professional and supposed expert in his field, Reimer’s parents agreed to raise their son Bruce as Brenda. The “John/Joan” case, as it was referred to by Money and his followers, was considered successful when Reimer’s parents reported back to Money that their “daughter” had come to enjoy feminine clothing and was used to justify surgical intervention on intersex infants. However, Reimer came to reject his gender assignment, changed his name to David, and eventually married a woman with children, becoming an adoptive step-father (Fausto-Sterling 20-21). In 2000, the same year Anne Fausto-Sterling published the revision to her 1993 essay, journalist John Colapinto published a book about Reimer. The book was based on an earlier article that had appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, called As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. Just over four years after the book’s release, Reimer took his own life. While Reimer’s courage to speak up about his maltreatment at the hands of a once-respected medical professional can be seen as one of the catalysts for the intersex human rights movement, his

scars ultimately would not heal, and his life ended tragically. While Reimer’s case may be extreme, many intersex individuals still live with residual trauma and scarring, physical or otherwise. Stigma also remains associated with intersex due to the past emphasis on nondisclosure.

In contrast to past views of intersex, findings from Davis and Wakefield’s relatively recent study (2017)—which sought to obtain qualitative data on the lived experiences of sixteen intersex American youth, and “relying on sociologist Barbara Risman’s (2004) gender structure theory as an empirical tool to understand and organize the experiences”—seem to suggest that the intersex youth who participated “are not deeply troubled by their diagnosis” (45-46). While history may cause us to doubt this claim, Davis and Wakefield argue that the shift can be attributed to gradual improvements in four main categories: “(1) embracing intersex, (2) diagnosis awareness and peer support, (3) response from friends and teachers, and (4) perception of providers” (53). These findings seem to suggest that decreased secrecy surrounding diagnosis and disclosure and reframing how intersex traits are perceived by the various social actors are integral to improving the quality of lived experiences of those individuals with intersex traits. The findings from Davis and Wakefield’s study also align with Carpenter’s argument that “the intersex human rights movement…goals are simple: the rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination, and an end to stigmatisation” (77).

Bordo argues in favour of “an analysis…of the mechanisms that shape and proliferate—rather than repress—desire, generate and focus our energies, construct our conceptions of normalcy and deviance” (747). I believe that Davis and Wakefields’ findings are evidence of preliminary analyses of intersex bodies, analogous to the ones Bordo commissioned for women’s bodies in her essay.

However, I would argue that while Bordo was correct when she called for an analysis of our cultural perception of bodies—and though that call can be applied to intersex bodies—her argument is short sighted in that it only addresses women, as if only women’s bodies are marked by culture. Bordo, while attempting to reconcile the tension between parody and possibility in gender expression, states that: “[when] explored as a possibility for the self, the ‘androgynous’ ideal ultimately exposes its internal contradiction and becomes a war that tears the subject in two” (751). Perhaps that is because there is a necessary division between gender and sex expression.

While progress has been made since Bordo’s essay was published, there is still a long road ahead. In 2016, only “Colombia, Australia, Germany…and Malta, [had] to date actively dealt with the legal status and entitlements of intersex children and persons,” despite United Nations (UN) recommendations (Greenberg qtd. in Ammaturo 592). Even in light of the forward movement of intersex advocacy, Carpenter, who is Australian (and intersex) themselves, points out that human rights violations continue, regardless of policy changes. Carpenter states: “Clitoral cutting is considered female genital mutilation, an abhorrent and harmful practice and a form of gender-based violence prohibited in many countries, yet exemptions may apply to intersex girls” (75). While I would venture the presumption that the majority of Western feminists would agree that female genital mutilation is an unacceptable practice, views on intersex bodies, and medical treatment of them, have only begun to change over the last twenty years or so.

Intersex activist Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) in 1993 in response to Fausto-Sterling’s essay “The Five Sexes,” and it was not until May 2000 that Chase was invited to speak to a panel of doctors who specialize in the area of paediatric hormones; in fact the American Academy of Pediatrics had denied her request to offer a patient’s perspective only a few years before (Fausto-Sterling 19). Fausto-Sterling’s discussion of Chase appears in her 2000 revision to the original essay, demonstrating the acceleration of the intersex movement.

