Kambala English Extension 2 Brochure 2021

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ENGLISH EXTENSION 2 2021


Charlie Aitken

Three Truths - Creative Fiction

Alix Anastasiadis

To Disappear Behind Glass - Script (Drama)

Alice Andrews

No Mad Woman Here - Creative Fiction

Anjalee Desai

A Rich Myth or a New Lorde? The Dialectical Possibilities of a Feminist Poetic - Critical Response

Lara Finlayson

Gutted - Creative Fiction

Francesca Herro

Mummy Dearest: The Ubiquitous Grotesquerie of the Maternal Body - Critical Response

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Madeline Kunstler

‘I’m Dying, You Sadomasochistic Torturer!’1 - Critical Response

Amelia Malouf

The Whore, The Killer, and The Skank - Creative Nonfiction

Mayling Paton

Where Diyu Belong? The Hauntings of a Hybrid Identity - Critical Response

Mia Retallack

Mycotoxicosis: A Love Story - Creative Fiction

Rose Scarlis

Sofiya’s Sonata - Podcast (Radio Drama)

Erika Skelin

The President of Misrule - Critical Response

D. Larsen, ‘The [Somewhat Disturbing But Highly Improbable] Princess Murderer’ (2003)

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Charlie Aitken: Three Truths “The story of rural women is absent. But it is absent in a way that is more than just because it’s forgotten...it's almost a purposeful discounting. - Alana Johnson, 2013

Drawing inspiration from the multiplicitous voices innate to third wave feminism, my critical response aims to celebrate the diverse means through which the feminine identity may be reclaimed from the patriarchal traditions of the Western Canon. I accomplish this by interweaving comparative analysis of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde’s poetry, theories and interviews. In this way, I interrogate the composer’s alternate methods of self-actualisation, ultimately suggesting that it is through friendship and contentious discussion that both poets are able to reinstate subjective female ’selves’.

Three Truths The tree knows three truthsEarth, water and the fire of the sun. The tree holds three truths in one. Root limb and leaf unfold Out of the seed, and these rejoice Till the tree dreams it has a voice To join three truths in one great world of gold. -‘The Wattle Tree’ Judith Wright

[2]

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I: Drought Windorah, Central Queensland, 1905-

The king of day surrenders To the queen of the night his throne And we feel that the dusk is ours

-‘Twilight’ Louisa Lawson

[3]

“The prettiest girl in town”

She’d been dubbed from a young age - flagged a diamond in the dust of Windorah.

The compliments came often and were almost as flattering as the platinum-blonde curls that framed her features. Her crowning glory was the colour of wheat husk, reflecting light like the harsh sun of a typical 1905 afternoon. It was not difficult to spot her in town, for there seemed to be a golden ring of light that clung to her presence in place of a shadow. Her skin was pale and rough as that of ghost gum bark and on her cheeks bloomed bottlebrush flowers, her skin freckled by its pollen.

Diana lived in a grounded Queenslander-style house. It stood in solitude with timber bleached of all colour and bony splinters protruding from its shell. Its desiccated throat croaked ‘Eternal Summer’, but bids for company quickly faded to mere whispers that were inevitably consumed by the corrugated heat radiating from the split bitumen out front. Throughout the backyard was woven an overgrown garden that her and her mother had nurtured over time, which they would spend most afternoons caring for. Most girls would have preferred dolls, but the flowers satisfied Diana deeply. They were such vivid sprouts against the swathes of desert that now clothed their land.

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The garden had crept into their house; honeysuckles, spur flowers and the occasional silver wattle could be spotted in wildflower bunches inside - they came as gifts from the families in town. For as long as she could remember, the local vicar had asked Diana to sing at the annual Christmas service in the makeshift chapel that was Town Hall. She would stand upon the first step in front of the altar, beneath the stained-glass window, the intricate biblical designs above her head painting the pale canvas of her hair with prismatic colours, casting her in the glaring spotlight of religious devotion. People from town looked on as she fumbled her way through the tangle of Latin, her voice somewhat reduced in both quality and volume when accompanied by the pianoforte. Yet their eyes were pinned to her petite stature, as though her appearance had become the only instrument on display. The compliments and flowers would follow shortly after:

“As soothing as buttercream.” Flametree flowers would usually complement the line, whilst she would earn an occasional morning glory or two along with the next, “As sweet as toffee.”

But she wasn’t always smothered with such gifts. These emblems of gratitude were as absent from her early life as the rain was from their property. She was only as high as the wilted crops of barley when a suffocating heat settled over the land, its knuckles silently tightening around the neck of all life surfacing the soil - a desolate smile lingering on its cracked lips. Her beloved father was one of the many that could not escape the clutch of bony fingers, his disposition hardening with the topsoil of their land. The heat would claim his final breath; the encroaching waves of death - a salvation to his sunburnt flesh there in the middle of that dried-up creek bed. But such alleviation was not afforded by the skeletons that remained. The heat of the drought had seeped into her mother’s bones, her skin now hanging and sagged from dehydration. The prying fingers of drought eventually melted the remaining crumbs of currency left in the glass jar under the kitchen countertop.

“In another place, in another time, you could have gone on to do greater things. But you must marry well now, petal.” Her mother would say to her, but her eyes said otherwise, “if only you were a boy, Diana.”

But obey her mother’s orders, she did. Her golden shadow was dimmed by the trail of lace dragged by satin heels down the aisle, her father’s ghost looking on, hidden among the eaves and basking in the hymnic resonance of Pachelbel’s Canon as if it were rain. The veil hung from her sharp cheekbones, presenting her porcelain complexion with a gaunt angularity. His name was Henry, and they met on a Sunday at Cooper 4


Creek in the Summer of 1912. He was well off, as her mother had requested, and going to inherit Keeroongooloo station. Henry would thread her platinum crown with blood poppies - the Australian Rose that, when added to her sporadic garden, flaunted their intensity of hue starkly against the muted wildflowers, a diamond in the brush.

“Just like you,” he would say to her.

It was only a matter of time before the gifted poppies wilted and their petals were desiccated by the heat. Beauty was fleeting in a town like Windorah. Their scarlet radiance had rusted to the colour of oxblood, their stems, mahogany and unyielding. The petals fell from her platinum crown, but the stain of red remained, for the vines of blood that now braided her hair remembered the butt of his gun, the sole of his boot, the back of his hand.

In the late hours of the night, when a golden ambience lingered and the horizon teetered with light, she yearned for leather and slipped outside the house for a ride. She had spent weeks inside, locked in the house by Henry. Much of her time would be spent embroidering flowers, spinning an artificial nature of her own and always in her pocket was a crumpled newspaper advertisement,

“Long Live the Lady Student![4] Irene Lowe - first Australian woman to study Agriculture”

She read it most nights, crafting an artificial future of her own too. But it was on the horse when the world became most still; peaceful, untouched. Time ceased, the blades of grass rippling as if caressed by the fingers of a breeze. The horse’s hooves struck the ground, hammering to crack the crusted earth, to reach untouched soil, new land. But that was when he appeared in front, spooking at his shadowy figure. The trees rattled like bones in the air, the bird whip cautioned danger and the percussion of cicadas rumbled an ominous tone.

Her shoulder hit the ground first.

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An acrid smell seared her nostrils - the wooden floor was lacquered in a thick varnish. It was cold, and hard, and familiar. Bloodied beads of red would cluster like gems at her collar bone, like the condensation on his bottle, embellishing her throat with a necklace of rubies.

