Semicolon

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FALL 2017 FALL 2017

VOLUME 5

ISSUE 1

FA L L 2 0 1 7

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 USC assume no liability for any errors, inaccuracies, or omissions contained in this publication.

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AN ARTS AND HUMANITIES STUDENTS’ COUNCIL PUBLICATION

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR From my first day on the AHSC Publications team, my life changed in a number of small but perceptible ways. Arriving at my first team meeting felt alarmingly similar to stepping out of my car on the first day of school. I was nervous. I was eager. I was searching for something I didn’t know I was missing yet. Somehow, I was lucky enough to find it here. Whether it was the constant support and friendship of my team, the incredible creativity and talent you too will be graced with in these pages, or simply the space to express myself, these publications quickly became very special to me, a little bit like magic (if you’ll excuse my chronic corniness). So, if Symposium or Semicolon showcased your hard work and talent or you were able to recognize a piece of yourself in these pages, then I can only hope we have been able to create something a little bit like magic for you too here.

Areesa Kanji Editor-in-Chief

W H AT W E ’ R E A B O U T Symposium is made of a collection of short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry that are original, inventive, well-written, and allow for a variety of personal interpretations. Symposium accepts creative work from any Arts and Humanities undergraduate student within the University of Western Ontario.

Symposium 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 Donation 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 Symposium, please contact the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council in Room 0N20D in the International and Graduate Affairs Building.

Editor-in-Chief VP Communications Academic Managing Editor Creative Managing Editor Copy Editor Layout Editor

Areesa Kanji Hannah Stanley Roshana Ghaedi Joshua Thompson-Persaud Aislyn Higgens Sofia Berger

SPECIAL THANKS TO THE PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE: Lauren O’Donnell, Megan Levine, Julia Sebastien, Camille Intson, Faith Clark

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“ N O T O R D I N A R Y, N O T U N O R D E R E D I N N O T R E S E M B L I N G ” : T H E Q U E E R N E S S O F TENDER BUTTONS

By Emily Kingsmill In Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, the titles that divide each section of “Objects” establish expectations, prompting the reader to visualize the object or image at hand, but the ensuing text dismantles those pre-conceived notions entirely. The reader is forced to compare their own mental image of the object with the abstract words on the page which are meant to represent that same object. This process brings about several recognitions: that there is a human desire to identify, define, and categorize our surroundings; that everyone has a different perception of the same surroundings; and finally, that not everything or everyone can be identified, defined, or categorized.

Tender Buttons stakes a claim for indeterminacy, resisting definitive meaning and disrupting normativity in language, gender, and sexuality.

Queer theory offers a useful approach to Stein’s writing because it is a paradigm focused on challenging heteronormativity and dramatizing “incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender, and desire” (Jagose 3). Queer theory unsettles dominant ideologies in the same way that Tender Buttons disrupts the normativity of everyday objects, by defamiliarizing the familiar and making the coherently mundane dramatically incoherent. The word “queer” is definitionally indeterminate, and likewise, Stein’s writing notoriously eludes a definitive meaning. Queer theory is applicable to Stein’s idiosyncratic style and it is also relevant to her personal life because she was in a same-sex relationship with Alice Toklas for several decades, which influenced her work significantly. The dramatic incoherencies of Tender Buttons celebrate the fluidity of language. Similarly, queer theory celebrates the fluidity of gender and sexuality.

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick gives credence to the notion that Stein’s sexuality informs her work, arguing that Stein’s prose is concerned with “constructing and reconfiguring narratives about female identities, lesbian desire, and domestic space” (9). She posits that Tender Buttons is both an experiment in the possibilities of language and an analysis of gender relations (19). Marchiselli notes that although Stein would likely not use the word “queer” to describe her project, “she clearly meant to redress the inequalities produced through conventional language” and that Stein disliked patriarchy despite her rejection of political feminism (83). Stein’s writing apprehends the social politics embedded in everyday speech, seeking to evade heteronormative language (73) with the recognition that “dismissing certain kinds of communication as ‘mere chatter’ involves power and privilege” (81). Tender Buttons endorses the artistic merit of chatter by

attributing value “to sounds otherwise discarded, to the abject noise associated with feminine speech and domestic spaces” (81). The acclamation of homosocial feminine speech is a declaration of pride and a dynamic affirmation that nobody should be disregarded because of their sexuality or gender.

Alice Toklas was one of many voices contributing to the chatter in Stein’s domestic realm.

Chani Anine Marchiselli reveals that Stein and Toklas’ apartment “became a space for some of the conversational sounds associated with avant-garde modernism. There, [they] hosted a salon frequented by a variety of writers, artists, and eccentrics… Tender Buttons speaks to and from this milieu, in its sociability, intimacy, and self-satisfied orality” (80). Stein’s progressive social sphere furnished her depiction of “queer domesticity,” and it provided a backdrop for a distinctly feminist subtext as Stein foregrounds conventionally feminine patterns of communication, venerating the sounds of her household and its guests (81).

Allusions to gender and sexuality emerge frequently throughout “Objects” in the everyday sounds and images of Stein and Toklas’ hospitable home.

There is an abundance of conventional signs of femininity and a relative scarcity of traditional masculinity in the text which establishes an atmosphere that is, at the very least, homosocial, if not homosexual. Most of the pronouns used throughout are feminine. The only names of individual people that are mentioned in “Objects” are traditionally feminine names: Mildred (718) and Pauline (724). Moreover, when people are mentioned without being named, they are often referred to exclusively in terms that relate to their sexual identity or relationship status, such as the virgin featured in the section titled “IN BETWEEN” (724), or the widow in “A CHAIR” (721). The virgin is described as “judged” and “made” which exemplifies that virginity is a socially constructed concept with connotations of morality attached to it. “Widow” is a gendered term, and so it is a signification of both gender and sexuality, which are the only distinguishable characteristics disclosed about most of the people in “Objects.” By identifying people in such terms, Stein draws attention not only to the performativity and social construction of gender and sexuality but also to the ways in which they affect our identities and experiences.

Another instance of the performativity of gender can be found in “SUPPOSE AN EYES” where a male soldier wears lace (725), a fabric that is conventionally delicate and feminine, which blurs gender norms in a particularly queer fashion. The image of “EYES” in the title of that section also recalls an earlier mention of masculinity in “A CUTLET,” that “a blind agitation is manly and uttermost” (722). The two sections are linked—not only through gender, with “manly” and the masculine pronouns used to refer to the soldier—but also through perception (or lack thereof), with “blind” and “EYES.” This double connection indicates that gender has a profound influence on perception, both in terms of the way that one perceives and the way that one is perceived. There is also a sexual connotation in “a blind agitation” as “agitation” could potentially refer to either a state of nervous excitement, or the action of briskly stirring or disturbing something. Moreover, “A CUTLET” is quite literally “a piece of meat,” which is a colloquialism that reduces people to their sexual

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organs. “SUPPOSE AN EYES” also features people as pieces of meat, as “little sales ladies little sales ladies” flows seamlessly into “little saddles of mutton,” comparing women to the flesh of sheep that is meant for eating, which is possibly an allusion to oral sex. Goodspeed-Chadwick asserts that “Stein gestures to structures and patterns of identity, apparently viewing them as sources of value, while also dismantling and refashioning possibilities for naming, claiming, and being in literature and in the world” (15). Stein reconfigures normative ontological notions of the ways in which sexuality and gender operate on identity through her unconventional use of language.

Many of the objects named in the text are articles of clothing that are feminine either by design (such as “A LONG DRESS,” “A PURSE,” “A PETTICOAT,” and “A SHAWL”) or by flamboyancy of colour (such as “A RED HAT,” “A BLUE COAT,” and “COLORED HATS”). Michael Moon notes that the fondness for bright colours has been perceived as an affliction and a moral failing that has often been ascribed throughout the modern period to sensuous women, children, and “primitives” of “all stripes” (qt. in Batchelor 15-17). The recurrent appearance of colours throughout Tender Buttons is comparable to the re-appropriation of the word “queer” in that they both extol what has been traditionally denigrated. Even when colours are not specified precisely, they nonetheless play an important role in shaping our perception of the object. For example, Goodspeed-Chadwick notes that “PURSE” encourages us to think about how we construe reality through language because we are never told what colour the purse is—only that it is neither green nor the colour of straw.

Thus, there are many more possibilities for what colour this purse could be than what it is not (18) which relates to the unlimited potentiality put forth in queer theory.

The celebration of identity through the liberal use of colour, whether intentional or not, seems to contradict Margaret Dickie’s argument that Stein was “less interested in freeing language from patriarchal structures and more concerned with manipulating language to cover up meaning that might become too explicit for the taboo subject of lesbian eroticism, which was her central concern” (3-4). Dickie goes on to claim that Stein’s persistent use of the words “dirt” and “dirty” in “Objects” indicates the author’s ambivalent feelings about her lifestyle, and that the recurrent theme of uncleanliness introduces “a severe, and unbalancing, judgment” which undercuts the text’s celebration of lesbian desire (13). This argument does not survive investigation since the word “dirt” (and its variants) only appears eight times throughout “Objects” while the word “clean” occurs ten times in the text. The cleanliness outweighs the dirtiness, rendering Dickie’s argument invalid. Goodspeed-Chadwick contends that Stein cannot “be held up as the sole author in (re)defining a term

steeped in identity politics. And yet, Stein does contribute in important discursive ways to our contemporary understanding of queerness, and she demonstrates, likely unwittingly (due to her own sense of biology and psychology), that gender and sexuality are performative behaviours” (14-15). Therefore, although it may be unlikely that Stein consciously used colours and cleanliness to represent her sexuality, these themes certainly influence readings of her work today.

The titles that divide “Objects” into sections are significant because, as Brian Glavey argues, “aesthetic form … functions both as a means to shore up provisional identities and to help us escape from them entirely” (3). The recurring rifts between titles and their respective sections repeatedly highlight “the fact that titles refer to texts, that words point to things in the world. Many of the puzzling titles directly invoke such intentionality, gesturing with indexical or deictic references,” (30) but Stein’s words point wildly around the room, refusing to settle or land on any specific object. Deixis refers to words that cannot be fully understood without context, and Stein’s deictic gesturing appears impossible to understand because she does not provide a clear and stable context—the enigma is left unsolved for the reader to ponder. The aesthetic form is invaluable because “it allows us to pay attention to the specificity of something and to look beyond it at one and the same time—to see something as itself and as something else” (171). The form is thus a type of “productive confusion” because we have learned to treat misrecognitions as incoherent, but form also provides the opportunity to “rethink the notion of coherence itself ” (166-67). The titles in “Objects” are formal structures that serve to further dramatize the incoherencies of the textual content.

Marchiselli observes that “Tender Buttons uses repetition as a way to hold open the possibility of multiple meanings. … Stein repeats headings and subheadings but with variations that refuse to fix meanings” (78). For instance, there are two sections in “Objects” that are titled “A BOX” which offers the potential for multiple interpretations.

Evidently, they are meant to be two separate sections or else they might have been combined in the editing process. But it is not clear whether the two sections refer to the same box or two separate boxes, whether the box is open or sealed, whether the sections describe the actual or imagined contents of the box, and so on. As Goodspeed-Chadwick asserts, Stein’s titling practices “encourage us to grapple with how we understand names as markers of identifications, even though these names signify identities that are always in flux, in terms of language and representation and in terms of changing entities in the real world” (9). The title of the text itself, Tender Buttons, also refuses to fix itself to a single determinate meaning. It could be read as an allusion to the clitoris, which would support the idea that lesbian desire is featured prominently in the text. It could also refer to the idea of buttons as switches and the body as a machine, or it might reinforce the sense of everyday domesticity as a reference to buttons on clothing. Alternatively, it could be a play on the words “tend her buttons,” instructing the reader to participate in the experience of desiring and to produce satisfaction through their own construction of meaning (26).

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Marchiselli reveals that critics have lambasted Stein’s work for its “sound-without-substance,” its lack of “specificity or a content-based message,” its “absence of discernable meaning,” and its failure to “arrive at definitive closure” (82), but perhaps these assessments are in line with what the text was intended to accomplish. As Glavey argues, the feeling of closure is “often where things open outward; the sense of an ending where something begins… To recognize that… openness and closure are not always mutually exclusive is to see that modernism’s aesthetic regime is not opposed to mimesis but is, on the contrary, a means of organizing it” (166-67). “Ending where something begins” recalls Stein’s compositional principles of beginning again and again, and writing in the continuous present. Stein’s writing deconstructs the binaries of openness and closure, nonsense and meaning, and difference and resemblance. Queer theory operates in a striking similar way as it resists definitive meaning and challenges the heteronormative binaries associated with gender and sexuality. Marchiselli argues that “to dismantle the rules of grammar and semantics might be to throw off the ideologies of language” (70), and that Stein’s writing “seems to portend the impulse of feminist, queer, and post-modern projects” (72). The ostensibly incoherent babble of Tender Buttons is only “sound-without-substance” if substance is rigidly defined according to immutable normative terms. The fixity of meaning is what Tender Buttons seeks to avoid in its queerly destabilized linguistic representations of gender and sexuality.