Citing anthropologist Mary Douglas, Bordo positions the body as symbolic, “a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of a culture are inscribed and thus reinforced” (745). Nowhere is that statement more evident than on the bodies of intersex individuals. To extend Bordo’s argument in order to encompass a full spectrum of possible sex characteristics and combinations thereof, some words necessitate changing. I would rewrite her argument as follows: “[society] desperately need[s] an effective political discourse about the [intersex] body, a discourse adequate to an analysis of the insidious, and often paradoxical, pathways of modern [medical and] social control” (746). Many intersex adults still carry the trauma of nonconsensual medical interventions; however, research shows that the intersex youth of today generally

report more positive experiences than negative ones. And while the debate over medialization and demedicalization of intersexuality continues, thanks to the advocacy of social actors, including but not limited to patients, the UN and other human rights organizations, and even some medical professionals, there is reason to hope that the medical community, and society as a whole, is moving in the right direction.

Works Cited Ammaturo, Francesca R. “Intersexuality and the ‘Right to Bodily Integrity’: Critical Reflections on Female Genital Cutting, Circumcision, and Intersex ‘Normalizing Surgeries’ in Europe.”

Social & Legal Studies, vol. 25, no. 5, 2016, pp. 591-610.

Bordo, Susan. “Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan G. Gubar, W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, 745-756.

Carpenter, Morgan. “The Human Rights of Intersex People: Addressing Harmful Practices and Rhetoric of Change.” Reproductive Health Matters, vol. 24, no. 47, 2016, pp. 74-84.

Davis, Georgiann, and Chris Wakefield. “The Intersex Kids Are All Right? Diagnosis Disclosure and the Experiences of Intersex Youth.” Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Among Contemporary Youth Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, vol. 23, 24 Nov. 2017, pp. 43–65.

Fausto-Sterling, A. “The Five Sexes, Revisited.” The Sciences, vol. 40, no. 4, 2000, pp. 18-23.

Horowicz, Edmund M. “Intersex Children: Who are we really Treating?” Medical Law International, vol. 17, no. 3, 2017, pp. 183-218.

Jenkins, Tania M., and Susan E. Short. “Negotiating Intersex: A Case for Revising the Theory of Social Diagnosis.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 175, 2017, pp. 91-98.

Advance Directives for Medical Assistance in Dying: A Right, A Canadian Value and Regulated Process of Informed Consent

By Abbey Horner

In 2016, Bill C-14 was passed to legalize Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada.1 The bill denied advance requests for MAID, inserting a stipulation that the applicant must have the capacity to provide consent immediately prior to the procedure. In this paper, I argue that Canadian legislation should be changed to allow for advance directives for MAID. Canadian legislation currently provides a framework for this change: people can consent to death in advance through the refusal of treatment. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada held that laws which force people to take their own lives prematurely violate the right to life, liberty, and security of the person set out in section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.2 The current MAID legislation should be amended to allow health care proxies to make this decision, but informed consent should be introduced into advanced directive legislation of this nature.

Patients can already consent to death in advance under current legislation. If patients can refuse life-saving treatments, like ventilators, in advance of becoming incapacitated, they should also be able to request MAID in advance. There is no distinction between removing someone’s life support and injecting a drug that will kill them. Removing someone’s life support is not passive, as it is a physical act that results in the death of a person. Health care proxies can also request this cease of treatment for a patient. Under current legislation, however, only patients can request and consent to MAID, not substitute decision-makers. Health care proxies should be able to make a decision on behalf of an individual, in the event that the patient has not made an explicit decision. Having another person consent to you being injected with a drug is qualitatively the same as having them consent to you being taken off life support. Although advance requests for MAID are not currently allowed in Canada, the majority of the Canadian public believes that they should be.3 Advance request for MAID 1. House of Commons of Canada. “BILL C-14: An Act to Amend the Criminal Code and to Make Related Amendments to Other Acts (Medical Assistance in Dying).” 14 Apr. 2016.

2. Carter v Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, [2015] 1 SCR 331 [Carter].

3. Bozinoff, Lorne. “Canadians Favour Advance Consent in Assisted Dying.” The Forum Poll, Marketing Research and

not only aligns with Canadian legislation, but also with current Canadian values.