She would sit on the couch with a body as stiff and as still and as silent as wood, with only her eyes surveying his movements as he cracked open another bottle of beer. The newspaper was propped up in front of her like a facade, helping to avoid drawing his attention. In between glancing upwards at Henry, she came across an article that had been published weeks ago,

“We shall pledge our last man and our last shilling to see this war brought to a successful issue.”[5]

A sudden surge of hope pulsed through her body, yet she cautiously remained motionless as a fusillade of thoughts attempted to crack her skull. He wouldn’t have seen it yet. The newspaper couldn’t promise his recruitment, but she certainly would.

The limbs of undergarments clung to the worn edges of the suitcase that lay open, invitingly on the bed, emanating a viscous, khaki scent, one of tobacco-stained fingerprints, soot and gunpowder packed into matted cotton and aged leather. She stuffed as many of the knotted rags as she could into the pinstripe-lined box.

He would be gone for a long while now.

Henry was sitting outside on the back verandah, and from behind looked as though he was appreciating the rarity of the rusted soil, the moon arising. He seemed to be looking out to his future, contemplating the life he would leave behind to go to war with a glint of sorrow in his eye, the only moisture Windorah had seen in years. But when she came and sat next to him, his presence leached her body of all warmth and the two

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black vortexes in place of eyes looked to the horizon line but still saw nothing. Nothing of sustenance. Nothing of worth. He was looking at her now.

“Just like you.”

His gaze scorched the words into her skin until the scent of burning flesh hung pungent in the heated night. With force, he branded her cheek with a kiss, slowly and menacingly, as if to assert his power; his ownership. As his Chelsea soles left the wooden boards of the patio, she silently followed him out. He was waiting next to the highway for the bus that would take him to the Longreach station. From there he’d follow the Central Western line to the Townsville recruitment centre. He was barely visible against the night; a mere black insect quivering in the inescapable sand of the Australian desert. The dust behind her parted three ways as she walked toward him. Two indents the size of feet would follow each other consecutively and behind that swerved an unbroken line that was more deeply ingrained in the soil. He could not see the granules of dirt that freckled her bare feet, her wheat husk hair strung back by the hot breeze nor her radiant ghost gum skin burning under the moonlight in all her hidden glory.

“Look at me,” she said to him, her sonorous voice beating from the expanse of land before them, rattling bones and burrows.

And he obeyed.

The unbroken line lifted from the soil, and with that she swung an old hoe, tearing it through the heavy blanket of night, through muscle and a long-lost vow. He choked on sputtered letters and words, as blood poppies bloomed from his pale bare chest and the red sand licked at the viscous liquid that wept like sap.

The stars stood out like pin pricks in the night sky, starkly visible, yet intangible knots of light, like clouds of breath suspended in the summer breeze, their feathered tails, wisps of cotton twisting around him, weaving him into the tapestry of the infinite Australian night.

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Only the tattered Akubra

[6]

remained, now a gift of departure that he had given her before he had left for

war. She placed the hat firmly on her head, and began the work she had been longing to do since the first church bell had been struck, since the suffocating heat had settled over the land, since her father had been cheated of life.

And so, she pounded the hoe into the earth, the metal encrusted with a bloodied, rustic tinge; a product of both age and death, yet a process that yielded fertile growth. Each strike split the hardened earth to reveal layers of moisture beneath, resonating a warmth from within. Only the core of the earth could retain such passionate heat, fuelled by a magmatic flux. The muscles in her back grew mangled, like the twisted trunks of aged copper tips, as she heaved her bodyweight into the ground each day.

As the light rose, closer and closer she came to breaking in the soil for new growth, preparing for all future generations to come.

II: Fire Korong Vale, Victoria, 1972-

Flesh of the world’s delight, Voice of the world’s desire, I drink you with my sight And I am filled with fire.

-‘Flame Tree in a Quarry’ Judith Wright

[7]

The sheets were bare and white, stretched tightly across the double mattress, the linen pooling at an indent that lay where he used to. Her alarm clock persisted, its digital bullets ricocheting off of the glass nightstand. A carelessly placed circle enclosed today on the calendar, carved into the bare paper, weeping the blood red colour that belonged on the sheets. Her stomach twisted into a knot of boiling emotion. The heat permeated 8


her body, extending out towards her fingertips and gathering at the metal that encircled her finger. It seemed a manacle binding her to a fate that she had never wanted. A fate that lingered as a shadow, haunting the female mind, but one that only dared to speak momentarily between locked eyes and hushed tones, carried by the shared knowledge of mothers and daughters and sisters.

She remembered when she had shown her mother, Leah. The wrinkles around her eyes had folded subtly, framing her worn and tired grin, now only a shadow of the bright one that rarely greeted Helen as a child when she got out of bed, or came back from school. Ready-made vegemite on toast would be waiting for her instead, its soggy smile the only indicator that her mother had been there that morning.

And so, Helen would turn to the company of mother nature instead, whose sapphire mist would embrace her each morning, whose shaded gums would beckon for her company, whose sunburnt plains and copper tipped brush would guide her as she wandered. And she smelt clean, like the scent of new life dancing lightly in the air, notes of fresh wool and honey, stronger ones of damp and peeling gum bark.

On the rare occasion that Leah had finished work early, sometimes her and Helen would sit in the ute tray deep into the night, overlooking the day’s work of back-burning as mother nature displayed a work of her own. Ember stars would wander through the dark soil, a floating trail of ash following in its path. The rich ebony night inevitably succumbed to the golden blaze that now embellished the sky as a golden ring breached the wastes of soil.

The marigold sun bloomed as its roots encroached the desperate earth.

Helen now approached her mother, where a whispered conversation followed dinner. The look Leah gave her daughter sought to dissemble the wall of childhood innocence that hung about her. Her voice was practical, “It’s either the farm or…” Leah tilted her head to the side as her steely gaze finished the sentence, “shame”. Her grasp bore a maternal reassurance, yet signified a heavy resolution that her daughter could not refute. Helen moved to the window as her mother left to make a telephone call.

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Through the fringed curtains she watched as a lamb faltered behind its mother with its disproportionate knees. They settled amongst the pasture, the lamb nestling into the sheep and the soil, surrounded by the warmth of two mothers and their beating hearts as both sleep and night came over them.

Could she not have both land and child as well?

The carriage conductor blew his piercing whistle and hurried people into the coaches that were set for Melbourne. She arranged herself quickly onto the next available seat. Despite the parallel rigidity of the tracks, it was an intermediate space; an intersection of life. Rain cascaded down the window, within each of the droplets a refracted, spherical reflection of passengers gathered on the pane. Thousands of unfamiliar faces looked on at her, their raw judgement attempting to penetrate her story. She wore a floral shift dress that was better suited to the sixties with a cardigan over the top to cover her notably sun-blemished arms. She thought about what her mother had told her father before she had left.

“Her Aunt May from Melbourne has fallen ill again. She’s requested Helen to come and help keep the house clean for a few months.”

Her mother had delivered it with a smile as she pushed Helen through the front door. It was a despicable sentence - one that was concocted to prevent inquiries into her daughter’s whereabouts. Innuendo lurked in every corner in a country town. But even her mother’s reasoning was a facade. Leah didn’t want Helen to have to choose between her child and the farm, as she once had done and regretted.

And so, Helen turned her gaze to the passengers themselves, as if in retaliation to both their watery stares from the glass and her own internal contemplations. Her gaze fell upon a woman who wore a red cardigan behind a newspaper that read “Whitlam’s strong protest against US bombing in Vietnam[8]'' and she noticed the absence of a wedding ring on her hand. Helen picked up her own paper, peering over to the baby that sat on its mother’s knee looking at her with eyes as large and innocent as the sky. 10


The pit in her stomach made her turn back to her own paper, where she noticed a small advertisement in the corner of the page:

“Looking for a house or warehouse and any resources to establish a women and children’s safe house. Expecting and single mothers and divorcees. Call 03-444-2545 for information.”