Works Cited Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. Reaktion Books, 2000, pp. 15-17.

Dickie, Margaret. “Recovering the Repression in Stein’s Erotic Poetry.”

Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, edited

by Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, pp. 3-25.

Glavey, Brian. The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis. Oxford UP, 2016.

Goodspeed-Chadwick, Julie. “Reconfiguring Identities in the Word and in the World: Naming Marginalized Subjects and Articulating Marginal Narratives in Early Canonical Works by Gertrude Stein.” South Central Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2014, pp. 9-27, doi: 10.1353/scr.2014.0012.

Jagose, Annamarie. Introduction. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York UP, 1996, pp. 1-6.

Marchiselli, Chani Anine. “Queer Sonorities: Sound as Persuasion in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 39, no. 1, 2016, pp. 69-85, doi: 10.1080/07491409.2015.1127302.

Moon, Michael. “Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex?” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 3, 2007, pp. 533-42, doi:10.1215/00382876-2007-012.

Stein, Gertrude. “Objects.” Tender Buttons. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, 8th ed., Norton, 2013, pp. 716-26.

DISTRACT II Rebecca McLaren

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M Y T H M A K I NG T HRO U G H TRAU MA I N BAROMOTER RISING AND

OBASAN

By Emma Lammers “For a child”, explains the narrator of Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan, “there is no presence without flesh” (243); likewise, for a nation, there can be no existence without people: without a community that unifies itself under a shared identity. How then to define a country whose identity has been imposed upon it by colonial conquest, regardless of the myriad cultures of its citizens? How can a child from such a country be answered when they ask, ‘Where do we come from?’

Two very different books, Hugh MacLennan’s novel Barometer Rising and the aforementioned Obasan, approach these questions of national community through individuals’ experiences in two separate historic events: the 1917 Halifax explosion, and the displacement of Japanese Canadians during and after World War Two. MacLennan, who “saw himself as a figure in the struggle against fascism” (Stacey 62), shapes the mythos of Barometer Rising in a way meant to rouse and resonate with its original 1941 readership.

However, the novel’s exclusionist vision of nationhood anticipates the internalized racism and fractured identities endured by the characters of Obasan. Naomi Nakane, the narrator of Obasan, explores the traumas of her past life through dreamlike, non-linear recollections, while Barometer Rising depicts crises of Canadian nationhood more explicitly, even didactically. In the latter novel, the suffering and subsequent recovery from war trauma reads like an epic myth upon which a concept of Canadian nationality is based. The mythological archetypes and patterns in Obasan signify the resonance of Naomi’s past in her present life and must be understood in order for her to have a future.

From its opening chapter, Barometer Rising campaigns against the ideologies that keep Halifax – and by extension, Canada – in stasis, subservient to the British Empire, and therefore a sub-nation. To achieve this, the novel focuses on the characters of Colonel Geoffrey Wain and his young son, Roddie. Wain represents the “anomalous permanency” of Canada’s colonial existence, “still tied to England, suffering when she did but rarely partaking of her prosperities” (MacLennan 181). Wain’s resentment of this state parallels his contempt for his working-class mistress: “while it was possible to enjoy [her] without losing prestige in his own eyes, he was incapable of spending a night with her in bed without admitting…that she was necessary to him” (MacLennan 205). Likewise, for him to exceed “the limitations of the

province”, Nova Scotia, requires “nothing less than a war” (MacLennan 92), but for Canada to go to war, it must wait for England to lead the way. Similarly, Roddie, surrounded by propagandized colonial hierarchy, believes that Canada’s “happiness would be lost forever if it should aspire to anything higher than a position in the butler’s pantry of the British Empire” (MacLennan 179). However, his initial impression of the Halifax explosion as an “adventure” is spoiled by its “impingement of the unseen and the incalculable into his own life” (MacLennan 260). This symbolizes the uselessness of glorifying foreign militarism when faced with a national catastrophe.

By contrast, the children in Obasan experience war as the demonization of their Japanese ethnicity. The coinciding pressure to conform to an Anglo-centric society contributes to a sense of division in their identities and the repression of their memories. Separated from her mother by the outbreak of the Pacific War, and from her father when he is forced to go to a work camp, Naomi and her brother Stephen are left in the care of their Obasan (aunt) and uncle; as an adult, Naomi both avoids and is haunted by her past (Kogawa 80, 100).

Naomi’s retrospection “illuminates her awakening consciousness of both the importance of her cultural history and her desire to return to the mother” (Grice 95), but also unearths a cycle of troubling memories (Kogawa 194). Naomi must approach her childhood indirectly in order to turn her nightmares into a narrative of self-acceptance.

Whereas MacLennan uses exposition of landscape and possessions to trace his heroes’ perception of Canada and their growing awareness of its potential, Kogawa employs the same tactic to symbolize her characters’ gradual loss of their sense of self. Early in Barometer Rising, protagonist Neil Macrae makes several visual surveys of Halifax. Through him, readers see the city’s harbour as “the reason for the town’s existence”, and follow Neil’s gaze over “familiar landmarks” from the vantage point of Citadel Hill (MacLennan 5). These geographic and narrative points of view place Neil in an authoritative, even godlike, position, and align readers with his emotional perspective. By comparison, the presence of a white neighbour in Naomi’s childhood home anticipates her family’s displacement later in the story, seeming “more powerful than Father, larger and more at home even though this is our house” (Kogawa 69). The neighbour, Old Man Gower, has already invaded Naomi’s privacy through sexual abuse, and she pictures this secret as a “chasm”. “My mother is on one side of the rift”, Naomi explains; “I am on the other” (Kogawa 65). Already, before their possessions are liquidated or they are forced to leave their home, the space in which the Nakane family exists does not belong to them, and Naomi’s description of geographical forms illustrates her isolation.

On the other hand, the description of the ship the Olympic “accompanied by considerable band music and swarms of children” (MacLennan 73) serves as a metaphor for Haligonian unity in Barometer Rising. Haligonians have “acquired personal affection for [the Olympic]” (MacLennan 73), which, as Robert McGill explains, makes them feel “joined

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together by sharing emotions” (214) of pride and wonder. In the crowd, protagonist Angus Murray struggles with his paradoxical disapproval of Canada’s involvement in the war and “his intuitive belief …that a world without England would be intolerable” (MacLennan 74). The fact that the Olympic carries Canadian troops to Europe’s battlefields deepens its resonance as a symbol of the British Empire, “whose preservation [is] the reason and the justification of all that happen[s] here in Halifax” (MacLennan 76). Small wonder, then, that Roddie feels “empty and alone” after the departure of the ship, which for him represents “the purpose of the world” – competition, patriotism, and spectacle (MacLennan 78, 75).

For Naomi and Stephen, as for Murray, symbols of their cultural heritage bring conflicted feelings. Too young to understand the hostility directed towards her family after the attack on Pearl Harbour, Naomi vents her frustration by beating a Japanese doll given to her by her mother (Kogawa 81). Stephen repeatedly refuses to speak Japanese or eat traditional Japanese food; his school lunches consist of “peanut butter sandwiches”, whereas Naomi takes “rice balls with a salty red plum in the centre” (Kogawa 153). Ironically, Stephen keeps his Yellow Peril board game, in which players try to defend their territory from an army of yellow pawns. Since the connotations of “yellow” can imply cowardly or Japanese (Kogawa 152), the children intuitively avoid any association with the label, but they cannot claim a Canadian identity either. Their uncle points to the prairie grass, saying “it’s like the sea”, but it is not the sea; Naomi claims that she is “not yellow”, but caught in a cycle of negation, she cannot say what she is (Kogawa 1, 152, emphasis added).

In Barometer Rising, the war has “penetrated” the bodies of Neil and Murray, “putting them in the objectified position of women”. To overcome this “figurative emasculation”, both must symbolically reclaim their status as men (McGill 222). Neil’s rescue work after the explosion serves this purpose, particularly his entrance into the basement of a ruined house to save the family trapped there: this “is at once a figurative sexual act and a figurative birth” (McGill 224). The dark, burning structure (MacLennan 226) also recalls the underworld of Greek mythology from which only heroes could return alive1. Neil is thus given heroic stature by his association with these images of sexual dominance and defiance of death. Murray’s operation on Penny, described as another figurative penetration, gives him the opportunity to “re-masculinize himself ” (McGill 224). Before the explosion, Murray’s injured hand functioned only as a spectacle of war, but now that he can 1. The author’s knowledge of Greek mythology stems from previous study.

control it with his independent will, it functions as a synecdoche for Murray as a self-sufficient man, just as he, in turn, embodies Canada’s potential as a self-sufficient nation. Likewise, in Obasan, Stephen’s limp makes him an object of a “collective male gaze” (McGill 218), but this collective is notable for its whiteness, not its masculinity, and Stephen’s physical difference makes him not a hero but a “gimpy Jap” (Kogawa 153).

Akin to their metaphorical depictions of bodies and body parts, Barometer Rising and Obasan propagate impressions of Canadian consciousness through characters’ sensory perceptions. Helena Grice argues that in Naomi’s narration, “attentiveness” to her senses replaces “linguistic signs with nonverbal messages… [helping] to decode the signals for us” (97). Neil, Penny, and Murray’s sensory experiences have similar roles in Barometer Rising, though theirs contribute to a more explicit mythos than the one in Obasan.

Penny’s injury after the explosion, for example, parallels Neil’s and Murray’s war wounds, but her reaction to pain expresses the novel’s views on gender. The men’s injuries are “confirmations of [their] membership in the nation” and “corporeal hurdles” on their paths to self-actualization (McGill 222). Penny’s semi-conscious recollection of the day her and Neil’s daughter was born (MacLennan 240) enforces her identity as defined by her relationship to other, predominately male, characters. Reunited with Neil, “the cold control she had trained herself to acquire” begins to disintegrate, and she desires “tenderness” (MacLennan 303). Closely succeeding a passage of “Neil’s explicit meditation on Canada’s future alongside his own”, Penny’s yearning for his support makes her dependent upon him, a symbolic wife. This combines “the fate of [their] family with the fate of the nation” (McGill 225).

Naomi also longs for physical intimacy, but her ponderings on identity liken her more to Murray than Penny. Naomi’s “reality is measured through touch” (Grice 97), especially as a child feeling the absence of her mother: “there is no presence without flesh” (Kogawa 243). Eventually, she is told of her mother’s fate, but it is through the silence that she understands her mother’s love. “Martyr Mother”, Naomi addresses her in an unspoken conversation, “you pilot your powerful voicelessness over the ocean… to protect us”. Since Naomi’s mother shares no words with her children, she “[does] not share the horror” of her experience at Nagasaki (Kogawa 242). For Naomi, this realization brings another: that “the body of grief is not fit for human habitation”. She bids her mother “rest in peace in [her] world of stone”, and her final sensory perception, the scent of distant wild roses, parallels her knowledge of her mother’s bodiless presence (Kogawa 246-247).

Understanding and enduring the Halifax explosion’s effect on the city leaves Murray with similarly ambiguous feelings. While the “raw and cold” wind “[piercing] his great coat” echoes the melancholy of his thought that nobody would notice his absence, the fact that alcoholism and prostitutes have lost their former appeal implies a lessening of shame (MacLennan 286, 285). Murray’s physical actions close the gap between damage and repair, literally as a surgeon as well as metaphorically for Neil, whom he slaps out of a

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flashback immediately after the explosion (MacLennan 222). Despite these remedial moments of physical contact, Murray’s story does not end with musings on Canada’s future as Neil’s does (MacLennan 301). His sensory recollections are nostalgic: “green trees under the sun” and the sound of “locusts shrilling at high noon” (MacLennan 294). These memories anticipate Penny’s perceptions of Neil in the final chapter. When she “[sees] him trying to make himself a cog in the machine of the army” and hears “the sound of his footsteps echoing bleakly as he wandered like a fugitive through strange cities in England”, Penny knows “that it is inevitable for [them] to go on together” (MacLennan 298-299). These images associate Neil’s need for an independent identity with Canada’s, just as the image of Naomi as “branch, vine, butterfly” to her mother’s “tree trunk” reveals the interdependence of their two selves (Kogawa 242).