Current Canadian values align with the purpose of MAID legislation: to enhance the quality of life of vulnerable people, while protecting their rights. The laws prohibiting advance directives for physician-assisted dying interfere with the life, liberty, and security of the person who has a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.”4 In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada held that depriving some people of life by forcing them to take their own lives prematurely out of fear that they would be incapable of doing so could not be “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”5 The requirement to provide consent immediately before the procedure has forced people to end their lives prematurely, in fear of being unable to make the request at a later stage in their illness. Patients may also choose to reduce or refuse pain medication in fear they will be too impaired to provide final consent for MAID. For some, the pain associated with their medical condition is too great, and they must effectively abandon their request for MAID in order to manage their pain. Advance requests also provide comfort to individuals, as knowing that their lives will not end in a way that is against their lucidly-determined, wishes. The requirement to provide consent immediately before the procedure has led to unnecessary physical and psychological suffering, that, as the Supreme court has outlined in the Carter case, is a violation under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and cannot be saved under Section 1.6 People should be allowed to give advance consent to MAID, but not as an advance directive, as they currently exist in Canadian legislation. Allowing advance requests for assistance in dying is more than expressing wishes: it is providing advance consent. When people utilize what is often referred to as ‘advance directives’ to express wishes about medical treatment in advance, this is not an Intelligence Association, Apr. 2016, poll.forumresearch.com/post/2529/canadians-favour-advance-consent-in-assisteddying/.

4. Carter v Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, [2015] 1 SCR 331 [Carter].

5. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, s 15, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11, (QL) 6. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, s 15, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11, (QL)

informed consent process. Thus, people who complete advance directive documents are not required to inform themselves about any of the illnesses or treatments about which they express their wishes, nor are they required to discuss their wishes with health care professionals. The rules about advance directives also vary across the country and, therefore, when a patient wishes to consent to physicianassisted dying in advance, “the Advisory Group recommends that a standardized patient declaration form requesting physician-assisted dying be used instead of existing mechanisms.” 7Advance requests for MAID must be an informed consent process, as well as a standardized patient declaration, in order to ensure that vulnerable populations are best protected.

Some argue against advance directives for MAID on the grounds of personhood. For example, dementia can undermine qualities that define who a person is, their ability to think, recall memories, and communicate with others. Thus, raising the question: as someone loses their identity, are they still the same person? This person is likely to lose their memory of their wish to access MAID, and/ or may no longer wish to engage in MAID. While dementia patients and their differing personhood must be acknowledged, this can be done through informed consent. A dementia patient must be given information surrounding the particularities of their disorder, and they must be aware that they may change their minds, given the nature of their disease. This same degree of uncertainty exists with incapacitated patients refusing treatment, but is permitted under Canadian legislation.

Canadian legislation already provides a framework for advance directives. Current legislation should be changed to allow individuals to provide advance directives to MAID, and to allow family members or health care proxies to make this decision. While there are concerns that arise with advance directives for MAID, in order to protect the vulnerable and enhance the quality of life, it is imperative that advance directives are adapted and applied to MAID.

7. Provincial-Territorial Expert Advisory Group. “Provincial-Territorial Expert Advisory Group on Physician-Assisted Dying.” The Parliament of Canada, 30 Nov. 2015.

Works Cited Bozinoff, Lorne. “Canadians Favour Advance Consent in Assisted Dying.” The Forum Poll, Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, Apr. 2016, poll.forumresearch.com/post/2529/ canadians-favour-advance-consent-in-assisted-dying/.

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, s 15, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c 11, (QL) Carter v Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5, [2015] 1 SCR 331 [Carter].

House of Commons of Canada. “BILL C-14: An Act to Amend the Criminal Code and to Make Related Amendments to Other Acts (Medical Assistance in Dying).” 14 Apr. 2016.

Provincial-Territorial Expert Advisory Group. “Provincial-Territorial Expert Advisory Group on Physician-Assisted Dying.” The Parliament of Canada, 30 Nov. 2015.

The Master’s Image of Africa: Achebe and Lorde on Language and the Literary Canon

By R. Kaitlin Watson

Audre Lorde and Chinua Achebe are two prominent figures in literature, as well as race studies.

Lorde in “The Master’s Tools” argues that the feminist movement needs to take a more intersectional approach to systems of oppression. Rather than a hierarchy of suffering, systems of oppression need to be understood as an interlocking system where each affects the other. Achebe reacts to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in “An Image of Africa,” specifically to Conrad’s blatant racism, and a need for African literature. The Western literary canon has, for a long time, consisted of mainly men, who are considered universal writers and thinkers. While many of them are outstanding writers, there is more to literature than Europe. Achebe creates his own literary canon in “An Image of Africa” to illustrate this. His most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, also illustrates a very different Africa than the Africa portrayed by Conrad. Conrad’s image of Africa was accepted by the masses because it was the dominant illustration of Africa from the time Heart of Darkness was published, in 1899, until the twentieth century. For Lorde, minority groups cannot rely on the oppressor to change the literary canon, the oppressed have to take it upon themselves to change the canon. This essay will argue that until recently, the master’s tools have only told the master’s story. The changing social and political world of the twentieth-century led to changes in literature and theory as well, which in turn led to new stories being told, and old stories finally being heard.