‘Safe house’. She rolled the word around on her tongue. The texture was foreign, taste; unfamiliar. There were certainly none of them back at Korong Vale or Wedderburn. If Bendigo had one then she had never seen it either. She tore the advertisement from the newspaper and pocketed it.

The train driver pulled the lever, causing the metal to grind and shift the weight of the train as the wheels switched tracks.

The scent of patchouli oil and tobacco permeated the streets, overgrown hair and outgrown pants serving only to further waft the smell towards her as they flicked by. Reflections of birds leaped from window to window but inevitably disappeared under the shadow of the newest QANTAS model. Lamp posts protruded with a harsh angularity, slanted with wear like aged trees. A chaos of shapes pierced the cigarette haze of a 1972 Melbourne afternoon.

Further down the thoroughfare she could see people gathering, and as she drew closer, a tangle of fingers emerged, clutching at the air, hoping to collide with unfamiliar flesh. Some bore only the middle one, directed up to the socio-political figurehead that governed them all, and five thousand of them became one, thrusting blood-red words in the air:

“MY WOMB IS NOT STATE PROPERTY”

[9]

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“FREE THE PILL FROM THE TILL”

[10]

But some faces in the crowd wore an apprehensive look. Some young women teetered on the outskirts, edging to join but held back by husbands. Others watched on as quiet allies, celebrating progress and victory internally. The women had relinquished Virginia Slims

[11]

and were puffing Winfield Red’s

[12]

like

machines. Helen was entranced by the independence these women possessed, the autonomy they owned, when suddenly a warm hand enclosed her wrist and lifted it into the air with power and conviction, shouting into the crowd with almighty spit and force. The stranger locked eyes with her, instilling in her a sense of value. She voiced something as they stood impervious to the sweltering heat of the rally, the engulfing flames:

“It’s your choice…” The stranger nodded to her sisters behind her. It was an invitation to join.

Helen stammered, hesitating to answer. They stood there for what felt like minutes, during which a fire festered deep beneath her flesh, fuelling her feet towards the heart of the crowd, her blood seething at the thought of female inequality. But the furious haze of her vision was shattered by onlooking comments and whispers. A group of teenage boys not far from her age were wolf whistling and sneering at the rally, and the word ‘slut’ seemed to be hanging from the tongues of passing mothers and daughters. She could hear the dirty word lace the talk of her town, could envisage the whispered labels directed at her from repulsed faces of shopkeepers, her friends, her family. ‘Feminist’. The thought snuffed the fire of fury churning within her and she dropped the stranger’s hand. The fire of women charred down Little La Trobe Street

[13]

, leaving

the haze of that 1972 Melbourne afternoon. The lingering shadow consumed her fate once again, and she shrunk away to her room at the inn, with its worn linoleum floors and veneer wood panelling.

It was six o’clock when she left the Inn, making her way along the dim-lit streets, evading the lamp lights and curious faces that embellished the night like stars. The smog held her breath at her lips and the air was repulsively stagnant - distant from the kind of still that settled over the ryegrass on a winter morning, when 12


spiders of frost would weave in between each blade. Nor the kind of still that would smooth the ripples from the dam of a summer evening, producing a perfect reflection of the sun beginning to fade like the burnt-out end of a smoky day.

She reached for the knob of the clinic doorway when the advertisement she had found on the train fell into a puddle from her pocket. The lines of ink began to blur and fade from the muddied water, reminding her of the lady on the train and her child, whose rosy flesh was yet to meet winter’s cold breath or spring time dew, reminding her of the stranger whose hand encircling hers was stronger than any piece of metal on her finger.

She felt a shift, a movement, deep within her core; the baby’s foot had left a print both on her womb and soul. She wiped off the advertisement on her coat and pocketed it along with her engagement ring to sell and turned away from the clinic doorway, placing a quivering hand over her womb.

Specks of dust settled on the white cloth wrapped around her daughter as the bus drove away. The hiss of the bus was familiar, but the following rattle of suitcase on the broken cobblestone of the main street was not. Curtains of the houses edging the street flitted, behind them, old family friends that now retreated into their houses upon seeing Helen’s daughter. But their children came out to greet her, each daughter’s face lighting up at the prospect of choice and the sun could no longer cast her life in the shadow that had once overcome it, now serving only to fuel the uncontrollable fire burning within.

And her mother stood at the end of Rinders Lane with her hands outstretched. Helen made her way through the scorching gazes of the women from the window, finally meeting her mother’s arms and leaving the ashes of shame and isolation behind her. The surrounding bush seemed to cradle the two figures in white encircling the child; nature’s maternal reassurance was familiar and comforting. The shaded gums swayed in Helen’s company once again and the copper tipped brush welcomed her wander. She hugged her mother as the sunburnt plains embraced her with a sapphire mist, surrounded by the warmth of two mothers and their beating hearts. III: Rain Sydney 2018, New South Wales 13


‘Small rains grow, gather strength and run forward. Having come out of Nothing, they desire All’.

-

Judith Wright Letter to A Friend

[14]

It was still dark when I woke, as it was every morning. Some would argue it was an abnormal circadian rhythm but I thought of it as a natural cycle that came from years spent on the family property. Out of lasting nostalgia, I expected the serenade of galahs and kookaburras laughing alike at the more delicate song tolled by the bellbird. But in their place sounded the sputtering of street lamps, cars choking on pipes and the laptop pinging for my attention. Just as my brother would be sowing the seeds for harvest around this time of year, so too had I made it my life’s work to sow the seeds that would lead to the cultivation of the next great Australian writers. Yet still I find myself wishing to take Huxley’s place, wondering what it would’ve been like if my PhD read ‘Agriculture’ instead of ‘Australian Literature’, and so I put pen to paper once again:

Her father’s voice was assertive and mechanical from down the hall, “Eight generations, Pen. I can’t break it. Besides, the school accepted my deposit. They’ve got a place for her now.”

“At least wait, until she’s fifteen.” Her mother made a practical proposal, attempting to bend his resolution. She saw reflections of his determination in their daughter - a leader, a farmer.

Earlier that day they had been mustering cattle, Ara still refusing to use anything but her improbable musterer of a pony. Huxley, looking to the sky, missed his father’s commands and let a cow escape from the herd. Just as everyone realised its absence, Ara had already raised out of her saddle and tightened the reins. Her pony hammered its hooves into the mud as she carved around the cow so close to the dam that the dust from her ride rippled the water. She trotted back on her pony with a grin spanning her entire face, searching for the same smile on the solemn face of her father to no avail. 14


“Open your eyes, Dad.” Ara mumbled, frustration now rising to her throat in a knot. Emotion swelled like gushing creeks behind her eyes, their banks barely holding back the rushing storm water after the first rain in months. She turned to hide her face, cantering back home. Her fingers yearned for the sensation of the fluttering pages of a book, and that soft gust of wind that follows, smelling faintly of the foreign pine; a distant world.