Ultimately, the vision of Canada’s future laid out in Barometer Rising fails those who cannot achieve its standards of virtue and heroism. Because Naomi and her family cannot be “half-English and half-American” like Neil, they hang suspended in the ambiguity created by the debate, both internal and external, of whether or not they deserve Canadian nationality. In their dialogues of possession and dispossession, sensation and mythic metaphor, Barometer Rising and Obasan conflict with each other. One might argue that the former novel’s rhetoric must be put into historical context, but the act of reading this “‘vessel’ containing Canadians at war… [holds] the potential to stir the patriotism of those who engage with it” in any age (McGill 216).

Obasan’s sensual narrative stirs its readers’ fear of loss. These empathetic tellings use similar methods for different causes, as one seeks to recover from the purgative that the other prescribed.

Works Cited Grice, Helena. “Reading the Nonverbal: The Indices of Space, Time, Tactility and Taciturnity in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” MELUS. 24. 4 (1999): 93-105.

Online.

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. 1981. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1983. Print.

MacLennan, Hugh. Barometer Rising. 1941. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. Print.

McGill, Robert. “Somatic Nationalism and Spectacle in Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising.” Studies in Canadian Literature. 37. 2 (2012): 213-229.

Online.

Shirley Ma MUSCLE HEAD

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QUEER AND DISABILITY FRAMEWORK OF CONTINGENCY

by Han Gyol Kim This essay takes up writings about the future that emerges out of queer and/ or disabled experiences and scholarship. Notions of the future have been used against both the queer and the disabled to expel them from time and their place in the future. Queer and disability studies ask: what possibilities are foreclosed by heteronormative and able-bodied fantasies of the future?

They also point out the conditions that make the present unlivable and uninhabitable for certain bodies. I turn to queer theory, disability studies, and crip theory in this essay to argue for the indispensability of “contingency” as an effective resource for our futural imaginings beyond “able-bodied heterosexuality” (McRuer). While I begin with the notion of contingency as it has been theorized by disability scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I also use queer sources to further develop “contingency” as a multivalent idea that has profound implications for thinking about the future. I argue that a queercrip framework provides a critical space furnished with the affective forces of contingency, which serve as an invaluable resource for imagining alternate futures that refuse compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes that disability “represents aspects of the human condition that are unpredictable, unstable, and unexpected: in short, contingency itself ” (340). Contingency describes our inherent susceptibility to transformation, and, as disability movements have argued, the temporal nature of such categories as “non-disabled” and “able-bodied.”

In her reading of disability as “the transformation of the flesh [and, I would add, the mind] as it encounters the world” (342), Garland-Thomson foregrounds the situated body — its role in, as well as its receptiveness to, the unfolding of the world. Contingency disrupts the fiction of independence that undergirds normative imaginings of the future; the popular conceptualization of “a better future [as] one that excludes disability and disabled bodies” (Kafer 2) signals the eradication of contingency and affirms the cultural fantasy of autonomy. Advances in medicine, for example, promise to eradicate contingency through technologies of foresight and prevention. The removal of contingency from the fabric of social life does not exist solely in visions of the future but is already present, as Sara Ahmed illustrates in her critical interrogation of happiness.

In “Happy Futures, Perhaps,” Ahmed launches her genealogical tracing of effect with the question of none other than contingency: “I begin [...] with

the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and what I call ‘the drama of contingency,’ how we are touched by what comes near” (162). Ahmed mourns the loss of contingency — the “hap” (chance) in “happiness.” This loss is occasioned by affective meanings attributed to objects in our shared world: when particular objects become meaningful as causes of happiness, we turn toward such objects and come to inhabit a particular orientation to the world. As Ahmed tells us in Queer Phenomenology, heterosexuality (and its pendant, the nuclear family) asserts itself as a “social good,” as the ultimate object that promises happiness. Ontological possibilities indexed by the concept of contingency are eroded by the ways in which objects are already constructed as “good” or “bad,” as sources of happiness or unhappiness. Like other queers of the world who are astonished by the unrelenting repetition of “the same form of sociality as the heterosexual couple,” Ahmed asks a central question that returns us to the matter of contingency: “how does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present?” (82).

Ahmed suggests that the loss of contingency — effected by shared orientations towards “social goods” — constrains and produces a specific “bodily horizon, a space for action, which puts some objects and not others in reach” (66 QP, emphasis in original). Disability studies remind us, however, that not all bodies are invited to share a cultural orientation; certain orientations might even be foreclosed to a disabled body, insofar as not all bodies can maneuver themselves into such orientations. In other words, objects that promise happiness are within reach for some but not others. Moreover, disabled people are often encouraged towards a wholly different cluster of “happiness means” (“Happy Futures” 163): as Alison Kafer writes, within the compulsory imagination of able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, “the only appropriate disabled mind/body is one cured or moving toward cure” (28). The figure of the disabled embodies an exilic relation to the realm of heterosexual reproduction where, under the logic of eugenics, a fantasy of a world without disability persists. Thus, whereas Ahmed uses the term “compulsory orientation” (QP) to describe what Adrienne Rich has famously coined “compulsory heterosexuality,” many disabled people experience a different compulsory orientation: the expectation to direct one’s life towards normalizing treatments — that is, to direct one’s time, energy, and resources towards able-bodiedness. Here, the object that promises happiness is able-bodiedness itself, the ultimate “social good” in the hegemony of able-bodied culture.

Disability studies and movements have shown that not all disabled individuals share this orientation towards cure and normalization. Like Ahmed’s “feminist killjoy,” a disabled person might “kill joy because she refuses to share an orientation toward certain things as being good because she does not find the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising” (“Happy Objects” 39). A disabled person who declines the invitation to able-bodiedness (“No, thank you.”), who does not experience pleasure from proximity to this social good, could, therefore, be described as an “affect alien,” alongside Ahmed’s “melancholic migrant,” “feminist killjoy,” and the queer. McRuer describes a “critically disabled” position as one that “call[s] attention to the ways in which disability

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rights movement and disability studies have resisted the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness and have demanded access to a newly imagined and newly configured public sphere where full participation is not contingent on an able body” (30). The disabled affect alien, moreover, unapologetically kills joy by shutting down suggestions that the disabled must will themselves towards positivity and happiness in order to overcome barriers in their lives. The mandate of positive thinking, “itself a kind of able-mindedness” (Kafer 101), functions as a sign of happiness under which disability is depoliticized, and the role of anger, and even mourning, as affective resources for political transformation is erased (Kafer 6). At the same time, disabled affect aliens also reject the conflation of disability with misery and rehabilitation with happiness. Rejecting the construction of disability “as the sign of no future, or at least of no good future,” Alison Kafer offers a politics of crip futurity that insists on imagining accessible futures (Kafer 3). What would it mean if access, and not able-bodiedness, circulated as a “social good” in the dominant cultural imaginary? Disabled affect aliens have already begun the work of forging a politics around the wish for access, smuggling in blueprints for accessible futures into the present system of compulsory able-bodiedness.

The experience of contingency provides the epistemological and effective resources for imagining accessible futures. Foregrounding the unfolding of life as the encounter between flesh and environment, Garland-Thomson describes “misfitting” as when a body enters an environment that fails to sustain the shape and function of that body. The jarring experience of misfitting awakens us to “the truth of contingency” that we forget when we “fit” into the environment (Garland-Thomson 597). In other words, fitting suggests that we do not think twice about the material configurations that we inhabit, whereas the experience of misfitting can “foster intense awareness of social injustice and the formation of a community of misfits” (597).

Frameworks of contingency help us reorient our relationship to space, insofar as we choose to stay with, rather than anxiously suppress, feelings engendered by an immediate, embodied confrontation with the “truth of contingency.” Being attuned to contingency — to the fact that “any of us can fit here today and misfit there tomorrow” (Garland-Thomson 597) — as we navigate spaces can awaken our senses to lingering effects that might haunt those spaces, such as pain, dissonance, or disorientation arising from experiences of misfitting. Of course, thinking about contingency does not lead to feeling the lived experience of contingency. People in Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms (PISSAR) places non-disabled students in bathrooms, “armed with measuring tapes and clipboards, to track the

failures and omissions of the built environment (Kafer 9). This activity encourages students to enumerate the potential ways of misfitting in a particular bathroom, with the help of systematized criteria and expectations. While the activity is a great improvement from ones that blindfold non-blind students to “experience” disability and raise awareness (Kafer 9), my interest in the affective experience of contingency takes me away from such activities towards works such as those of Amanda Baggs, whose video, “In My Language” offers an autobiographical account of living with autism.

Visually and aurally, Baggs describes how she interacts with her surroundings, radically expanding the definitional scope of language by explaining how her own “native language” is “about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of [her] environment.” Her body physically responds to all parts of the surroundings, which she touches, smells, tastes, and listens to, with a sensorial openness to the world that allows Baggs to know the world differently. Baggs fully and immersively interacts with the space she inhabits, rather than reacting to only limited elements of that space. She thus demonstrates a way of “inhabiting” space and the body that foregrounds the dynamic relationship between the two, which as Garland-Thomson suggests are always already shaped by each other. What if, based on Amanda Bagg’s self-portrait, we expanded or reworked the definition of “affect alien” even further, moving away from Ahmed’s “emotions” towards the kinds of “affects” that represent somatic sensations and interactions with the world. After all, to be part of an affective community requires that one can experience the same effects in the first place; we must talk about neurodivergence, and how we might build queer/crip communities that do not necessarily require a same effective horizon, insofar as bodies are affected differently by the world. The experience of “fitting” diminishes the scope of one’s somatic engagement with the world, whereas “misfitting” jolts the body and/or the mind. The “bodymind” is opened up to the physical surroundings, to make sense of the space and one’s place within it. To “make sense” requires that one use their “senses,” and it is in this sense that I am using the phrase “the affect of contingency.” Harnessing the affects of contingency towards the political project of imagining alternate spaces and futures can be achieved by re-ordering one’s immediate and somatic interaction with their surroundings. Although I am cautious about “appropriating” Bagg’s autobiographical description as an autistic person, “In My Language” provides an important framework for inhabiting spaces differently. What would it mean to fully engage one’s surroundings at the level of sensory and embodied affect, or at least to try to see and inhabit spaces differently by being attentive to material details that one usually misses? I would suggest that such reconfiguration of one’s somatic relationship with space generates “feelings” or affects of contingency, insofar as this engagement alerts the body to the materiality of the space — height of door handles and the weight of the door, to offer a simple example. The body is, in turn, alerted to its dependence on such material structures to extend into space and sustain itself. This reconfiguration of one’s own bodily inhabitance differs from the campus activity

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mentioned above, in which students are equipped with various tools and materials to measure the inaccessibility of a space according to a predetermined set of criteria. As Emma Kisivild writes, “Cripistemology is not a process of addition; it is a snapshot of surprise, an opportunity, a challenge” (160) . Rather than adding to the body in order to “know” the space, a cripistemological framework — which places disabled subjectivities at the center of knowledge production — might be one that moves away from clipboards and measuring tapes, and towards the body itself as a situated being in space, with the capacity to be affected by the space and thus arrive at alternate ways of knowing. Opening the self to the possibility of being differently “affected” and touched by one’s surroundings might lead one to assume the position of an “affect alien.”

As I have shown, the somatic engagement with the “truth of contingency” reorients one’s relationship to space. This engagement, however, also reorients one’s relationship to time, because the intensity of feeling induced by contingency produces an anticipatory affect. Contingency pulls us into the immediacy of our surroundings in the present, but as I have suggested, we must invest in the affects of contingency as a critical space from which to imagine alternate futures and possibilities. The pursuit of accessible spaces anticipates contingency as a matter of bodily fact. Contingency allows us to expand our political imagination and might be vital to how we envision a queer utopia. Ahmed writes that deviating from the normative (sexual) orientation might allow one to find

ROOTS Shirley Ma

a community of others who have also deviated from the compulsory path. By turning from heterosexuality, “you might simply arrive in spaces (clubs, bars, houses, streets, rooms) where welcome shadows fall and linger, indication that others too have arrived” (QP 105). To conclude, I would like us to think about those others who cannot arrive, let alone “simply arrive,” in those spaces of queer connections and intimacies. Ahmed illustrates queer theory’s attentiveness to desires, socialities, and affects outside of the dominant heteronormative order. When queer theory is brought into dialogue with disability movements and literature, we can expand this “attentiveness” to foreground an effective, sensory attention to the materiality of those spaces we might name “queer.”

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Futures, Perhaps.” Queer Times, Queer Becomings, edited by McCallum, E.L., Steven Bruhm, and Mikko Tuhkanen, SUNY Press, 2011, pp. 159182.

“Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke UP, 2010, pp. 29-51.

Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.

Baggs, Amanda. “In My Language.” YouTube, uploaded by silentmiaow, 14 January 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “The Case for Conserving Disability.” Bioethical Inquiry, no. 9, 2012, pp. 339-355.

“Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia, vol. 26, no. 3, 2011, pp.

591-609.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana UP, 2013.

McRuer, Robert. “Compulsory Able-bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Experience.”

Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York UP, 2006. pp.

1-32.

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IF YOU DO, LOVE, I’LL CRY: RAPE CULTURE AND INTERNALIZED MISOGYNY IN SHAKESPEARE’S A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM AND

TWO NOBLE KINSMEN

by Lauren O’Donnell

In the 2016 presidential election, 53% of white women voted (“Exit Polls 2016”) for a man on trial for sexual assault of a minor (Pilkington). This rejection of female solidarity in favour of a misogynistic society is mirrored in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Two Noble Kinsmen. The women in these plays police their sexuality, subjugate themselves, and blame themselves and other women for ‘tempting’ men.

In doing so, they reinforce the idea that a woman’s worth is determined by her virginity, her submissiveness, and her willingness to marry the man chosen for her. The women of these plays do not just live in a misogynist rape culture, they perpetuate it.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a heavy emphasis is placed upon chastity. Chastity is not just enforced by the men in power, young women internalize its value. Any young woman who fails to remain virtuous is considered “damaged goods” and is ostracized. In the early modern period, young women’s only real power was derived from their virginity, and they were therefore anxious to protect it at all costs, an anxiety that did not extend to men. In their work “The Ideology of Virginity” David Berger and Morton Wenger point out that “male virginity is a topic that is all but ignored in the sociological literature on sex” (668). Only female virginity is policed and valued by society. This means that a woman’s control of her sexuality is the only valuable bargaining chip that she has left. In Midsummer, Hermia asks that, for her sake, Lysander “not lie so near” (2.2.45) because she knows that if she were caught lying by Lysander, the implications alone would ruin her reputation. She protests that Lysander should sleep further away as “[b]ecomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid” (2.2.59) because the idea that chaste women do not sleep near their lover is so deeply ingrained in her. Even though Hermia is going to marry Lysander and they are alone in a secluded forest, her internalized belief that chastity and the illusion of chastity are paramount prevents her from letting him sleep near her.

On the other hand, Two Noble Kinsmen presents a woman so overcome by her inability to sleep with the person she loves that she goes insane. All that the Jailer’s daughter desires is to have sex with Palamon, but because of the class difference between the two of them, her wishes are frustrated

and this frustration leads to the collapse of her mind. Before freeing Palamon, she remarks that to “be his whore is witless” (2.5.5) because losing her virginity without the promise of marriage will ruin her. Later, when she has gone mad, despite her heavily sexualized language, she still says that she has kept “close for all this / Close as a cockle” (4.1.129-130); that she has kept her legs closed and has not lost her virginity. Even driven mad by her frustrated desire for Palamon, the Jailer’s daughter is adamant that her maidenhead remains intact. Berger and Wegner, quoting Randall Collins’ work, remark that it is in women’s interest to confine “sexuality to use as a bargaining resource only for marriage” (667) just as the Jailer’s daughter does, because she knows that having pre-marital sex will lower her value and prevent her from being married. In both plays, the belief that a woman’s only worth comes from her virtue is so deeply ingrained in Hermia and the Jailer’s daughter that they are unable to surmount it. It controls one and drives the other mad.

Not only is the sexuality of early modern women policed by themselves, the normalization of violence against women that is symptomatic of a rape culture is perpetuated by these women blaming themselves for the violence, and condoning the violent subjugation of other women. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena internalizes Demetrius’ hatred of her and believes that it is what she deserves. She says:

The more you beat me I will fawn on you.

Use me but as your spaniel: spurn me, strike me,

Neglect me, lose me – only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you. (2.1.205-207)

Helena not only forgives Demetrius for his violence towards her, she actively encourages him to treat her as he would his dog if only that would make him love her.

Helena is so desperate to be loved by Demetrius that she is willing to tolerate abuse.

Demetrius’ rejection of Helena even forces her to question what she knows to be true; that she is as beautiful as Hermia. External validation from Demetrius is the only thing that makes Helena truly value herself. She asks “[w]hat wicked and dissembling glass of mine / Made me compare with Hermia’s sphery eyne?” (2.2.98-99), because if Demetrius does not think she is beautiful, then it must be true. Even though Helena knows that she is Hermia’s equal, Demetrius violence towards her undermines her confidence and makes her tear herself down. She internalizes everything that Demetrius says to her and turns it back on herself. By contrast, The Jailer’s daughter appears to rebel against violence. She warns ‘Palamon’ not to hurt her, and says “If you do, love, I’ll cry” (5.3.112). However, while it seems like she is rejecting violence against women, she knows that if the wooer as Palamon chooses to hurt her, there is nothing she can do, no recourse she can take but to cry. Like Helena, she will tolerate abuse, because she cannot fight back, resist, or leave.

No one else will marry her after she has lost her virginity, she will have nothing. It does

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not matter if the wooer hurts her or not, what matters is that she knows she can do nothing if he does.

In Two Noble Kinsmen, on the other hand, it is women who reinforce the normalization of subjugation and violence against women. The second queen does not ask for Hippolyta’s aid as a former warrior; instead, she upbraids her for presuming to go beyond the boundaries of her sex. The second queen approves of Theseus forcibly making Hippolyta submit to him in battle. The queen then asks Hippolyta to beg Theseus’ help “in a woman’s key, like such a woman / As any of us three. Weep ere you fail. / Lend us a knee.” (1.1.94-96), reasserting that Hippolyta should submit to Theseus. Hippolyta is shamed for usurping her gender, and her forced marriage to Theseus is seen as a restoration of the normal order. Instead of fighting her own battles, Hippolyta is expected to beg her husband for his help on her knees. This internalized misogyny reinforces the idea that women should be submissive, forcing Hippolyta to conform to gender roles, and to pressure Emilia to conform to those same roles. It is a continuous system of women being unable to act outside of their prescribed roles and inflicting that same frustration on the women around them. In her work “Alliances between Women: Overcoming Internalized Oppression and Internalized Domination”, Gail Pheterson says that “The guilt felt for dominating others…reinforces the guilt felt for one’s own victimization” (159). The second queen, unable to undo her own social constrictions, places these same restraints upon Hippolyta. This undermines Hippolyta’s power and allows the second queen to feel that at least she is morally superior to Hippolyta, even if she herself has no other power. The second queen’s frustration of having to rely on a foreign ruler to avenge her husband causes her to oppress Hippolyta, who in turn oppresses Emilia.

In addition, victim blaming is perpetuated throughout these two plays.

Women are blamed for men falling in love with them, their beauty ‘tempts’ the men. However, these accusations are most often made by other women. In Midsummer, Helena asks Hermia to teach her “how [she looks], and with what art / [She sways] the motion of Demetrius’ heart” (1.1.192193). Demetrius’ love of Hermia is entirely unwanted and non-consensual, yet Hermia’s beauty is still blamed for making Demetrius fall in love with her. Even Helena, Hermia’s dearest friend, thinks that Hermia has purposefully stolen Demetrius away from her. On the other hand, blaming someone for another person loving them can also be extended to Demetrius. Throughout Midsummer, we see the use of the love potion as a perversion of nature, an abomination. It warps Titania’s vision and sexually humiliates her by forcing her to fall in love with her social and physical

inferior, and makes Lysander fall in love with Helena, despite his deep love for Hermia just one scene earlier. For all intents and purposes, Demetrius has truly fallen in love with Hermia and no longer loves Helena, and yet when Oberon sees that “[a] sweet Athenian lady is in love / With a disdainful youth” (2.2.260-261) he immediately decides to force Demetrius to return Helena’s love. How is it acceptable to force Demetrius to love Helena when it is so deeply uncomfortable to see the same thing happen to Titania?

In Two Noble Kinsmen, the theme of blaming women for men falling in love with them continues, with even higher stakes. Emilia is forced to choose which of Palamon and Arcite she will marry and which will die, even though she did not ask for either of them to fall in love with her. Despite her initial rejection of responsibility for Palamon and Arcite’s lives, she eventually accepts the blame and says that whoever marries her will lose a noble cousin “for [her] sins” (4.2.156) and her “unhappy beauty” (4.2.64), placing the responsibility on herself. Likewise, Hippolyta blames Emilia for the kinsmen falling in love with her, possibly because inflicting forced marriage upon her sister will make her feel better about her own marriage. Pheterson remarks that “Oppression and domination are experienced as a mutually reinforcing web of insecurities and rigidities” (159) benefitting neither party and creating more resentment. Hippolyta oppresses Emilia, demanding that she beg for Arcite and Palamon to be spared. Just as the second queen undermines Hippolyta’s power in the first scene, Hippolyta undermines Emilia and forces her into marrying one of the kinsmen.

She tells Emilia “not to be denied. That face of yours / Will bear the curse else of after ages / For these lost cousins” (3.6.186-189). If Emilia does not agree to marry someone she has never met before, women will curse her forever. Hippolyta repeatedly tears Emilia down: “O my soft-hearted sister, what think you? / Weep not till they weep blood, wench: it must be.” (4.2.147-148). She calls Emilia soft-hearted, for weeping that a stranger is going to die at the altar of her beauty and that she will shortly marry whichever one does not die.

The women of these plays internalize the messages of their patriarchal culture, and those who try to act against their assigned gender roles are violently forced to conform, like

PARADISE II Rebecca McLaren

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Hippolyta, and themselves reinforce this culture. By internalizing and accepting the control of women’s sexuality, the subjugation of women, and blaming women for the choices of men, the women of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Two Noble Kinsmen allow the rape culture that they live in to not only survive, but thrive.

Works Cited Berger, David G., and Morton G. Wenger. “The Ideology of Virginity.”

Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 35, no. 4, 1973, pp. 666–676. www. jstor.org/stable/350880.

“Exit Polls 2016.” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/ national/president. Accessed 18 November 2016.

Pheterson, Gail. “Alliances between Women: Overcoming Internalized Oppression and Internalized Domination.” Signs, vol. 12, no. 1, 1986, pp.

146–160. www.jstor.org/stable/3174362.

Pilkington, Ed. “Trump lawyers given court date over lawsuit alleging rape of 13-year-old.” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2016/oct/12/donald-trump-jeffrey-epstein-alleged-rape-lawsuit.

Accessed November 29th, 2016.

Shakespeare, William. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Norton Shakespeare. 3rd ed. Eds. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullen.

New York: W.W Norton, 2016. 398-453. Print.

Shakespeare, William. “Two Noble Kinsmen.” The Norton Shakespeare.

3rd ed. Eds. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katherine Eisaman Maus, and Gordon McMullen. New York: W.W Norton, 2016. 451-536. Print.

ALCHEMY AND MYSTICISM IN PAUL CELAN’S TODESFUGE AND ANSELM KIEFER’S MARGARETE, SHULAMITE , AND STERNEN-LAGER IV

by Sara Dhurjon Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge (1945) was revolutionary in its ability to capture and vividly depict themes of sacrifice, brutality and hopelessness whilst simultaneously providing his readers with the opportunity to confront horrors of the past. It can also be said that his poem encouraged readers to reconcile those horrors. However, the term reconciliation is often received with some degree of hesitancy, and when applied to a post-World War II society attempting to deal with numerous atrocities, the epoch of which was the Holocaust, it becomes problematized even further. Anselm Kiefer’s artwork proves as much, in that the Holocaust, at least at present, can never thoroughly be reconciled by Jewish persons and those who survived the Germany of the nineteen-forties, or the rest of society who inherited a world attempting to understand the horrors of WWII in general. Kiefer’s Margarete (1981), Shulamite (1983) and Sternen-Lager IV (1988) pieces embody these frustrations and externalize them both in their textural elements as well as their resemblances to Celan’s Todesfuge. While the link to Celan’s poem is easily made, less known are the alchemical and mystical elements present in both Celan’s poem and Kiefer’s art. As such, this essay will analyze Paul Celan’s Todesfuge for its alchemical and mystical elements which serve as the inspiration for Anselm Kiefer’s Margarete, Shulamite and Sternen-Lager IV which also contain said elements. By exploring celestial imagery, the lived experiences of Holocaust victims, and contrasts in textural elements of the different pieces as well as those present between literary figures who influenced Celan’s poem, this essay will prove that the alchemical and mystical elements are central in a deeper understanding both of Celan’s poem and Kiefer’s work as it relates to the Holocaust.