Many examples of the master’s story exist in the world of literature, but this essay will deal specifically with Conrad’s representation of Africa in Heart of Darkness as the master’s story.

Conrad deliberately sets up Africa as “the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization” (Achebe, “Image” 1614). Colonialism and imperialism are just two of the master’s tools in the master’s world.

Even though Heart of Darkness takes place in Congo, the lives of European characters are the dominant stories in the novella. There is no need to search for other representations of Africa, because the dominant class is well represented in Conrad’s picture of Africa. Language, specifically, in this situation, English, is the tool of the colonizers in Africa, and therefore, what Lorde calls the master’s tool. When the colonizers arrive in Africa, their first colonial responsibility is to teach the native

population their language. In the process, native Africans are forced to abandon their own language, and their own story. Conrad uses language in Heart of Darkness to “constitute some of his best assaults” on the native population” (Achebe, “Image” 1617). English is used twice by the Congolese: “the first occurs when cannibalism gets the better of them”, and the second when Mr. Kurtz dies (Achebe, “Image” 1617). The first instance of English being used by one of the Congolese reinforces Conrad’s theme of European dominance, and African savagery. Cannibalism is taboo, and English is used in this situation to explicitly articulate the dominance of European culture over African culture.

The second instance, when one of the Congolese slaves announces that Kurtz has died, implies that Kurtz, a European, was a dominant figure in his life. The slave in this situation exists only to announce the death of his master. Conrad is the master, Heart of Darkness is his story, and English is his tool.

Language, and writing especially, is one of the master’s tools that can be employed by those other than the master to fight his power. Achebe was born Albert, but during university, changed his name to the shortened version of his Nigerian name, Chinualumogu (Damrosch 906). His name, his identity is a rejection of the master’s story. He forsakes his Christian name, and therefore, the religion of colonialism for the native culture and identity his people were forced to abandon during the scramble for Africa. His most famous novel, however, Things Fall Apart, employs the master’s tool of language throughout. The title of the novel itself comes from W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” (Achebe, Things 910). This is an indication of Achebe’s history as a part of colonial society.

He is educated in traditional English literature, as well as his own Nigerian culture. Despite this, “The Second Coming” is not about the ‘glory’ of colonial society, but about that society literally falling apart. The second part of Things Fall Apart is about Igbo society falling apart at the hands of colonialism, but Achebe sheds new light on the harsh realities of colonialism. The master’s story is “the centre cannot hold” (Yeats 3). Furthermore, “what happens to the African languages in the situation where [Africans] are writing” in the language of the master, the colonizer (Searle 159)?

Achebe not only uses the language of the colonizer, but Igbo as well. At the beginning of the novel, there is a section with the translations of Igbo terms used throughout Things Fall Apart. His use of Igbo draws his readers’ attention to the culture and language lost as a result of colonialism, since the

Igbo terms are so scarce throughout the novel. He keeps his own language alive. Achebe uses the master’s tools to de-construct his story, and to tell his own.

Lorde, on the other hand, does not believe that “the master’s tools will ever dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde, “Master’s” 27). His tools “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde, “Master’s” 27). The master’s tools are used to write his story, and if not to erase the stories of others, than to at least hide them from sight. Colonialism, which Achebe criticizes and analyzes in Things Fall Apart, as well in “An Image of Africa,” is the master’s best tactic for elevating his own story above those he deems lesser human beings. It is not the reinvention of the uses of the master’s tools that will dismantle his house, but “the creative use of difference that will help us really move toward change” (Kraft 153).

Since the master’s tools are used to separate people into classes and groups, only the recognition of those classes and groups will dismantle his house. In telling the stories of those misrepresented, underrepresented, and those not represented at all, the master’s story becomes obsolete, or at least less effective. In “developing and forming an art and literature that speaks to [their] needs,” people underrepresented in literature, art, and society no longer need the master’s tools (Kraft 151). They instead create their own.