My laptop became increasingly abandoned with each day that my book grew in volume and with each pen rendered empty. It was only by handwriting that I could immerse myself in my outback memories for as long as possible. The rise and fall of the pen emulated a movement of nature. Sipping my coffee, my eyes began to float around the apartment. It was an architect’s indulgence, sculpted to modernist perfection. Words fell away as I summoned my familiars - a garden of magpies and the wattle tree’s shadow, touching new images

[15]

on the walls, but despite my efforts, the bricks still refused to yield and flex, greeting the morning

light as a tin roof would. My head fell to the page again:

Her gut twisted at the thought of going away and she chewed at the dirt under her nails. Wandering to the window, Ara pressed her cheeks up against the cool glass to look out to the Milky way. If she just pressed hard enough maybe she would fall into the endless galaxy and never have to leave the property. She could watch over it for an eternity, amongst the company of the stars. Her hot breath eventually fogged up the pane and obscured her vision of the outside world, and her wandering thoughts collapsed in on themselves. She unhinged the lock, placing two palms and one foot on the sill and launching herself from the window. As soon as her bare feet hit the ground she was running. Her fringe was splayed up by the wind, the legs of her oversized overalls were torn away from her feet by thorns and sticks and her path was lit by the moon - as if mother nature was the only caring force in her life. Here, time was measured in colours - the endless dome above was painted with fractions of iridescent hues, refusing to be just one.

The wind whispered her name until she felt a pebble hit her back and looked up to see it was Huxley on the roof. Crawling up the piping on the side of the house, she collapsed next to him, ensuring she made a clang which earnt her a punch in the arm. But her giggle was swiftly severed in her brother’s company - another reminder of her fate. They silently looked up at the night sky and its tessellation of stars. 15


“You know, you’re pretty lucky, Ara” It was an unprovoked statement by her brother.

She didn’t answer.

“At least you have the choice to pick what you want to do. Dad just goes on about how I’m going to be a-”

“Farmer.” Ara cut in, “You’re going to be a farmer.” Her tone was envious and curt.

“Well…” He faltered, but then tried again, “What if I wanted to do something else?” He blurted out the sentence then rolled over meekly.

“What do you mean something else? What’re you going to do then?”

He shrugged, not being able to push the word “astronaut” out of his mouth.

Ara turned over, allowing her imagination to wander through the floating clouds of cotton crop and the rolling hills that would greet her one day, with a kelpie by her side.

Fingertips of rain began to tap at the verandah, murmuring for my attention. I leaned on the window sill, flicking to where I was up to out of the pages I had written, which was marked with a dog-eared photograph from ‘94 of Huxley and I playing in the dam. Mum was in the background, with creases around her eyes that were from a smile I knew was empty. How could it not be when only later that year would women be able to legally call themselves farmers? She was a ‘silent partner’, just as I would have been. That was what she had told me, knowing nothing else than acceptance of the unwritten rule; the silent transaction of land between father and son.

The piercing whistle of the black cockatoo warned from the tops of the wattle, while the kookaburra laughed ominously from the power line. A storm brewed in the distance. Turning in to put the tractor away, Ara saw Huxley lying on the roof as bullets of rain pelted at the tin. Making her way over to the house, her yells for him to come down were quickly cut off as a wall of sound smacked into her ear. Only the ringing remained 16


from the bellowing thunder as a vein of light met the sandy dust, a blackened crater now marking the place that it had struck. She began to count under her breath in anticipation of the next strike:

“One…”

Branches of electricity flickered across the underbelly of the grey canopy in the sky. The eye of the storm grew darker, a whirlpool of spite deepening as the sound of developing thunder rumbled within its core.

“Two…”

It was as though the sky inhaled; the wind ceased, and Ara and Huxley watched with halted heartbeats as the heavens released its bowstring.

“Three.”

Ara grabbed Huxley from the tin roof and they both fell to the ground as a dagger of lightning pierced the woody girth of a gum tree in their backyard. Electricity pulsed through the expanse of land before them, and Ara and Huxley flinched as unhinged energy permeated their powerless bodies that were limp on the ground.

It was a warning strike.

Huxley buried his face into Ara’s side with a mixture of relief and shock as she ruffled his hair comfortingly then turned over to face the sky, the salvation of rain now washing over their slightly singed skin.

The phone was ringing. My fingers had unconsciously drifted to my teeth as I was writing. A voice that I hadn’t heard in years came through the speaker. Mum’s tone was bittersweet;

“It’s Dad.” ●

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I promised to visit the very place that I had managed to evade for the past decade, for fear of the wound it would inflict on my painful yearning to live on the land; an ache I had only recently dulled. Next thing I knew, the bus hissed to a halt, and a cloud of dust flared up from the contact of my suitcase with the ground. My childhood home stood, taunting me, with weatherboards that had long ago abandoned their paint in the absence of moisture. Through the hairline cracks that vein the windows, a skeleton tune of my own life’s

[16]

misery whistled.

I was sitting underneath Dad’s favourite wattle tree with some tea when Mum came out of the house carrying an envelope by her side. I sucked in a breath traced with the scent of eucalypt that bled from dying leaves and porous flesh calling, pleading for hydration. I had forgotten what it was like, her wrinkled hand on my shoulder as she placed the unopened letter on the table.

“When you’re ready.”

I felt the blistered leaves coil and the shadow of the wattle shrivel over me as gleaming drops of silver began to meet the desiccated earth and wilted grass. My family came out of the house, their blemished skin and sun-crisped hair telling the testament of time; it had been years. As their disbelief was broken, so too was the sharp and definite edge of ink as my father’s last written words melted off the page. The puddle of graphite now served to quench the desperate earth, each letter seeping into the ancient cracks and crevices of a dry and broken land, never to touch another’s lips again.

The words on that will were empty to me. The words of the law were silent. And so, I turned to nature’s law instead. Leaning back into her distantly familiar embrace, I let a deluge of emotion drown the drought that had lived within me for decades. The pressure that had been building, daring to fall, had finally released. Both nature’s tears and mine pooled in the dimples that my grandmother had gifted me. The sun-bleached hair that once belonged to my mother was plastered against my forehead. But the most important trait of all had been passed down over the generations; no longer a silent transaction between mother and daughter; their determination and love for the land was seeded within me, chafed by the droughts, charred by the fires, and reared by rains again.

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“Three Truths: A collection of female rural experiences” by Ara Wright

For Diana and Helen, Your stories won’t be silenced any longer.

Published 2021, Sydney, Australia

Author’s Note:

I sit at the circular table in the kitchen, the only signs of age being the yearly addition of a blemish on each patch of their skin; whether it be a wrinkle, freckle or scar. The finalised draft is centred between us. Denise’s face is painted with the same expression she first wore when telling me of her Aunty Diana who followed in the footsteps of Irene Lowe and went on to become one of the first women to study a Bachelor of Agricultural Science, which she was awarded in 1932 from Queensland University.

Helen sits with an insouciant yet confident slouch, the wrinkles framing her mouth a testament to the years’ worth of storytelling she has done. Her denim lapels are decorated with badges attributed to the various rallies

she

has

attended

for

both

the

general

and

rural

feminist

movements. ‘Delmira’ or ‘notable protector’ is the name of her safehouse which she opened in ‘74. The house was the first of its kind in regional Australia, welcoming rural women experiencing pregnancies out of wedlock but also struggling divorcees, among others.

19


Beside me lie documents that were essential to this collection. Most difficult to write about was the history behind domestic violence, there being no official records documenting its occurrence throughout the early 20th century - consistent with both the geographical isolation faced by rural women experiencing abuse and the fact that its occurrence was treated as a ‘private matter’. Helen was my primary source of the progression

of

abortion

rights.

Given

the

small

nature

of

rural

communities, the social stigma attached to having a child out of wedlock often left expecting mothers with limited option but to seek abortion. Despite its legalisation in 1969, rural women had limited access to these services.

Finally,

from

first-hand

experience

and

research,

the

succession of property from father to eldest son in many agricultural families remains tradition to this day. A woman’s contribution to the family farm remained invisible until 1994, when the ‘silent partner’ principle was abolished and women were legally able to call themselves farmers.