Paul Celan is a Romanian born poet who interrogates concepts of Jewishness in his poetry. Todesfuge, or Death Fugue, is one of Celan’s most notable works, in that it explores themes of genocide and cultural dissonance as a means to interact with the aftermath and consequences of the Holocaust on the Jewish community. Less notable in this poem is Celan’s use of celestial imagery to facilitate alchemical and mystical interpretations as elements which later inspired artist Anselm Kiefer’s work. A close reading of the poem exposes all of these elements. Celan begins the poem with, “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night”,1 and repeats this throughout the poem. Day and night inserted at the beginning of the poem and repeated throughout serves two purposes. The first can be related back 1. John Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge”. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, (1986). 250.

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to the Myth of Creation2 that is found both in the Tanakh as well as contemporary copies of Old and New Testament texts, where God created the earth with Adam and Eve over the course of seven days and seven nights.

While day and night cycles are not foreign to any number of other religious myths, the Myth of Creation is of particular significance as it bears a direct linkage to the seven stages of alchemical purification, wherein an individual would undergo seven stages of purification before transforming into the ultimate synthesized version of the desirable androgynous body which united both man and woman in perfect health. Additionally, the sun and moon figures that stem from the day and night cycles are also referenced, in that men and women play an integral role in the undergoing of said processes. More importantly, the sun and moon rotations are what signal the time that passes so that these processes can occur. Additionally, the topic of burial both in the poem and in alchemical purification are of significance.

Celan provides readers with two forms of burial that can be achieved.

Holocaust victims can either “shovel a grave in the air there [they] won’t feel too cramped”3 or, they can “shovel a grave in the ground”.4 Drawing upon Christian theology once more is the idea of the soul that roams free after death. Naturally then, a grave in the ground is ultimately a grave in the sky.

However, this process is disrupted, overshadowed by the mass burials that occurred in concentration camps and where, unfortunately, many Holocaust victims were buried alive. Therefore, a burial in the ground does not lead to freedom in the night sky nor the furthering of the alchemical process. Rather, it is a slow death which shatters the ability of the soul to rise freely or, a death where one may “rise… in smoke to the sky”,5 a process which involves the disintegration of the body in the mass crematoriums of concentration camps that leave no body to be buried alive or dead, neither in a mass grave or in an effort to gain alchemical purity. This burial instead furthers a narrative of anti-creation, one where day and night are insignificant because of disrupted burial which impacts the ability of the soul to rise and which impedes the function and furthering of the alchemical processes. Ultimately, any process of creation or transformation is nulled, and the prospect either of a new world or the healthy androgynous body is unattainable.

Anselm Kiefer is a German artist whose Margarete and Shulamite paintings are inspired by Paul Celan’s Todesfuge. It can be argued “that both Celan and 2. Robert D. Clarke III. “Bending the Light: Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’”.

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2000. 113, 153. 3. Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge”. 250.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid

Kiefer are informed by a particular… effort to express the ‘sublime’, the irresolvable space between earthly and heavenly ideals [which] also accentuate the way in which Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ and Kiefer’s ‘Margarete’ and [‘Shulamite’] paintings are in dialogue with each other”.6 To this end, the resolution of heavenly and earthly ideals can be reconciled in alchemical and mystical transformations present in Kiefer’s paintings. At first glance, Margarete depicts strands of straw which are painted in acrylic on a paper canvas.7 There are also parts of the painting that are covered with spots of black paint that bear a direct relation to Shulamite. Although this link is made, Shulamite proves to be one of Kiefer’s darker works: “a thick impasto resulting from a hardened mixture of oil, acrylic, emulsion, and shellac; a brittle, textured surface infused with commonplace materials… [like] straw and ash”.8 The textural elements of each work contrast vastly with the narratives upon which they are based. Margarete, the lighter of the works, is related to German writer Johann Goethe’s nineteenth-century Faust heroine, Gretchen. After committing infanticide of her own child she lays on a bed of straw as her lover, Faust, murders her brother.9 Like the dominant male figure in Celan’s Todesfuge who “writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete”,10 “Margarete… falls victim to the ambitions of her alchemical magician-lover”11 but despite her “…responsibility for the death camp horrors in Celan’s poem — however serious — pales in comparison to that of her brutal German soldier-lover”.12 The alchemical relation here is therefore found in the faltering of Faust as a character, the figure in a larger narrative that provokes Celan which in turn inspires Kiefer, in that Faust was “[s]educed by the Devil to exchange his soul for unnatural wisdom… [and] commits the most heinous of crimes…”13 in much the same way the dominant male figure in Todesfuge “…whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground / he orders [them to] strike up and play for the dance … / … he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it”14 and eventually, “he shoots [them] with shot made of lead shoots [them] level and true”.15 In contrast Shulamite, despite being dark and hardened, is inspired by the biblical figure Shulamite, the Jewish woman from the 6. Bonnie Roos, “Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the Early ‘Margarete’ and ‘Sulamith’ in Paintings”. Comparative Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, (2006). 25.

7. Sue Hubbard, “Margarete (1981) by Anselm Kiefer (Saatchi Collection)”. Independent.

October 23, 2008. httpy://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/ margarete-1981-by-anselm-kiefer-saatchi-collection-970630.html 8. Rebecca Taylor, “Anselm Kiefer, Shulamite”. Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/identity-body/identity-body-europe/a/ anselm-kiefer-shulamite 9. Roos, “Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the Early ‘Margarete’ and ‘Sulamith’ Paintings”. 32.

10. Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge”. 250.

11. Roos, “Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the Early ‘Margarete’ and ‘Sulamith’ Paintings”. 32.

12. Ibid, 33.

13. Ibid, 34.

14. Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge”. 250.

15. Ibid.

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Songs of Solomon who is celebrated for representing wedded love.16 However, the darkness of Shulamite has nothing to do with the figure of the biblical Shulamite but rather, the experiences of Jewish persons and their ultimate end in Nazi concentration camps as well as the dismal circumstances under which they lived during their stay. It is important to note here that two objectives of the alchemical process were to attain infinite health and transmutation.17 Because alchemy in many ways displaces the body and soul, transmutation in this sense is metaphysical and, if the soul is not bodily encapsulated and earthly, is therefore heavenly. Given that “[h]eavenly bodies only differ in regard to the amount or quantity of matter”,18 the divisions and differences between Margarete and Shulamite in the heavenly sphere are mitigated whereas, in the earthly realm, these differences are exaggerated for the ways in which they play upon racial and religious tensions that were heightened and exploited during the Holocaust. The ultimate end for Jewish persons and, more particularly Shulamite, is death, either by “a grave in the ground”19 or, more sinisterly, a death that sees her “rise… in smoke to the sky”.20 This end is more likely the conclusion of Shulamite: her ashen hair is a testament to this.

Another one of Kiefer’s works that deals with alchemical and mystical elements is Sternen-Lager IV. The piece itself is composed of acrylic, shellac, emulsion, sand and oil on canvas21 which once more lends to the same interpretation of textural elements found and contrasted in Shulamite and Margarete. From an observer’s perspective, and one who is looking for alchemical links, Kiefer’s experimentation with texture can in many ways be related to the alchemist himself who, through a willingness to experiment with science “transforms or creates something through a seemingly magical process”.22 Whereas the alchemist seeks to transform base metals into gold, Kiefer looks to transform German guilt and reluctance to thoroughly acknowledge its role in the Holocaust into 16. Ibid, 33.

17. “Alchemy”. Science 18, no. 447 (1891): pp. 113-17. American Association for the Advancement of Science. http://www.jstor.org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/stable/1768043. 113.

18. “Ibid, 115.

19. Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge”. 250.

20. Ibid.

21. John G. Hatch, “Cosmic Stutters: Anselm Kiefer’s Search for Redemption in the Stars”. ed. Nicholas Campion, Heavenly Discourses. Ceredigion: Sophia Centre Press, University of Wales, (2016). 268.

22. “Alchemist”. New Oxford American Dictionary, ed. Stevenson, Angus, and Christine A. Lindberg. (Oxford University Press, 2010). http://www.oxfordreference.com. proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/view/10.1093/acref/9780195

responsibility, and where the alchemical process looks to attain the full androgyny between the male and female united in health,23 Kiefer looks to unite a broken and segregated Germany in post-WWII society. As for the piece of work itself, viewers observe “a storage area containing numerous boxes, each labelled with a lengthy numerical sequence… [with] numbers [that] designate star positions…”.24 Upon first examination, these boxes can be interpreted as “a whimsical interpretation of capturing stars and keeping them in a storeroom”,25 but there are several other interpretations that are more sinister in their meaning. The first is that the boxes “[contain] the personal effects of concentration camp victims”26 which could only be a result of their incineration in the ovens of the concentration camps where afterwards, they would “rise…in smoke to the sky”.27 The numbers could also bear reference to the “infamous tattooed identifications applied to camp prisoners”.28 However, because the numbers of the boxes “designate star positions”,29 a more hopeful interpretation of the scene depicted by Sternen-Lager IV is that through the process of numbering, victims will “have a grave then in the clouds … [where they]... won’t feel too cramped”.30 The numbers which once designated their fates and trapped them in the helpless setting of the Holocaust and in the cramped boxes of Kiefer’s storage room transform into their designated positions in the sky where they find their way home, wherever that may be, guided by the light of their own starry embodiment and through that of others. Through this process of interpreting Kiefer’s work, it can be argued that observers engage in yet another form of interpretation, being the Kabbalistic receiving or experiencing of God. “As a form of Jewish mysticism, it is primarily concerned with directly experiencing God through meditation, spiritual exercises, or interpretations of scripture… and other writings”.31 Given that both Kiefer and Celan were inspired by Jewish mysticism, this connection is appropriate. Sternen-Lager IV is, therefore, the object of meditation, and the experience of God is the choice to recognize victims of the Holocaust as at last finding some form of peace in the night sky.

This essay has argued for the ways in which Paul Celan’s Todesfuge portrays 23. “Alchemy”. Science 18, no. 447 (1891): pp. 113-17. American Association for the Advancement of Science. http://www.jstor.org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/stable/1768043.

24. Hatch, “Cosmic Stutters: Anselm Kiefer’s Search for Redemption in the Stars”. 266.

25. Ibid, 267.

26. Ibid.

27. Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge”. 250.

28. Hatch, “Cosmic Stutters: Anselm Kiefer’s Search for Redemption in the Stars”. 267.

29. Ibid, 266 30. Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge”. 250.

31. Mark Nickens, “Kabbalah”. Encyclopedia of Time: Science, Philosophy, Theology & Culture, ed. H. J. Birx. Thousand Oaks, CA:SAGE Publications, Inc. (2009). 735).

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alchemical and mystical elements that in turn served as the inspiration for Anselm Kiefer’s Margarete, Shulamite, and Sternen-Lager IV. While it has discussed the many alchemical and mystical elements present in both Celan’s poem and Kiefer’s works, it has neglected to discuss what Kiefer sought to achieve through his art. A German contemporary artist seeking to navigate the divide between the Germany of the nineteen-forties and the progress of Germany at the time of his exhibiting his artwork, it is difficult attempting to articulate what he must have felt. It is not unlikely, however, that he should not have felt some form of guilt, not only as a German but as a Christian German whose privilege over Jewish persons had he been set amidst WWII would have been undeniable. While Celan met his end through suicide, an unfortunate conclusion to a life that saw him as the sole survivor of a family who perished in a concentration camp and an accomplished writer, Kiefer’s end is yet to be concluded. In much the same way day and night references beginnings and endings in Celan’s Todesfuge, so too do the works of Celan and Kiefer reference beginnings of healing and an end of the refusal to acknowledge a tumultuous history for what it was. In turn, this process signals transformation, where hopefully, elements such as “dein goldenes Haar Margarete / dein aschenes Haar Sulamith”32 are insignificant in a larger attempt to transcend base qualities of society, and attain what can be termed the ultimate, ever-lasting health of a rights-respecting societal collective.

32. Felstiner, “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge”. 251.

Bibliography “Alchemist”. New Oxford American Dictionary, ed. Stevenson, Angus, and Christine A. Lindberg. (Oxford University Press, 2010). http://www.oxfordreference.com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/view/10.1093/ acref/9780195 “Alchemy”. Science 18, no. 447 (1891): pp. 113-17. American Association for the Advancement of Science. http://www.jstor.org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/ stable/1768043.

Clarke, Robert D., III. “Bending the Light: Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ ”.

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2000.

Felstiner, John. “Paul Celan’s Todesfuge.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, (1986): pp. 249-264 Hatch, John. “Cosmic Stutters: Anselm Kiefer’s Search for Redemption in the Stars”. ed. Nicholas Campion, Heavenly Discourses. Ceredigion: Sophia Centre Press: University of Wales (2016): pp. 263-270.