How though, is it possible to break from the master’s tools when they are so engrained in society? For Lorde, “the law is defined as male and white” (Nolte 143). The master’s tools rely on the structures of patriarchy and racism. These tools are not easy to break away from, and are found constantly in the master’s, as well as in the slave’s story. In Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness, women are second-class citizens to men. They exist in their relationship to men, and in Things Fall Apart, their relationship to Okonkwo’s children. These structures have remained in place because of the silence on behalf of women and people of colour. Women and people of colour “share a commitment to language and to the power of language” (Lorde, “Transformation” 43). It is language and its power that has kept them so long in the background of the master’s story, rather than as active and central figures. “In the transformation of silence into language and action,” women and people of colour reclaim their place in the master’s story, and begin to tell their own (Lorde, “Transformation”

43). This transformation allows for the break from the master’s tools. Or does it?

Achebe takes action in “An Image of Africa” against Conrad’s racism. “An Image of Africa” is also a criticism of the Western World and its quick belief of what Conrad says about Africa. Achebe “will not trust the evidence even of a man’s very eyes when [he suspects] them to be as jaundiced as Conrad’s” (Achebe, “Image” 1620). This is one of his reasons for writing Things Fall Apart as well as “An Image of Africa.” That is not to say that the master is forbidden from telling the stories of others, but those stories will always be told on behalf of the master’s prejudice and conceptions of the other.

Achebe writes his own story of Africa because “[the] same story told by two different people will be almost two different stories” (Searle 155). Both he and Conrad deal with the scramble for Africa, but their stories and interpretations of the event differ on human and ideological levels. Lorde asks in “The Master’s Tools” what it means, “when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy” (25)? She and Achebe take an intersectional approach to the Western literary canon. They examine literature from the perspective of the slave rather than the master. This action has led to the changing of the literary canon. As such, Lorde and Achebe are now studied as university texts. However, Conrad and other problematic figures are still being taught, and many students and teachers alike remain ignorant to feminist and racial discourses. The transformation identified by Lorde has allowed Achebe to emerge as a writer worthy of being in the canon, but the canon itself is still one of the master’s tools. Simply being acknowledged by higher learning facilities does not eradicate the fundamental differences between writers like Conrad and Achebe. Achebe and Lorde agree that there is still a lot of work to be done before “the storyteller, the people and the force of ideas are working together in harmony” (Searle 159).

Chinua Achebe writes Things Fall Apart as the colonial system in Africa is falling apart. “An Image of Africa,” published first in 1975, identifies the problems with past representations of Africa, specifically that of Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s racism and position in European society makes him the master of his story, and the master of the portrayal of Africa for many years.

Achebe’s reaction to Heart of Darkness is that, while it is a brilliant literary piece, it constructs a dangerous idea of what Africa and Africans are like. A few years later, Audre Lorde gives her speech

“The Master’s Tools.” In it, she identifies the differences between tolerance and action regarding race and feminist issues, and how they are intertwined. She does not believe that women can live in peace with patriarchy and racism, but that the two structures need to be torn down. Lorde and Achebe’s ideas about race and culture are very similar. The master’s tools have for so long told the master’s story because it has not been challenged, but lived with in supposed harmony. Achebe uses Igbo in Things Fall Apart to draw his audience’s attention to language as one of the master’s tools. Africans to this day speak the languages of their colonizers, and have as a result, lost a lot of their native cultures and tongues. Achebe’s name and identity even echo his family’s and country’s colonial past.

Lorde identifies the silence of women and people of colour as a reason the master’s story has not been challenged. Marginalized groups need to speak up and tell their own story, rather than live in the background of the master’s. But simply joining the Western literary canon does not necessarily change anything. The canon itself is a tool of the Western world, in order to deem certain works worthy of criticism and study, and others not. Emerging as a member of the canon, however, has allowed for the stories of marginalized groups to finally be heard. This may be the first step in tearing down the master’s house, and building in its place a diverse community of writers and stories, never before heard from or seen.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism: Second Edition, edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al. New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2010. Pp. 1612-1623 Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart from Gateways to World Literature: Volume 2, edited by David Damrosch. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2012. Pp. 908-989 Damrosch, David. Gateways to World Literature: Volume 2. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2012.