20


Alix Anastasiadis: To Disappear Behind Glass My major work, a piece of historiographic metatheatre, follows an ambiguous biographical narrative of Arthur Jandaschewsky, through which fact, imagination and unreliable memory collide to investigate the life of this world-renowned clown. Whilst Arthur’s acts and memorabilia peaked the interest of The Powerhouse Museum; the unreliable, fallible stories of Arthur’s life continued through the unlikely relationship with my grandfather, upon introducing himself one day at a park bench in Enmore, was lost in the realm of ‘factual dispute’, deemed ‘outside history’ for the museum. Inspired by Foucault’s ‘archeological’ studies, and then his later ‘genealogical method’, through its metatheatrical journey, I expose the problem in any ‘staging’ of history as holding objective certainty, and truth. To Disappear Behind Glass

CHARACTER LIST: LOUISE: Louise is an emerging director in contemporary Australia, with a few notable credits but little fame. A young woman in her thirties, she is desperate to craft the ‘break-through’ piece that will establish her career as a director. Possessing a strange fixation on the story of Arthur Jandaschewsky, Louise isn’t going to let a few historical inaccuracies stand in the way of her artistic ‘vision’. 21


CHARLIE: Charlie, in his early twenties, has been hired by the Powerhouse Museum as an archivist and Fact Checker because the recruiter did not consult his referees. His first paid job since graduating three years ago with a degree in Fine Arts, Charlie is determined to perform his task to perfection; and that means sticking to the facts. ACTOR 1: A male actor hired by Louise. Skilled in clowning, he plays the character of the world-renowned clown, Arthur Jandaschewsky, as we follow his story. ACTOR 2: Another male actor hired by Louise, who is also skilled in clowning. A transformational actor, he plays the part of John, friend to Arthur and the role of other minor characters that interact with Arthur.

Playwright notes: ‘/’ denotes an interruption in phrasing by another character deliberately allowing for the dialogue to collide and overlap in moments of performance.

ACT 1 SCENE 1 When the audience enters the theatre, the stage is concealed by a curtain. Sitting in the front row of the audience bank are CHARLIE, and LOUISE. As soon as the audience begins to settle, the house lights dim, and simultaneously a soft spotlight hits the two of them. CHARLIE flicks through his programme, as LOUISE nervously looks around. (S.N: CHARLIE and LOUISE playing audience members in this scene could use concealed microphones so that their dialogue cuts through the pre-show chat of the audience. Otherwise, 22


vocal projection should be enough. It should feel as though the audience is intruding upon their conversation.) LOUISE:

I can’t see him.

CHARLIE:

See who?

LOUISE:

Higgins, who else?

A pause. CHARLIE looks down his row, trying to spot him. CHARLIE:

Maybe he didn’t show up.

LOUISE:

I can’t even remember what he looks like.

CHARLIE:

Crinkled face, eyes that sear into your soul,/

LOUISE:

(She turns around, and in shock) Charlie.

CHARLIE:

/that haunts you in your dreams. Every time you blink, he’s

there, watching you. What? LOUISE gestures for him to turn around. A pause. CHARLIE glances behind him, and sees an amused Mr Higgins. (S.N: ‘Mr Higgins’ does not exist and is not played by an actor, but simply a male member of the audience.) CHARLIE:

Oh...he-hello Mr Higgins... Erm, enjoy the show.

He slowly turns around. LOUISE:

(In a loud whisper) Just perfect, and here I thought things

couldn’t getCHARLIE:

Sh, it’s starting.

SCENE 2 A colourful tune is heard as ACTOR 2, playing the 'ringmaster', enters from stage left in front of the curtain, and strides to centre-stage. ACTOR 2 is clothed in a deep red tailcoat, with gold

23


trimming, sporting a waistcoat and bow tie. His entrance is marked by a follow-spot, indicating the conventions of a circus performance, circa 1910. ACTOR 2:

Welcome! Tonight, as we celebrate the Powerhouse Museum’s

fiftieth year anniversary of the ‘History of Clowns’, I am delighted to present the extraordinary tale of the world-renowned musical clown, Arthur Averino Jandaschewsky! ACTOR 2 strides stage-right, as the curtains simultaneously open, revealing a spotlight that hits ACTOR 1, centre stage playing ‘Arthur’. ACTOR 1 is dressed in a white tunic, with gold lace detailing, paired with a matching pantaloon of deep gold. He gestures to the audience to clap as he childishly waves and bows a few too many times. From beneath his voluminous pantaloon, he reaches into his pocket and reveals a small trumpet. The spotlight begins to oscillate around the stage, as ACTOR 1 struggles to pin down the spotlight. Finally, as he begins to play his trumpet, he releases a discordant sound, performing a pratfall ‘in shock’. On the ground he plays a sorrowful tune, à la ‘Slava’. ACTOR 2:

Beloved by Kings and Queens of Europe for his eccentric

performances, Arthur lived a life unknown, exotic compared to the modern man. He lived in a world full of tragedy made tolerable by the carnivalesque; and of course, his story was nearly forgotten. Until, on one fateful day, a man sparked a conversation with this strange looking clown, opening a door that made it possible for his story to be told, and thus history to be staged. ACTOR 1, stands and raises his arms to reveal his ‘circus troupe’ of acrobats, trained dogs, dancers all fabricated through shadow-play that is cast on the cyclorama. SCENE 3 LOUISE:

Stop! No! 24


The house lights abruptly turn on, and the magic of the circus dissolves, leaving ACTOR 1 looking lost, occupying centre-stage. We have been transported to the beginning of their rehearsals. Revealed is a bare stage, apart from a rack of costumes upstage right and a large canvas upstage left, facing backstage. A shadow of a man emerges from behind the canvas. He is backlit and begins to paint the ‘set’. This continues throughout the entire piece. LOUISE arises from her seat and makes her way to the stage, power striding as she goes. CHARLIE follows her, now clutching onto his iPad. LOUISE:

(Frustrated) He missed his cue. This is supposed to be

engaging. (Gesturing theatrically) We need to see him at the height of his fame and to be transfixed by it. Then we see his life and story unravel; slowly and painfully. How many times do we have to do this before we get it right? LOUISE pauses her strides as she notices CHARLIE. LOUISE:

(To the ACTORS, pointing at CHARLIE) Who is this?

CHARLIE takes a step back, clearly intimidated. CHARLIE:

Uh, Charlie Michaels. LOUISE

Okay, Charlie Michaels, let me reframe that question. Why are

you here? LOUISE resumes her power strides towards the stage. CHARLIE follows her. CHARLIE:

I’ve been assigned to you as a research dramaturg… by Mr

Higgins… the curator of Australian circus history at The Powerhouse Museum? Think of it as fact-checking. LOUISE:

Fact checking? He can’t be serious. (She eyes CHARLIE up

and down) How old are you?

25


CHARLIE:

Twenty-three. But I've been working as an editor for six months

for ‘The Daily’, mostly fact-checking. More-so volunteering, I wasn’t paid. And I’ve helped out on some big exhibitions at Powerhouse, when Higgins isn’t ordering me about to buy him lunch, which I’m starting to realise is his twisted form of a joke. Not that I think he’s twisted, or- that I wouldn’t buy you lunch. (Remembering) I was also Chief Editor of the Melbourne University Gazette. He waits for a reaction he is used to; he expects LOUISE to warm to him, but she doesn’t. LOUISE:

This is not a ‘Daily Mail’ piece./ CHARLIE:

No, of course not.