Hubbard, Sue. “Margarete (1981) by Anselm Kiefer (Saatchi Collection)”. Independent.

October 23, 2008. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/ margarete- 1981-by-anselm-kiefer-saatchi-collection-970630.html Nickens, Mark. “Kabbalah”. Encyclopedia of Time: Science, Philosophy, Theology, & Culture, ed. H. J. Birx. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. (2009): pp. 735-736 Roos, Bonnie. “Anselm Kiefer and the Art of Allusion: Dialectics of the Early ‘Margarete’ and ‘Sulamith’ Paintings”. Comparative Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, (2006): pp. 24-43 Taylor, Rebecca. “Anselm Kiefer, Shulamite”. Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy. org/humanities/global-culture/identity-body/identity-body-europe/a/anselmkiefer-shulamite

TRUST Olivia Mossuto

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PLAY, PERFORMANCE, AND POWER: PEGGY PHELAN AND ALLAN KAPROW ON ART VERSUS REALITY

by Camille Intson The end of the twentieth century cultivated rich developments in the field of performance art, fuelling a movement now loosely dubbed as the “post-postmodern age” (Phelan 80). The term rose to acclaim by the efforts of artists and theorists from the 1970s onwards intent on challenging the nature of live performance with experiments focusing on theatricalizing mundane aspects of everyday life. Allan Kaprow’s theory-based experiments and Peggy Phelan’s commentaries on Marina Abramović’s installations both speak of blurring the lines between art and reality. However, whereas Phelan conjectures Abramović’s ‘performances,’ that is to say creations presented for an audience, Kaprow explains the principles behind his ‘happenings’ which are done for ‘play,’ ergo in the absence of a spectator. Both essayists agree, varying approaches aside, that art should be created for its own sake and should not be limited by the art world’s political economy or by public expectation of what art should be. The experiments discussed, conjoined by the belief that the artist should not be in complete control of a piece’s meaning wherein other participants or observers are involved, diverge in tactics. Phelan believes that Abramović’s The House with the Ocean View provides audiences with cause to be subjective and introspective in their analyses of the form while Kaprow’s On/Off strengthens a communal sense of consciousness among participants. These two differing factions of performance art are finally linked by their belief in the power of ‘performance’ and ‘play’ in the physical present and the open-mindedness that can arise from subjective interpretation of the work.

Allan Kaprow and Peggy Phelan vary in their theories on art imitating reality, however, both artists strongly reject a “commodity based art market” (Phelan 78) that serves the capital world. Kaprow’s ‘playing’ is unconcerned with public consumption; his events disregard the ‘performance’ aspect and thus do not serve the consuming masses. He calls experimental performance “the only kind of art that Anglo-American can call its own,” (Kaprow 180) insinuating that other forms are now mass-produced to fit a global capital art market. Kaprow also believes that all actions that are ‘performed’ for an audience are “appropriations” of experimental art, and should not adopt the ‘art-imitating-reality’ label (Kaprow 178). He affirms this with the statement, “No matter how much life we confront in [these performances], standard contexts never allow us to forget art’s higher station” (Kaprow 178). On the other hand, Phelan believes in the theatricalization of reality. She states that

“without a robust sense of “life” as something other than art, the terms collapse into one another and we are left with [a]…reality… that risks making art nothing more than… documentation” (Phelan 79). Phelan critiques the idea of ‘art’ being purely mundane, that is, the basis of Kaprow’s work. She believes that Marina Abramović’s experiments thrive on the element of spectacle, of performance; there is nothing material for the audience to gain, but they are emotionally immersed in her actions, in the manipulating of the everyday duties she performs in public. Phelan voices her disbelief in art as a commodity by citing acclaimed American art theorists Adrian Piper and Andrea Fraser, who critique artists “[producing] work tailored to sell rather than innovate” (Phelan 78), stating that “the political economy of the art world… robs the performance of art” (Phelan 79). Here, we can draw similarities to Kaprow’s stance on art and capital; both believe in creation for creation’s sake and reject capitalist demand for art as a product to be mass marketed.

Kaprow’s On/Off and Abramović’s The House with the Ocean View, as described by Phelan, both take interpretive power away from the artist, but while House provokes audiences to be introspective, On/Off is a social experiment that toys with communal perceptions of small events and behaviours. Phelan writes that The House with the Ocean View shows Abramović “theatricalizing the repetitive everyday acts of sleeping, showering, eliminating waste, and sitting at a table” (Phelan 81). Her interpretation is that, as onlookers watch these duties being staged, they begin to lose their sense of time to the mesmerizing simplicity of the actions performed. Both actor and spectator are lost in the moment and become somewhat hypnotized. This “mutual transformation” of both actor and spectator is explained by Phelan as she writes that “House took place between the spaces we saw, in the eyes and minds of the artists and viewers who sat silently and were transformed. [It was] A celebration and dramatization of liminality” (Phelan 82-83). Each viewer brought subjective associations and meanings to the installation, thus enriching their individual experience of the piece.

On/Off takes a different approach, focusing on the communal and not the individual.

Kaprow describes a group of people playing with a light switch, flicking it on and off as they please, “[peeking] at one another, trying to anticipate who would make the next move” (Kaprow 178). The participants became increasingly conscious of one another’s simple movements during the experiment, listened to each other’s breathing, stared around the room, and remained in silence. In those silent moments, the participants were seemingly in control and could directly reflect upon and examine their peers’ responses. Although nothing was said aloud, the manipulation of power that the project spawned was felt indefinitely by the participants although it could not be identified or explained. The effects of both experiments were felt objectively among the players and spectators; the artist never directly controlled the audience’s experience, although the projects greatly differed.

Works Cited Phelan, Peggy. “Marina Abramović: Witnessing shadows.” The Performance

Studies Reader Third Edition, edited by Henry Bial and Sara Brady,

Routledge, 2016, 77-84.

HAPPY PLACE Shirley Ma

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Phelan’s theories on Abramović and Kaprow’s retellings of his own ‘happenings’ converge in a theme of open-endedness, in the idea that experimental art toying with reality is defined by a lack of definition. Phelan theorizes that the goal of Abramović’s experiments, and the goals of similar post-post-modern artists, is to create art in the fleeting moment. It is to create art “that [has] no object, no remaining trace to be sold, collected, or otherwise ‘arrested’ ” (Phelan 78). By this, Phelan means that Abramović’s installations must be experienced in the physical present; their meanings are not predetermined by the artist. She believes that “great art… moves beyond the control of its creators… Constraining critical discussion about what art is… reveals a lack of faith in the… artwork” (Phelan 79). This means that there is no set constraint as to what ‘art’ can represent to any individual. Kaprow takes the same stance, noting that experimental art “is that act or thought whose identity as art must always remain in doubt,” and that “the forgetting of art,” that is art in the moment, is “the condition for experimentation” (Kaprow 178). Both artists accept that exploratory art is characterized by ambiguity, recognize the importance of the mundane, and swear by the power of experimental ‘performance’ and ‘play’ in the development of twenty-first century art.

COMING AND GOING : LACK AND COMPULSION IN “THE LOVE SONG OF ALFRED J. PRUFOCK”

by Rachel Windsor The irony in the title of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rests in the indisputable fact that it is not a love song at all. The poem may be better described as an avoidance of love and indeed of any sort of intimacy in general. Eliot takes a modernistic approach to the character of Prufrock and through the requisite clear language and vivid, clean descriptions, he paints Prufrock as a highly neurotic individual. In part, this characterization comes from the way Prufrock describes his surroundings, often deferring to strange comparisons that expose Prufrock’s mind—for example, comparing the night sky to an etherized patient. In the same pseudo-medical vein, images of dismemberment are common in the text. Within this essay, I argue that fragmentation of the self is a major source of anxiety for Prufrock, one that he paradoxically handles by metaphorically dismembering himself and those around him. I locate Prufrock’s bodily anxiety within Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and utilize this theory in a discussion of his focus on fragmentation throughout the text. I also employ Freud’s theory of compulsive repetition in an effort to explain why Prufrock, despite all his anxiety surrounding his own dismemberment, still uses such imagery as a defence mechanism. Ultimately, I attempt to prove that the violent images in the poem function as an expression of unconscious trauma.

According to Lacan, the mirror stage is an identification; it is a transformation that takes place in the subject when he recognizes himself in the mirror and “assumes an image” (Lacan 2). This stage occurs in infanthood when the child sees his image as unified and coherent. But “being an image, the unity is offers is by definition imaginary: corporeal reality and reflected image can never coincide. The mirror stage is thus a scene of […] splitting, and places misperception at the very foundation of the psyche” (Harris n.p.). The self, then, is characterized by a lack; the individual has the desire to be the unified body that he saw in the mirror during development, but can never connect the imaginary wholeness with the fragmented real (the real being Lacan’s conception of that which is beyond language, often traumatic in itself (ibed. n.p.)). In Lacan’s Ecrits, he states “the moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates […] the dialect that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations” (6). However, as we see over the course of the text, Prufrock is radically alienated, with his only forms of dialect taking place in his mind. One may, therefore, assume that Prufrock is in some way still “stuck” in the mirror stage as he is not able to communicate his “I” in social situations.

Prufrock begins his monologue by saying “let us go then, you and I” (Eliot 1), but the “you” he is addressing is never defined. Guven suggests while it is apparent the “I” is Prufrock himself the “you” may also be Prufrock; potentially his subconscious, or simply another part of his fractured mind (81). By inviting part of himself on a poetic journey with another part, Prufrock attempts to reconcile the self he recognized as broken during the

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mirror stage. This attempt does nothing to calm the anxieties that, according to Lacan, have been plaguing Prufrock since he was an infant.

By the next line, Prufrock is again thinking implicitly of the dismembered body, comparing the evening to “a patient etherized upon a table” (Eliot 3). Even in his subconscious mind, Prufrock is preoccupied with practices relating to surgery which, in the context of the rest of his monologue, we may understand as the taking of part of the body and thus the fracturing of the self. Particularly worrisome to Prufrock is the notion that others will not be able to comprehend his wholeness and will dismember him themselves. Consider his anxiety regarding parties; he imagines other guests noting “how is hair is growing thin!” and “how his arms and legs are thin!” (Eliot 41, 44) before he has even “descend[ed] the stair” (ibed.

39) to mingle with guests. Prufrock’s fear does not come from the idea of being judged for his appearance but rather from being perceived in parts; to be seen in such a manner would reinforce his view of himself as fragmented and make it more difficult for him to return to the imaginary ideal of unity. He makes this clear in his meditations on “the eyes that fix [him] in a formulated phrase” which leave him “pinned and wriggling on the wall” like an insect (Eliot 56, 58). Pinned insects are those prepared to be dissected and examined; Prufrock worries about eyes not because of how he looks but because of the ability of the gaze to fragment. This anxiety regarding being examined motivates Prufrock to isolate himself from others as we see him doing over the course of the poem.

For all his fears around his own dismemberment, Prufrock nevertheless handles his social anxiety by imagining those around him in fragments. Instead of talking to a woman, for example, he convinces himself that he has no need to do so anymore, as he has “known the arms already, known them all— / Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / (But in the lamplight, downed in light brown hair!)” (Eliot 62-64).

Prufrock reduces women to nothing more than body parts. His focus on the “light brown hair” is particularly telling of this reduction; women become not only extremities but the details of these parts. Prufrock is imagining those around him as the smallest and most superfluous fragments. By doing so, he is able to conceive himself as “more” together than them, even if he himself is fragmented. At one point Prufrock imagines himself as “a pair of ragged claws” (Eliot 74). Although he is able to acknowledge that he himself is not a unified “I,” he is still more whole than those surrounding him; he is a body part, while they are small details of the part. For Prufrock, the fragmentation of others is a defence mechanism against what he assumes they are doing to him.

The primary targets of Prufrock’s fragmentations are women. When discussing other men, he does not use the same type of dismemberment that he does with himself and women; the “lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows” (Eliot 73) are granted the privilege of being described primarily as men, while the details of their clothing and bodies are presented as secondary. Further, in the references to Lazarus and Hamlet, Prufrock uses their names, thus granting them a form of subjectivity that he denies to individual women. In his daydreams the women are fragmented: he imagines his love interest “settling a pillow by her head” (Eliot 96) and thinks of the mermaids only in terms of their singing voices. By conceptualizing women as parts, Prufrock denies them subjectivity—indeed, the same way he feels women are denying him his. Much has already been written on Prufrock’s anxiety about love and intimacy; suffice to say the poem is “a dramatic monologue that presents an inner conflict between the need to be loved and the failure to satisfy that need” (Waldoff 182). Prufrock feels that in denying him love, women are denying him the wholeness of self he craves. This assumption is evident in the climax of the poem, when Prufrock, imagining rejection from a woman, angrily exclaims “it is impossible to say just what I mean! / But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen” (Eliot 104-105). Due to the perceived rejection, Prufrock imagines not only that his voice is gone, but that he is reduced to nerves and projected on a screen. In his imagination, Prufrock has been radically dismembered through the dismissal by a woman.