Kraft, Marion. “The Creative Use of Difference” from Conversations with Audre Lorde, edited by Joan Wylie Hall. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Pp. 146-153 Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” from This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983. Pp. 25-28 Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: The Crossing Press, 1984. Pp. 40-44 Nolte, Dorothee. “The Law is Male and White: Meeting with the Black Author, Audre Lorde” from Conversations with Audre Lorde, edited by Joan Wylie Hall. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Pp. 143-145 Searle, Chris. “Achebe and the Bruised Heart of Africa” from Conversations with Chinua Achebe, edited by Bernth Lindfors. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Pp. 155-164 Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming” from The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Ninth Edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2013. Pp. 24812482

Purity Movements and Girlhood

By Faith Clark The 2008 documentary The Virgin Daughters, directed by Jane Treays, follows a variety of young women as they prepare for the annual father-daughter purity ball in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This purity ball, like so many others that take place across the United States every year, represents the culmination of the Evangelical Christian American purity movement, wherein girls as young as five vow to remain sexually pure until heterosexual marriage, pledging their virginities to their fathers, who, in turn, pledge to protect their daughters’ chastity until that time when they transfer that duty to their husbands. Although purity movements in various forms have existed since the late nineteenth-century, these modern manifestations have increased in popularity over the last two decades. This essay will argue that the purity movement, as an ideology, seeks to turn the female body into a fearful, ashamed, and traumatized entity in order to maintain established social structures, with little regard for the actual purity of the girl. Through an analysis of the works of leading figures in the field of feminist scholarship on the purity movement, Elizabeth Gish and Carly Matas, this essay will examine the potential social, physical, and psychological damages that the purity movement has on its female participants, while also investigating the possible benefits to offering abstinence education to young women.

Before beginning, it must be acknowledged that the purity movement is very much rooted in white Evangelical Christian communities and organizations, where, as Elizabeth Gish asserts in her essay “Are You a Trashable Styrofoam Cup?,” “white girls are upheld as the ideal embodiment of sexual purity” (Gish, TSC 6). In the United States, families with a heterosexual mother and father, who are married and living together with biological children—all of which are key pillars in Evangelical Christian teachings—are more likely to be white and middle class, which promotes the marginalization of those girls who are from nonwhite, poor, and/or queer families (Gish, TSC 9). As an example of this marginalization, Gish writes in “Producing High Priests and Princesses” that “when purity balls are held in communities of colour, the ‘father-daughter’ aspect of the ball is often muted,” highlighting the stereotype that all girls of colour come from “broken homes” (Gish, PHPP 4). Further,

there is a strong emphasis on Disney princesses within the purity movement, which have a long-standing tradition of being raced and classed in very specific ways to the exclusion of any girl who does not fit the white and wealthy princess ideal (Gish, PHPP 11). This essay would like to recognize the raced, classed, and queer aspects of exclusion in the Christian American purity movement, and specify that this essay will examine only the potential harms done to the white, middle class, heterosexual female body.

The harms done to young women at the hands of the purity movement, in terms of socialization of girls and society at large, can be broken down into two interrelated categories: consumerism and maintaining existing social structures. Gish quotes one of the leading figures in the movement, Pamela Stenzel, saying, “Does it work? You know what? Doesn’t matter… My job is not to keep teenagers from having sex… Our job should be to tell kids the truth!” (Gish, PHPP 2). The purity movement is not explicitly about maintaining female chastity; rather, it is about selling a product— the movement’s religious message—to maintain the proper order of “relationships as ordained by God,” and to exclude the aforementioned identities (Gish, PHPP 14). This emphasis on consumerism through the emergence of a sexual purity industry, promoting ongoing investment in “purity supplies, such as jewelry and purity guides, and attending events such as purity balls or rallies,” makes sexual purity under these terms accessible to only a select few (Gish, TSC 17). Girls are figuratively and literally being sold the concept of sexual purity, instilling in them the belief that they can become ideal girls through consuming material products, placing their value in the products rather than their own identities. Girls are taught to believe that they are exhibiting proper femininity and sexual purity by wearing nice dresses and tiaras that are selected by their fathers, and showing off their purity in public displays such as the purity balls. As Gish quotes from one of the purity ball websites, “your daughter will see how much you value her when you dress up and take her out for an entire evening” (Gish, PHPP 11). Purity balls have been “popularized by media outlets;” like many other things in our society, they have started “trending,” and now everyone wants to get in on them (Gish, PHPP 4).

This detracts from the supposed purpose of the balls, and instead, makes it entirely about the public displays of purity.