LOUISE:

/(To ACTOR 1 and 2) I don’t like those costumes for the next

scenes. Change to the boxing bells. We’ll figure out that transition later. (ACTORS 1 and 2 change by the rack. She looks disdainfully at CHARLIE) You want to fact-check my work?/ CHARLIE:

I read your script. Your piece seems to be mostly based on a

memoir about Arthur that was written by John? (Scrolling through his iPad) Arthur’s only friend whom he left all his belongings to? The entire text has been translated from Greek by an unknown source, with obscure metaphors that I’m sure got lost in said translation, and the syntax is all- I don’t recall the Powerhouse ever authorising it. LOUISE:

/We’re starting from scratch, anyway. You can sit and…

observe. Jandy! (When no one responds) Yes, you. I know it is your character's name! CHARLIE:

Okay. You mean his childhood?

26


She waves CHARLIE away. CHARLIE, now embarrassed and unsure what to do with himself, stands self-consciously by the edge of the stage. LOUISE:

We are moving on to his childhood. (LOUISE grabs her script.

CHARLIE scrolls through his iPad) Right… let’s take it from Scene two, from the voice-over introducing Arthur’s captivating beginning. Actors ready? (Projecting to the back of the theatre) Crew ready? There is a stark transition from the house lights to a complete blackout. A harsh spotlight illuminates LOUISE, casting her shadow onto the cyclorama. As she begins to read, a warm spotlight gradually emerges, illuminating ACTOR 2 now dressed in the ‘boxing bells’ costume2. ACTOR 2, waves and bows to his audience, muttering gratitude. LOUISE:

(Reading with authority) “Guillaume, the father of Arthur

Jandaschewsky was as an eminent performer, possessing a most extraordinary troupe, fit to entertain kings and queens; and that was what he did. Entertainer for the Tsarina’s summer palace, he grew up in the theatre, pleasing royalty.” The spotlight on ACTOR 2 disappears as another spotlight emerges, illuminating ACTOR 1, who now wears the same costume. Shocked by the sudden spotlight, he humorously attempts to cover himself in embarrassment. Physicalising Arthur’s younger self, he nervously waves to the audience. LOUISE:

“Guillaume married an Italian circus ballerina, Cristina Matis. I

was told Arthur was born onstage in Portugal, and that his mother literally died in character. The audience booed. They weren’t convinced. It’s said, when he was born, he didn’t cry once, but smiled boldly at the audience.”

2

See cover page.

27


(ACTOR 1 now grins. She skims a few pages) I'm cutting pages 8-10 in the script. Note that down later. (CHARLIE appears shocked by this.) As LOUISE continues, the spotlight widens to reveal ACTOR 2 once more as ACTORS 1 and 2 mimic a boxing match, which transitions into a musical number through the ringing of bells attached to their wrists, ankles and hats. LOUISE:

The family’s eccentric performances, that drew upon the

classic morality plays of derring-do, good versus evil, accompanied by, of course, music, was enjoyed by nobility across the globe. The King of Cambodia, the Sultans of Lahore and Hyderabad, all laughed heartily at their performances. (ACTOR 1 reveals a harmonica that now accompanies the tune). After garnering a medal and diploma from The King and Princess of Greece, by the early 1910s the troupe had finally settled in Australia. (A silhouette of circus carriages travel across the cyclorama) Experiencing the circus’ newly motorised era the family toured Queensland with Wirth’s Circus, then New South Wales through their own ‘Zig Zag’ troupe.” (ACTOR 2 surprises the audience with a sudden pratfall to the ground. LOUISE lowers her script. To ACTOR 1, in frustration) You fall before “Zig Zag”. Again! (Blackout) SCENE 4 A few seconds later, the house lights resume. Time has passed. ACTORS are now upstage rehearsing a mime routine. LOUISE paces the stage as she reads over her script, making notes. CHARLIE enters stage right, loitering by the wings, clutching onto a large binder. LOUISE, sensing CHARLIE's lingering presence, looks over. LOUISE:

What is it?

CHARLIE:

I don’t mean to interrupt. 28


LOUISE:

(Resuming her notetaking) You missed yesterday’s rehearsal.

CHARLIE:

Oh...er….right. I was at a job interview.

LOUISE:

With who?

CHARLIE:

(Under his breath) Luke Meyers.

LOUISE:

(She looks up) Meyers Press? You want to work for Meyers

Press? The company that prides itself on fake news, sorry, not news, “scandals” and other forms of gutter journalism? CHARLIE:

(Softly) My girlfriend reads Meyers.

LOUISE:

You are making a serious career decision based on the reading

habits of a twenty-year-old? Seriously?/ CHARLIE:

No? I didn’t/

LOUISE:

/You need a better anchor./

CHARLIE:

/(With sudden confidence) I came here to talk to you about the

memoir./ LOUISE:

/You will be floating endlessly thanks to Meyers and their

‘chick-flick’ column. CHARLIE:

/(Flicking through his binder) These are some brief notes I

printed from my iPad. Beginning with his mother. John is very descriptive about her, yet failed to mention a name. So of course I researched it. (He hands her a sheet of paper. When she doesn’t react he places it slowly back in the binder, humorously struggling to contain the sheets). Nothing. Not even a photo. In fact there are over three hundred Mrs Guilliame Jandaschewsky’s, so without a first name, or even a maiden name… And that’s just the first page, I haveLOUISE:

I picked it. 29


CHARLIE:

Picked it?

LOUISE:

Yes. Picked it. I couldn’t leave her nameless. So I named her.

Christina Matis. CHARLIE:

I’m entirely certain that’s not allowed.

LOUISE:

By what authority? If you can’t find her name, then no one will

be able to. Listen, you’re not going to change anything. It’s already been done. There’s nothing here for you to do. CHARLIE:

It's my job to be thorough. To make sure you stick to the facts,

with your reputation for being, well… experimental. LOUISE:

I love that.

A pause. CHARLIE:

Why Christina Matis?

LOUISE:

Christine de Pizan. Forgotten female thinker. Thought it was a

nice touch. Matis was a common surname of the time. CHARLIE:

Huh… Still a factual dispute. And you say Arthur was born

onstage at the Lisbon theatre? The archives say, more realistically, it was backstage. LOUISE:

(Smugly) It’s more Beckettian that way. (Adopting a theatrical

persona) “They gave birth astride of a grave, the light gleams for an instant and then it’s night once more” CHARLIE:

Okay… and the father. I found the original documentation.

There is no way of knowing he was the Tsar’s entertainer. Trust me, the Russian government isn’t about to give carte blanche access to an Australian digging up Bolshevik history/ LOUISE:

You contacted the Russian government? 30


CHARLIE:

/as well as his personality traits.

LOUISE:

I’m creating atmosphere.

CHARLIE:

You can’t choose facts!

LOUISE:

I’m a victim of perspective.3

CHARLIE:

The audience is trusting you to be their accurate guide to

history. A pause. LOUISE:

Let me give you a piece of advice./

CHARLIE:

I’m really only here to clarify a few details. (He tries once more

to give her the binder) LOUISE:

/People are lazy. They're not interested in minor facts and

details. They want someone to make sense of it for them and to feel moved. I’m trying to create ‘ecstatic truth’./ CHARLIE:

Are you quoting Herzog?

LOUISE:

/“It is mysterious. Elusive. And can only be reached through

fabrication and imagination.”4 Truth, Charlie./ CHARLIE:

Which arises from fact.

LOUISE:

/An opera in a rainforest. To stage a forgotten world in an

Australian auditorium. CHARLIE:

(Almost in a yell) But you can’t ignore what’s in front of you.