Throughout the poem, he attempts to respond to the alleged violence.

Prufrock’s anxiety around women and bodies is reinforced in his repetition of the lines “in the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (Eliot 35-36) repeated whenever he comes too close to thinking about his radical loneliness. These women represent all of his desires as well as the pinnacle of all his anxieties. Waldoff argues that the poem takes up two sides of anxiety about love, one of rejection and the other “a fear that one’s desires themselves are inherently dangerous” (184). Prufrock’s first anxiety about the women who come and go centres around love: he desires them but because of their constant movement, he is unable to have the discussion that he so desperately wants to over the course of the poem. It is because of this movement that he is unable to dismember them. Unlike other women in the poem, Prufrock does not think of these women as merely body parts. Rather, he sees them as whole subjects, much in the way that he himself desires to be. As discussed, Prufrock handles his lack of unity by doing the same to the women around him; again because of their constant migration, he is unable to render them objects. This causes him a type of anxiety that manifests itself in the poem as repetition. Because these women are constantly in flux Prufrock is unable to move past them. Perhaps most anxiety-inducing for Prufrock is not the physical reality of the women at all but his perception of them. In looking at the other, Prufrock sees the unified body that he imagined himself to be during the mirror stage. He has no access to the psyche of the other—particularly in this case as he refuses to actually talk to the other and attempt to understand them—and thus imagines them to be whole. In this fantasizing, he reminds himself of his own lack. Because of their status as unified “women who come

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and go” they represented all that Prufrock is missing and all that he desires, thus creating a neurotic state.

According to Lacan, “the unconscious is structured like a language” (qtd. in Harris n.p.); for Prufrock, language aids him in structuring his unconscious—or, at the very least, navigating the anxiety present there. In writing his thoughts and particularly, in his acts of metaphorical dismemberment, Prufrock attempts to work through his anxiety.

According to Freud (from whom Lacan developed a number of theories), those individuals who have undergone a traumatic experience are gripped by an unconscious desire to repeat the experience (Childers n.p.). If we accept this theory, we may develop an understanding of Prufrock’s obsession with fragmentation. Throughout the telling of his story, Prufrock is returning to the site of a traumatic experience, that is, his recognition of his own lack. Because he cannot physically return to the state of infanthood in which he was first exposed to the imaginary ideal of a unified body, he must return to this trauma metaphorically. He does so by writing about himself in pieces and by doing the same to others. The theory of repetition compulsion also explains Prufrock’s obsession with the “women [who] come and go” (Eliot 34). Given that he cannot dismember them, as already explored, he must orthographically return to this major site of his anxieties. In short, the writing of the poem acts for Prufrock as a therapeutic way to write through his compulsions, which appear to the reader as neuroticism. At the same time, the compulsions act as a defence mechanism against Prufrock’s intimacy anxiety.

To conclude, the images of dismemberment present in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” arise out of a longstanding trauma of the unconscious; the character of Prufrock dramatizes the fragmented mind theorized to arise in early childhood. Throughout the course of the poem, the reader watches as Prufrock attempts to handle his anxieties in a number of different manners: by dismemberment of the self, dismemberment of the other, and compulsive repetition of his trauma. All dismemberment, of course, occurs only in Prufrock’s imagination, but it is important to remember that the reasons Prufrock arrives at this coping mechanism reside only in his mind as well. It is the complex interiority of Prufrock that makes him such an interesting study for psychoanalytic literary criticism.

Works Cited Childers, Joseph. “Compulsion to Repeat, or Repetition Compulsion.” The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism, Edited by Gary Hentzi, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, literature.proquest.com.proxy1.id=R00787755& divLevel=0&queryId=2960936029282&trailId=158184658E9&area=ref&forward=critref_ft.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ecrits, Routledge Classics, London, 2001, pp. 1–8.

Guven, Samet. “A Modernist Approach to T.S Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Journal of History Culture and Art Research, vol. 4, no. 2, 2015, pp. 80–87. doi:10.7596/ taksad.v4i2.435.

Harris, Jan. “Jacques Lacan.” Literature Online Biography, 2007, http://literature. proquest.com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/searchFulltext.do?id=BIO011061&divLevel=0& queryId=2960200221121&trailId=1580258962E&area=ref&forward=critref_ft Waldoff, Leon. “Prufrock’s Defenses and Our Response.” American Imago, vol. 26, no. 2, 1969, pp. 182–193.

BIRCH III Rebecca McLaren

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COEXISTENCE: FEMINISM AND PORN

by Shauna Ruby Valchuk In relation to females in porn, feminist porn star Dylan Ryan stated,

Their bodies looked different from mine, and they seemed to embody a sexuality that was … vulnerable but hyper-sexual, passive but sexually desiring, ready for any sex act but without the impetus to make it hap pen. It seemed as if sex was happening ‘to’ these women rather than with them or because of their choices or motivations (“How I Became a Feminist Porn Star”)

The contradictions for women in the porn industry are plentiful but for both men and women watching porn, these contradictions can be consequential.

We live in a world where porn is easier to access than proper sexual education.

For most of us, porn is the first gateway into our sexuality and it can be very influential. Mainstream porn teaches many false ideas such as sex being strictly about male pleasure and that females only serve as a stepping stone to the male climax. However, feminist porn seeks to reform the porn industry in terms of equality, comfort, and consent. By shaping porn into a pro-equality industry, feminist action can seek to coexist within pornography.

Pornography, as a concept, is relatively modern. It is no shock that the general concept of pornography was birthed quite recently by a very much Christian-oriented, nineteenth-century Western society. Pornography originating from a traditionalist point of view - can be simply defined as “pictures or writings about prostitutes” (“Pornography and Feminism” 17).

More recently published, as of 1991, the Oxford English Dictionary defines pornography as:

1.A description of prostitutes or of prostitution, as a matter of public hygiene.

2.Description of the life, manners, etc. of prostitutes and their patrons;

hence, the expression or suggestion of obscene or unchaste subjects in

literature or art.

Although a dated definition, for a long time pornography has been defined as “obscene”, in context of prostitution and, most importantly, “as a matter of public hygiene”. Defining something as both obscene and as a matter of public hygiene is quite contradictory and seemingly ironic. By this definition, pornography becomes a taboo subject, but a necessary one.

More recently, the Oxford English Dictionary defines pornography as “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement.” The modernization of pornography (one that shies away from solely obscenities and prostitution) has conceived a strong point of debate for many feminists today. Broadly put, pro-porn feminists argue that pornography is a right, that it can be empowering to women, and without it, we perpetuate acts of censorship. On the contrary, anti-porn feminists argue that porn is a patriarchal medium meant only strengthens sexual aggression towards women. One - admittedly opinionated anti-porn feminist Robin Morgan infamously said, “porn is the theory, rape is the practice” (“Pornography and Feminism” 26). The ideology that pornography is innately bad portrays men as strictly violators and women as strictly victims. The conservative opinion that sexual aggression is a direct result of viewing porn, although holds some valid correlation in research, does not seek to change the issues that make porn problematic to transform it into a medium that empowers both men and women sexually. Rather, it seeks to rid the world of porn altogether. Like any sort of media in today’s society, there are inherit sexist double-standards that feminism should seek to eradicate. From television, to movies, to magazines, to music, there is seemingly always sexism and the same goes for pornography. As Feminists Against Censorship write in relation to the pro-porn argument, “This is not to say that all pornography is good simply that most of it is no worse than a great deal of the rest of the patriarchal and misogynist culture which it reflects” (“Pornography and Feminism” 26). Banning the world of pornography is indeed censorship, thus we must strive for change, rather than to rid.

What anti-pornography feminists seize to realize is that most of the time women who are sex-workers are not victims and are generally consenting women who do not need saving.

Feminism is about the freedom of choice, regardless of gender. Banning pornography altogether leaves no room for choice. Feminists Against Censorship write, “if everyone had the right to ban all images and written materials that happened to offend them, then how much would actually be left?” (“Pornography and Feminism” 72) Banning pornography only creates more issues rather than solve the ones already presented. That does not mean porn is not harmful, but in order to fix the issues at hand, we must see both men and women as equals who both, in part, suffer from the patriarchal ideals porn perpetuates in order to eradicate these issues.

Pornography is a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide. In 2007, global porn revenues were estimated at $20 billion (“Pornography Statistics” 4). In an industry this large, producers of such content are bound to cut corners. This “cutting corners” is what produces a lot of the key problems in the industry. Part of the issue is that pornography is so readily available due to the internet. In 2008, more than 560 college students responded to an online survey and the conclusion was that 93% of boys and 62% of girls were exposed to pornography before 18 (“Pornography Statistics” 15). Thus, this influx of

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access to pornography and the abundance of children viewers shows the great reach online pornography has. For a lot of people, myself included, our first visual encounter with sex is with pornography as children. Without proper sexual education, porn – for a lot of people – becomes a primary example of what sex should be.

Although the pornography industry does not actively seek to degrade women, this subtle degradation exists and is taught implicitly to both children and adults as the norm. Generally, mainstream porn is focused mainly on the male viewer. The end of most porn is male ejaculation and the means to this end becomes women, as a sexual object. Likewise, this type of porn demonstrates the ever-present societal ideal that men and women have specific roles. By catering strictly to the male viewer, porn gives false ideals of sex and portrays women as “pigtailed virgins, sex kittens, and hyper-orgasmic nymphos” (Taormino 207). This ideology - that only men are sexual beings and that women are just a vehicle to climax - convinces the viewer that men are meant to desire and that women are only to be desired (“Pornography and Feminism” 58). Excluding women and making porn with strictly the male viewer in mind fetishizes and degrades women. Not to mention, the working environment is harmful to both women and men. Dr. Sharon Mitchell confirms the STD prevalence in an interview with Court TV, in which she states: “66% of porn performers have herpes, 12-28% have sexually transmitted diseases, and 7% have HIV” (“Pornography Statistics” 6). Likewise, Tanya Burleson, formerly known as Jersey Jaxin, said, “Guys are punching you in the face. You get ripped.

Your insides can come out of you. It’s never ending. You’re viewed as an object — not as a human with a spirit. People do drugs because they can’t deal with the way they’re being treated” (“Pornography Statistics” 6). With the overproduction of porn, sex becomes simply an unachievable fantasy but is still strived for. These depictions of porn are mostly subtle and implicit and I am sure the porn industry does not actively seek to promote patriarchal ideals but they do implicitly perpetuate an abundance of problems for both men and women. These problems are very much present due to the corners that are cut in the industry and are some of the main arguments for anti-porn feminists.

Consequently, we must ask ourselves: what happens when we attempt to assimilate feminist ideals into pornography? Rather than creating a debate on entirely pro- or anti-pornography, feminists must work together to get rid of the attributes that make porn bad to develop it into a vehicle of sexuality for both men and women. As Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti said “there’s no reason that porn can’t present women as sexual collaborators with men rather than as sexual conquests of men” (“What Does Feminist Porn Look Like?”). The recent product of combining pornography with feminism is feminist porn. Feminist

porn is essentially porn made by feminists. However, most people do not agree on one singular definition of feminist porn. Tristian Taormino - an award-winning author, sex educator, and feminist pornographer - defines feminist porn as a fair and ethical process of production, as well as a positive working environment, while defying the many stereotypes of mainstream porn. Taormino writes, “feminist porn attempts to counteract the messages we get from society that can be reflected in mainstream porn: sex is shameful, naughty, dirty, scary, dangerous, or it’s the domain of men, where only their desires and fantasies get fulfilled” (207). What feminist porn attempts to do, is to fix all the previously mentioned problems with mainstream pornography. First and foremost, it attempts to create a positive and ethical working environment rather than cut corners.

Feminist porn does this by making sex workers comfortable and consenting in their environment. By providing contraceptives and things that make a more positive working environment, we eliminate negative connotations with working in porn and porn actors and actresses become actors who just happen to be performing sex. As Taormino writes “the process of making porn cannot only be consensual, it can be safe, professional, political, empowering, and fun” (210).

Likewise, feminist porn attempts to create a more authentic on-screen experience of sex.