Because of the importance of consumerism, the purity movement is able to promote sexual purity under the guise of abstinence and sexual risk avoidance with little resistance from within the movement. A quick Google search of “purity movement” brings up hundreds of personal blog pieces with titles such as “I Survived the Purity Movement,” “How Evangelical Purity Culture Can Lead to A Lifetime of Sexual Shame,” and “Evangelical Purity Movement Sees Women’s Bodies as A Threat.” There are clearly some obvious problems with the movement, and yet, young women are only able to recognize this once they are no longer at the center of it. The purity balls are meant to sound as fun and appealing as possible to girls so that religious communities can “publicly affirm their theologies and accompanying practices related to sexual purity” to willing audiences (Gish, PHPP 4).

However, when girls start going to these events at five years old, they are not able to fully understand what is going on; they just want to wear a pretty dress and obey their fathers’ wishes. These girls are not yet capable of making their own decisions or fully grasping what they are submitting to—fiveyear-olds do not understand sexuality in the same ways teenagers do—and so, in this way, the purity movement becomes almost exclusively about maintaining patriarchal systems where daughters look to their fathers—or, the Father—for guidance. The purity balls “provide a context for performing and continuing the process of producing sex and gender in ways that diminish the full humanity” of girls and women (Gish, PHPP 10). As Matas states in “Modern American Evangelical Conceptions of Girls’ Virginity,” “virginity’s main role in Biblical times was a guarantee… of the [male] ownership of a woman [which] makes virginity more of a property issue than a purity one” (Matas 36).

Yet, Evangelical Christians of today have carried this belief forward into modern times, constructing virginity in terms of purity and morality, rather than outright property. However, by encouraging girls to be passive in their sexual development, allowing fathers to choose a husband upon which to bestow their power, and framing the father-daughter relationship as “one that replaces girls’ romantic relationships,” issues surrounding virginity and purity remain largely about ownership, albeit in more subtle ways (Gish, PHPP 8-9). These girls are not capable of making their own decisions or displaying any kind of agency because they have never been permitted to establish or explore their own beliefs and desires. As Elizabeth Baker asserts in her article “I Was Victimized by The Purity Movement,” “it was about control. It was never about purity. It was never about what was best for me and my spiritual

development. It was never about my future marriage. It was about control of my body and the pursuit of political power” (Baker). In the modern age of sexual freedom and political liberation for all people, the purity movement, with the help of consumerist ideologies, enables families to construct their female children’s identities in terms of acceptable feminine standards of the past.

While the social harms done to participants of the purity movement can be obscure in many ways, the potential physical harms are far more explicit. It is no surprise that the purity movement, as an extension of abstinence-only sex education programs, does not deter young girls from exploring their sexualities, and actually places them more at-risk for sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy than girls outside of the movement because of an utter lack of education surrounding safe sex practices (Gish, TSC 7). Young people within the movement are encouraged to abstain from all sexual activities before heterosexual marriage, from penetrative penile-vaginal intercourse right down to hand holding (Gish, TSC 7). But, of course, simply being a part of this movement does not eliminate the hormones and curiosity that are present in every other teenager in America. While the movement asserts that health risks stem directly from the sexual act itself, the reality is that young people are more susceptible to risk when they are not permitted to explore their sexuality in educated, stigma-free manners. In “How Evangelical Purity Culture Can Lead to A Lifetime of Sexual Shame,” Stephanie Dubick reveals that “many women who grow up in purity culture and eventually begin having sex report experiencing an involuntary physical tightening of the vagina—also known as vaginismus—that is linked to a fear of penetrative sex and makes intercourse extremely painful” (Dubick).

Thus, aside from the potential risks of STIs and unplanned pregnancies as a result of a lack of education, the patriarchal values and constant shame that are engrained into young girls within the purity movement can actually manifest in physical ways that carry forward into their adult lives, regardless of whether the kind of sex they are having aligns with Christian teachings or not.