LOUISE:

It is my job to do exactly that! I decide what goes in and what

gets cut. (A pause) This feels very D’agata… (Reconsidering) I don’t want to

3 4

Stoppard, T. (1957), ‘Albert’s Bridge’, p.g. 37. Werner Herzog when defining “Ecstatic Truth” in his ‘Minnesota Declaration’

31


be taboo... Listen, do you expect me to cut the mother out altogether, because society told her to lose her first and maiden name? CHARLIE:

Yes-no?... Er, I’m just letting you know there are major

concerns that are not unwarranted. He’s nearing the big cut if I'm not able to resolve these... inaccuracies. LOUISE:

Inaccuracies? Inaccuracies? I’ll show Higgin’s inaccuracies

(She points to the two ACTORS. She begins to pace the stage) He’s joking if he thinks... (Giving in) Okay... What inaccuracies? CHARLIE:

Other than everything I just mentioned? (She doesn’t react)

Right, well, continuing on. I’ve managed to locate a timeline of their performances up to the outbreak of World War 1. There are no records that the troupe ever left Australia after the war. Which is odd, considering their previous success. Anyway, that’s not important. A few chapters down, however, during the Cold War sections, it’s written he witnessed the war in Greece? A spotlight hits CHARLIE and LOUISE as they walk centre-stage. A silhouette of a boy pushing a wheelbarrow of guns appears on the cyclorama through shadow play. LOUISE:

Yes? The freedom fighters, Andartes. Jandy had been forced

to deliver guns to a nearby village. CHARLIE:

Right. Except Arthur was supposed to be performing his one-

man show in Tivoli Theatre and also the Regent Theatre in Melbourne. (The silhouette now reaching centre stage, is halted by a new silhouette of ‘Arthur’, who extends his arms to an audience)

32


LOUISE:

What do you mean? That’s where his brother died. They were

tricked. The guns were given straight to the enemy. He watched them kill the village, his family. (The boy now crouches behind his wheelbarrow, shaking) CHARLIE:

There are images of the three brothers together. (The

silhouette of Arthur is now joined by two others, posing for a photograph) The only one who had died before the 1960s was Emile, in a tragic elevator crash in… (Looking through his iPad) Melbourne, 1910. (A silhouette beside Arthur disappears) And the ‘sign shop’ you claim he managed in 1962, where he was robbed? In Scene twelve? (The silhouette of the young boy is now replaced by an older figure, who waves his arms sporadically at the intruders) After the troupe’s collapse, Arthur had bought land and a store on Enmore road, labelled ‘confectionaries’. There are no records of raids, or windows being destroyed. What I'm trying to say is that John, in his state of mind, seemed to have somehow merged his own memories with that of what Arthur told him. And it’s practically impossible to differentiate between whose narrative it really is. We don’t have any other choice but to cut the memoir. The house lights resume, causing the shadows of Arthur’s past to disappear. A pause. LOUISE:

That is cutting the pain, the journey, the entire narrative! All

that’s left are paychecks! CHARLIE:

We cut the memoir; we stick to the facts; we keep our jobs. So

I don’t misquote... (He reveals his phone, and scrolls to a message) From Higgins... (Reading the text) “It’s tainted, and you tell her she’s delusional if she thinks I wouldn’t see through it.”

33


LOUISE:

Nothing is ever without ‘taint’. If he wants to cut my directorial

decisions, he can come here and do that himself, not through some twentythree-year-old “historian” who probably is still bludging on his family./ CHARLIE:

I’m not living with my family. It’s a separate duplex.

LOUISE:

/No. Every year, they put on Grock. Do you know why they do

that? Because it’s clean. There’s no ‘taint’. But most importantly, his fame lived on. There is no mention of the destruction of our shifting ‘trends’ in entertainment, when people decided cinema was the next best thing. The memoir shows us that cruelty. This is people’s history, and you are telling me to let it go? Do you understand? CHARLIE:

I do! But this isn’t history!

LOUISE:

Of course it is!

CHARLIE:

No, it's a- a memory.

LOUISE:

I’m not seeing your point.

CHARLIE in a moment of frustration, abruptly holds out his binder, making loose papers and documents fly into the air, and float down like rain. LOUISE and CHARLIE stand there for a moment, drowning in a sea of documents, of possible stories. CHARLIE:

I’m so sorry. Let me -

CHARLIE’s phone rings. CHARLIE:

(Looking at the screen) Higgins.

LOUISE:

(In a moment of desperation) You won’t tell him we don’t have

it all… you know… finished, right? Not yet. CHARLIE:

No! No, of course not. I can call him later.

LOUISE picks up some papers, flicking through, as CHARLIE attempts to retrieve the rest of his work. 34


LOUISE:

(Reading) To do… ask Louise about Tsar.

CHARLIE:

(In desperation) No, please give that back, it’s nothing.

LOUISE:

(With amusement) Somehow give Louise factual dispute’s

folder... (She stops smiling.) Tell Higgins about the memoir. CHARLIE:

I wasn’t going to actually tell him -

CHARLIE’s phone rings again. A pause. LOUISE:

Take the call, Charlie.

CHARLIE:

(Nervously) I honestly wasn’t.

LOUISE:

I don’t believe you.

CHARLIE wearily exits, as LOUISE picks up the remaining sheets. Blackout. SCENE 5 A warm backlight gradually emerges from behind the painting which has moved centre-stage, illuminating two silhouettes of ‘John’ and ‘Louise’. We see in the shadow, John’s foot tapping. She opens the script once more; the rest of the stage is covered in Darkness. LOUISE:

Pops? Did you say before or after ‘Do-re-mi?’

He stops tapping, and turns over to LOUISE. ACTOR 2:

Arthur had a cockatoo. Pinky.

He waves his arm around stiffly, mimicking the bird’s theatrical movements. LOUISE:

Okay, but after the war, where did the other troupes go?

ACTOR 2

I’m not sure. Arthur stayed in Sydney.

LOUISE:

Yesterday, you told me (Flicking through her book) Here! That

“...following the end of the Cold War, Zig Zag troupes were forced to resign, as documentation of their success was lost.” Where did they go? 35


ACTOR 2:

Well… I’m not sure… Does this matter?

LOUISE:

(Muttering) I guess not.

ACTOR 2:

He told me that theatre companies assumed he was illiterate;

that they had arranged a translator to organise contracts and things, without ever asking him. They paid him below minimum wage...they thought he wouldn’t notice. LOUISE:

Do you have any letters? Any documents of their viscousness?

ACTOR 2:

Well… no. Arthur didn’t keep many letters.

LOUISE:

(In frustration) Do you have anything at all? We just need to get

this part right. All we need are a few ACTOR 2 begins to tap his feet again. LOUISE:

(Giving up) You just keep painting.

Blackout. House lights resume. LOUISE sees CHARLIE in the wings. LOUISE:

Charlie?

CHARLIE:

Sorry. I wasn’t standing here long, I -

LOUISE:

I want to move onto the second act. (She gestures to the

auditorium.) Actors! ACTORS return to stage. CHARLIE:

But-

LOUISE:

His career from here began to dwindle.

CHARLIE:

We can’t move on until we’ve ironed out clear inaccuracies in

theLOUISE:

Pick up on Act Two!