This is done by creating an environment where real sex can be simulated amongst the actors. Taormino, for example, let’s her actors pick who they would want to have sex with or feel like they would work well acting with. By doing this and several other things, feminist porn focuses on sex workers of both genders as three-dimensional characters, as raw and authentic, and most importantly, as real human beings. Trying to incorporate real emotion into porn not only makes for a more authentic sexual experience, it shows viewers the reality and flaws of sex and all humans as sexual beings.

Another key issue feminist porn attempts to resolve is that of stereotypes. Taormino identifies the main archetypes of mainstream porn as men as “a silent/stoic, always around and rock hard, dominant, assertive, and (judging by how their faces and much of their bodies are cut out of frame) in the camera’s way” and women as “white, skinny, submissive, and big breasted … they are always ready for sex, they never say no, yet their pleasure isn’t a priority” (208). Seeing porn as one-dimensional completely dehumanizes the entire sensation of sex. However, more importantly, these archetypes are harmful to the stereotyping and fetishizing of other groups. Typically, like women, those of colour and non-heterosexuals are seen only as a vehicle for sexual pleasure and as a fetish. This not only perpetuates stereotypes but reduces them to just a category on a porn site. Even titles of porn reduce people of colour to degrading stereotypes (i.e. Slant Eyed Sluts, Naughty Spanish Maids, and Big Black Asses to name only a few). Race becomes exoticized, fetishized, and commoditized in very particular ways (Taormino 208).

Feminist porn, however, does not seek to reduce people to their gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, body size, ability, nor age. Feminist porn, as a whole, attempts to challenge the very definition of sex as entirely heteronormative in order for viewers to view sex for

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what it truly is - intersectional.

Evidently, feminist porn seeks to fix all the issues that make mainstream porn problematic. Feminist porn creates a positive and comfortable working environment, it focuses on the authenticity of the human sexual experience, and eradicates stereotypes while mainstream porn does the opposite. The debate on the innate evilness of pornography is a viable one, yet as feminists, we should attempt to fix the problems that already exist in the pornography industry, rather than censor ourselves. By using feminist porn as a plan of action, we can sexually empower everyone, regardless of gender or sexuality.

Mainstream porn, as it is now, translates the ever-present stereotypes our society perpetuates into a sexual media that is easily accessible. This accessibility not only makes people of all ages assume that porn is the way the typical person experiences sex, but it assumes that the translating stereotypes into sex is okay. The reformation of porn in coexistence with feminism will attempt to take the patriarchal stereotypes that are prevalent in society out of the pornography industry. Although a small step towards the equality of the sexes, it may be an impactful one and through this, all people can finally live free, sexually, and will be closer to equality.

Works Cited Albury, Kath. “Reading Porn Reparatively.” Sexualities 12.5 (2009): 647-5. Sage Journals. Web. 08 Feb. 2016.

O’Connor, Russell. “What Does Feminist Porn Look Like?” Everyday Feminism. 08 Sept. 2013. Web. 08 Feb. 2016.

“Pornography.” Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Pornography Statistics. 1st ed. Owosso: Covenant Eyes, 2016. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Rodgerson, Gillian, and Elizabeth Wilson. Pornography and Feminism: The Case against Censorship. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991. Print.

Ryan, Dylan. “How I Became a Feminist Porn Star.” Jezebel. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Taormino, Tristan. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.

New York: The Feminist Press, 2013. Print.

BACKPACK KICKER Upasna Mehta

I AM LOST I AM FOUND Upasna Mehta

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CONFESSIONS OF A DYING MAN

by Na-Young Kang In “True Kindness” of Great House, Aaron documents his evolving feelings towards his son, Dovik. In Part I, bitterness and cruelty guide Aaron’s behaviours and attitudes, as he attacks Dovik as a person, son, and writer. This anger motivates Aaron’s vindictiveness and irreversibly draws a wedge between them. Importantly, Aaron refuses to acknowledge or take responsibility for being the only thing that stands in the way of himself and his son. Aaron uses three mechanisms of denial: blame, as in blaming Dovik for creating this barrier; misinterpretation, as in misinterpreting Dovik as a human being; and projection, as in projecting his own insecurities and shortcomings onto Dovik. With each mechanism, Aaron’s desire to feel connected to his son becomes increasingly evident, but he allows his pride to stand in the way of expressing these feelings. In Part II, only when Aaron faces death, he begins to reflect on his behaviours towards Dovik. Aaron sets aside his ego in order to accept and admit that all along, he was what stood between himself and his son.

Although Aaron speaks of regret and guilt, it is the imminent threat of death that truly guides Aaron’s confession. This essay will explore why Aaron remains in a state of denial only until he faces the subject of death. This will be accomplished by exploring why Aaron resents Dovik, Aaron’s mechanisms of denial, and why Aaron decides to confess.

Part I is saturated with anger and denial. In his confession to Dovik, Aaron makes very obvious of his resentment: “…I let you shit in your pants, a ten-year-old boy facing his smallness and helplessness, the nightmare of his utter aloneness” (55). Aaron seemingly enjoys watching Dovik suffer; moreover, he enjoys being the source of his suffering: “In my fury, I grabbed your little friend and dangled him above the whirring blade of the blender… you screamed a bloodcurdling scream… As if it were you yourself I was prepared to sacrifice to the blade. A pleasant tingling spread through the ends of my nerves” (62). Why does Aaron treat Dovik with such cruelty? The reason becomes clear with time: Aaron feels inadequate as a father. Aaron goes out of his way to convince others, and more importantly, to convince himself, that he knows “how to raise [his] own child” (72), and that he “loved [Dovik] as [he] knew how” (191). Subconsciously, Aaron knows that there exists “neglect and brutality” (71) beneath the surface. Uri, Dovik’s brother, accepts Aaron’s shortcomings as a father, in a way that “didn’t cost [Aaron his] dignity” (57), but Dovik does not – and this is precisely why Aaron resents Dovik.

Aaron not only resents Dovik but actively blames him – Aaron’s first mechanism of denial – for creating the wedge between them. The only reason

Aaron fails as a father is that Dovik fails as a son: “When [your mother] died I called Uri first… it was Uri who drove her to the chemotherapy… And you, my son? Where were you during all of that?” (49). Cruelty and blame are not only Aaron’s coping mechanisms but concealments of his true motive – he needs Dovik to need him: “Only when at last I decided that you’d learned your lesson, that it had been made clear to you just how much you needed me, did I pop back out from behind the rock…” (55). When Dovik finally shows vulnerability and asks to stay with Aaron, Aaron admits, “…Something happened in me. A kind of ravaged feeling entered. As if now that your mother was gone, now that she was no longer there to absorb your pain, to tend to it, to feel it as her own, it had been left to me” (64). Rather than seizing the opportunity to rekindle their relationship, Aaron uses this moment to create another power struggle of who needs whom: “For your sake or mine?”

(69).

Aaron’s remaining mechanisms of denial are misinterpretation and projection. Aaron misinterprets Dovik for one of two reasons: Aaron truly does not understand Dovik, or, Aaron is simply projecting his own insecurities onto his son as a defence mechanism, unwilling to accept the fact that he is the sole barrier between himself and his son. The strongest evidence for Aaron’s misunderstanding of Dovik is his misinterpretation of Dovik’s shark story (66). The shark represents “a repository for human sadness. Who takes all that the dreamers cannot bear, who bears the violence of their accumulated feeling” (179).

Evidently, Aaron grossly misunderstands this, as he focusses on rather superficial features: “What does it eat, this shark? Where is this place, this institution, this hospital, for a lack of a better word, with the enormous tank? Why do these people sleep so much? They don’t need to eat either?” (181). Aaron’s misunderstanding of this shark story may represent his genuine misunderstanding of Dovik. This genuine misunderstanding is also apparent in Aaron’s narration of the stark contrast between his own relationship with Dovik, versus Dovik’s relationship with Dovik’s mother. Aaron feels like an invader, the one responsible for separating Dovik from her (197). Moreover, Aaron does not understand Dovik in the way that Dovik’s mother does: “Where I saw little pathetic piles of dirt she saw a whole city. From the beginning you had given her the keys to yourself. But not to me. Never to me, my son” (178). Perhaps Aaron truly does not understand Dovik, as he is a mere outsider to a world he “would not be let into” (180).

The alternative and more likely explanation is that Aaron purposely misinterprets Dovik as a defence mechanism – projecting his own insecurities onto Dovik, and viewing Dovik strictly through the narrow lens that he has created. For example, suffering resonates throughout Aaron’s confession, but not in the way that he suggests: “Suffering: just the sort of thing that’s up [Dovik’s] alley” (52). Dovik is not the one who is suffering here; rather, Aaron projects his own experience of suffering onto Dovik, as he struggles with the fear “that [Dovik] would turn away from [him] again, as [he has] always turned away” (69).

Aaron’s fear of abandonment tends to guide his delusional thinking: “Sometimes I convinced myself that you knew I broke open the packages and read what you wrote; that you meant

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for me to read it” (66). No matter how strongly Aaron craves the connection and relationship with Dovik, he lets his ego get in the way and rejects Dovik before Dovik can reject him (179): “You write and you erase. And you call this a profession? And you, in your infinite wisdom, you said, No, a living. I laughed in your face” (50).

In Part II, blame turns into self-reflection and acceptance. Aaron not only admits that he knows he was “the monster of [Dovik’s] childhood” (174) and that “there were times [his] temper got the better of [him]” (191), but he explains why he behaved this way: “Looking at you, I felt a pang for my own lost youth” (183). This single statement captures the use of two mechanisms of denial: blame and projection. Although Aaron may still be guided by misconceptions about Dovik, he no longer makes a mockery out of Dovik, and can now “admit that [he] couldn’t understand [him]” (190); and Aaron even feels guilty for this vast misunderstanding (190). Ultimately, Aaron accepts that he has been the cause of the barrier that stands between them: “The moment after you walked out of the room I realized that I’d lost my chance. I understood that you offered me a reprieve, and I’d squandered it. And I knew it would not come again” (179).

Importantly, only when Aaron thinks of death, does he think of Dovik: “You see, my child, a little bit every day I find myself contemplating my death… In one of these little excursions into the unknown I uncovered something about you that I’d almost forgotten” (175); “And then, my child, I thought of you. I realized that I didn’t care if the others came [to my grave]” (196). Likewise, this thought of death is what triggers Aaron’s confession: “We’re running out of time, you and I. No matter how miserable your life may be, there is still more time left for you… But not I. I’m rapidly approaching my end” (173). Although guilt may contribute to Aaron’s confession, it seems to be the sense of urgency that takes precedence; which raises concerns about the sincerity of his confession.

Although it is evident that Aaron craves Dovik’s love and attention: “Will you visit me once I’m gone? Will you come from time to time and sit with me?”

(195); he does not ask for Dovik’s forgiveness, but rather, a truce (174). This raises the question, is Aaron’s confession largely a self-serving one – to die with a piece of mind? This is likely, considering Aaron’s statement: “You don’t have to tell me what you don’t want to tell me about your life… I can live without knowing that. But what I need to know is why you’ve come back to me” (195).

Aaron’s curiosity is limited to how Dovik perceives him, rather than about Dovik himself: “Tell me, Dovik… Did you really see me like that? So heartless, and arrogant, and cruel?” (182). Nevertheless, although the motive is unclear,

Aaron’s feelings of regret are not: “…I thought I would explode from it all, from love and regret, Dov, love and regret as I never thought possible” (197). This regret, however, seems not to arise from mistreating Dovik or being the cause of their conflicts, but rather, from not confessing soon enough: “Am I too late?... when I woke… no one was there. Your chair was empty” (195).

It is clear that Aaron feels the need to confess to Dovik, but for a different reason than led to believe. In Part I of “True Kindness”, Aaron is angry and takes pleasure in knowing that he hurt Dovik. It soon becomes clear as to why he feels this way – he acknowledges that their broken relationship is a result of his own inadequacy, something Dovik does not accept.

Moreover, Aaron is in a state of denial; depending on blame, misperceptions, and psychological projection, in order to avoid accepting responsibility. Although it becomes evident that Aaron subconsciously desires to repair their relationship, he goes out of his way to deny it. In fact, Aaron overcompensates – he not only denies it but makes it worse by mocking Dovik, further deepening the division between them. In Part II, Aaron becomes overburdened by the thought of death. This thought generates a chain of reactions, such as guilt and regret. Although these feelings contribute to Aaron’s confession, they do not trigger it. Perhaps Aaron truly regrets the lack of a relationship with Dovik, and he may even regret not taking responsibility any sooner, but he does not regret being the cause of the barrier.

Rather, Aaron’s confession is guided by a sense of urgency, the threat of death, and the desire to die with a peace of mind – that is, confessions of a dying man.

Works Cited

FOR DISPLAY ONLY Olivia Mossuto

Krauss, Nicole. Great House. Paragon, 2012.