On top of the social and physical harms caused by the purity movement’s teachings, which manifest in outward manners, the psychological damage done to young girls is much subtler but no less detrimental to girls’ sexual development. Gish argues that the emphasis on becoming the “ideal subject” impairs the construction of a coherent self-identity in girls (Gish, PHPP 1). Girls in the

purity movement are not able to construct a clear identity for themselves because their identities are so tied up in other people’s expectations of them. When girls’ sexual identities are always constructed in terms of vulnerability and the need for protection from other people, girls are not permitted to grow into anything else. They are placed into this one box of sexual purity, with the constant threat of harm looming over them if they choose to step outside of that box, so there is never the option to develop a healthy sexual relationship with oneself or one’s partner. As Gish quotes, “great sex in marriage is promised to those who wait. Sex is no longer a taboo to be avoided but the prize to be earned… that makes it seem like a secure investment with a guaranteed high rate of return” (Gardner in Gish, TSC 15). But what if sex is not great once they are married? They either go a lifetime not knowing what they enjoy because they have no experience to the contrary, or they feel like they have failed in some way because they did what they were told—they waited—but their “prize” was not worth it. To quote a purity manual: “In your dating relationships, are you a ‘trashable’ Styrofoam cup, an everyday ceramic mug that is easily replaceable, or a valuable priceless teacup?” (Gish, TSC 16). By framing the possibilities for girls as this limited, the purity movement not only psychologically impairs their ability to form comfortable identities, but it also conveys to girls that their value rests solely upon whether or not they “retain their sexual purity as a ‘gift’ to a future husband,” effectively turning them into objects to be produced by and transacted between men rather than full human beings with agency of their own (Gish, TSC 16). In terms of the objectification of women, it is interesting that, “in Old Testament times, an intact hymen carried legal implications in the marriage transaction between the father of the bride and the husband to be … If the hymen is broken, the ‘product’ has been tampered with” (Conaway in Gish, TSC 17). Not only are girls being conditioned to exist within a consumerist world, as discussed above, but they are also constructed as the products to be consumed. Dubick asserts that “based on our nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia, one might think that my childhood friends and I had been to war… And in fact, we had. We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church” (Dubick). Girls of the purity movement are negotiating their way between being told to never express their sexualities outside of marriage, while constantly being a sexualized object traded between men.

With all that being said, Matas does acknowledge that there is some value in offering, not abstinence-only education, but abstinence as “part of a continuum of options open to adolescents as they grow into their sexual selves” (Matas 44). Just as teaching them that they should not be doing it does not actually stop them from participating in sexual activities, teaching abstinence amongst many other options will not promote doing it, but will identify with some individuals who want to make that choice. Education curriculums and religious teachings need to stop making the decisions for adolescents, and instead, present every option in an unbiased and informative manner, allowing those young people to make the choice that is right for their unique selves. Researchers have found that making an abstinence pledge can actually be meaningful for adolescents when they have full agency over the decision; it becomes a personal pledge, rather than the public one that the purity movement promotes, “based out of personal conviction rather than external pressure” (Matas 44). Young people, like everyone else, want to know that they have the freedom to choose what to do with their bodies. When abstinence is taught alongside a multitude of other acceptable options, adolescents do not need to “rebel” against a lifetime of abstinence-only education and can, instead, make informed, healthy choices about their sexual activities, or lack thereof. The purity movement, in its pursuit of abstinence as the only acceptable option, effectively constructs the female adolescent body as a site of fear, shame, and confusion, stealing her agency and reducing her to someone with an incoherent identity and trauma to last a lifetime.

Works Cited Baker, Elizabeth. “I Was Victimized by The Purity Movement.” Scary Mommy, https://www .scarymommy.com/survived-purity-movement/. Accessed 9 February 2019.

Dubick, Stephanie. “How Evangelical Purity Culture Can Lead to A Lifetime of Sexual Shame.” Broadly, 16 October 2018, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/pa98x8/purity-culture-linday-kay-klein-pure-review. Accessed 9 February 2019.

Gish, Elizabeth. “‘Are You a Trashable Styrofoam Cup?’ Harm and Damage Rhetoric in the Contemporary American Sexual Purity Movement.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 34, no. 2, 2018, pg. 5-22.

Gish, Elizabeth. “Producing High Priests and Princesses: The Father-Daughter Relationship in the Christian Sexual Purity Movement.” Religions, vol. 7, no. 3, 2016, pg. 1-22.

Matas, Carly. “Modern American Evangelical Conceptions of Girls’ Virginity: Their Origins in Patriarchal Property Discourse of Deuteronomic Family Laws.” Denison Journal of Religion, vol. 12, no. 4, 2013, pg. 35-48.

Treays, Jane. “The Virgin Daughters.” YouTube, 15 July 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watc h?v=3mhez8t8Ifs. Accessed 9 February 2019.