A sudden blackout. ACT 2 36


SCENE 6

The audience return to their seats, and the auditorium is lit as though a real performance is going to begin, only this time it is just CHARLIE sitting in his seat in the front row. Shadows of a grand audience are cast, overwhelming the cyclorama. A follow-spot hits ACTOR 1, playing ‘Jandy’, dressed in an oversized suit and top hat, clinging onto a burnt cigar in his mouth whilst carrying two large cloth suitcases. Struggling to lift the suitcases, he grunts and groans as he walks to centre-stage. Satisfied with his placement on-stage, he releases the handles, causing the suitcases to collapse flat onto the floor. Removing his hat, he reveals his bald cap, with a red pompom protruding the top. Enacting his pain, he begins to rub his arms, chest, and back. Yet through tuned ‘squeakers’ hidden inside the suit, he ‘accidentally’ begins to play ‘Waltzing Matilda’, to which he performs with an exaggerated shock expression. A voice-over is heard as he does this, mimicking a newsreel from the 1950s. VOICE OVER:

Many would remember as the Averino Family, now a

one-man show, ‘Jandy’ the musical clown has arrived in Australia’s theatres. A fantastic performance that has been enjoyed by international nobility, including the King of Cambodia! Shadows begin to dissipate, as ACTOR 1 in further desperation tries to entertain his audience. VOICE OVER:

‘Jandy’ the clown, now touring Australia’s theatres. A

nostalgic performance that our grandparent’s generation can reminisce about. Tickets sold via separate theatres for those looking to find something a little different. (Shadows are now sporadically disappearing) ‘Jandy’ the clown’s final show at the Tivoli before retiring is welcoming any audience,

37


free of charge. This beloved clown will surely be missed amongst theatregoers. ACTOR 1

(Now in a single spotlight, speaking to an imaginary figure)

Please, one more season…. I can find an audience! I am Jandy the clown! The spotlight widens revealing ACTOR 2, playing an Australian reporter. ACTOR 1 now sits awkwardly, as they begin ‘recording’ the interview. ACTOR 2:

Musician Enzo Toppano, claimed and I quote, “Jandy, it’s time

you retired. The other evening I was watching television and saw your act performed by a horse!” What is your response? ACTOR 1:

How could a horse do my act?

ACTOR 2:

Well, they had a set of handbells with leather handles. The

horse picked up each bell with his teeth and played a tune, just as you do. A pause. ACTOR 1 thinks. ACTOR 1:

How many octaves?

ACTOR 2:

One.

ACTOR 1:

A-ha! I play two!5

House lights return. LOUISE:

(To ACTOR 1) Well done, Jandy. Nice delivery.

As CHARLIE speaks, he walks back onto the stage. The ACTORS converse briefly before rehearsing their routines. CHARLIE:

(Frustrated) This is too ambiguous. We’ve been over this. The

interview wasn't until late 1960s. That’s twenty years missing. Apart from his retirement papers -

5

Exact dialogue of an interview, recalled by Clifford Warne. ibid.

38


LOUISE:

I want it pacey, anyway. I want them to feel the absurd rapidity

of Arthur’s downfall. I want them to blink, and find all his work, money, and fame has disappeared. And he didn’t retire, they fired him. CHARLIE:

There’s no proof of that. Please, we can’t go on.

LOUISE:

You see how Arthur is wearing his make-up in the interview?

You see how creepy, and inhumane it makes him look? That isn't accurate. (In a burst of anger to the ACTORS) In eight counts! You should be counting! CHARLIE:

There are no facts.

LOUISE:

Facts? People don’t read Harper Lee to read facts. The world

doesn’t sit around a TV, listening to Charlie reading facts. CHARLIE:

You’re just making a dig now.

LOUISE:

I don’t play games, I have no interest in playing games with

you. CHARLIE:

You are hiding under your grandfather’s unreliable stories, yet

you just call it flair. LOUISE:

How did you -

CHARLIE:

I’m a historian. It’s my job to know.

A pause. LOUISE:

I am not discussing my personal life with you.

CHARLIE:

(With sudden confidence) You make me work all hours of the

day, worrying when you might decide to ‘tweak’ a date, or a name. And it’s like you do it on purpose, in spite. LOUISE:

I don’t not like you. I just despise Higgins, and you as a result.

You’re all hypocrites. You ask me to “stage history”, how can anyone

39


possibly “stage history” in under two hours without obscuring something, anything? (With emotional intensity) I refuse to let them go! CHARLIE:

(Matching her intensity) And I refuse to lose this one job I finally

earned because you couldn’t pull together the facts! (A long pause. Louise exposes a genuine moment of pain; it is visceral) I’m sorry, I know why- I didn’t mean to... LOUISE:

I can’t let it go. (Another long pause. LOUISE looks around her

stage. As she talks, she manically attempts to tidy clothes left astray back onto their place on rack, placing props back in their position beneath it) It was always the thing to get my grandfather talking, the 'Tale of Jandy'. Each time it would be slightly different from the other. It always depended on his audience. (Holding a piece of costume in her hands) Arthur gave him all of his clothes, memorabilia. All of these artefacts were donated to the museum. (She resumes her cleaning) But the stories they talked about in the memoir Jandy’s trauma; the cruelty they faced, what they bonded over...it never made it in. No one believed him anymore. I really thought I could pull this one off. I thought no one will question the minor blurs, stumps. I could bring them back into history. And I was even getting cocky, until you came along... You and iPad. A pause.

CHARLIE:

My Great Grandfather and Great Uncle Andrew came here

from Sweden. Apparently they did some sketchy stuff to get us here, ‘cause Pops claims to this day he hid in a suitcase the entire way there. Each year, I have to witness the most unnatural image of him trying to recreate it. I even have a photo - (CHARLIE fiddles for his phone to show her a photo then 40


stops abruptly, realising he has overshared. Thinking, he fiddles with his fingernails as he looks around the stage. They share a moment of comfortable silence.) I won’t tell Higgins. LOUISE:

What?

CHARLIE:

You make sure the audience knows this is a memory. You can

keep all your ‘ecstatic truth’ but we keep the ambiguity. (He points to the audience. The two look out and make direct eye-contact with the audience for the first time) They get to decide what they want to believe. (Pointing to the array of papers scattered on the ground) Our mess in the open… We won’t worry about Higgins till after opening night, and pray it won’t be our closing night as well. I’m only getting paid minimum wage, anyway. LOUISE:

Okay.

CHARLIE:

Okay?

LOUISE:

I like it, well done./

CHARLIE:

You like it?

LOUISE:

/It’s interesting. Sticks to my vision… I like it. We show the

story how it is. Unreliable, but moving. And a story worth telling. CHARLIE:

A blurry story about a clown.

LOUISE:

Maybe something a bit more enticing than that.

Warm rays of sunlight seep through the theatre. LOUISE and CHARLIE both look up. Blackout.

41


ACT 3

SCENE 7

We hear LOUISE and CHARLIE shuffle to resume their seats in the auditorium. The ‘Final Scene’. ACTOR 1, playing Arthur, sits on a bench, as ACTOR 2, playing John, sits beside him, deep in conversation ACTOR 2:

What job do you do?

ACTOR 1:

I’m doing nothing now. I was a clown.

ACTOR 2:

Very, very interesting.

ACTOR 1:

Why?

ACTOR 2:

I was working in the theatre for a while.

ACTOR 1:

Is that so? What were you doing?

ACTOR 2:

I’m an artist. I was doing the backgrounds to the theatres and

things like this. ACTOR 1:

One day, we can go to my home and show a few quite

interesting things. ACTOR 2:

Let’s go now.

ACTOR 1:

Oh, don’t be in a hurry. Some other day.6

ACTOR 2:

I never caught your name.

ACTOR 1:

Arthur. Arthur Jandaschewsky.

Blackout. The dim light returns to LOUISE and CHARLIE. LOUISE:

(Turning around to ‘Mr Higgins’) So… Mr Higgins.

CHARLIE:

We understand you might be feeling... confused.

6

Dialogue quoted by John Anastasiadis when asked to recount their first meeting. John Anastasiadis, interview with Inara Walden, 29 May 1996, oral history held by Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.

42


LOUISE:

Overwhelmed.

CHARLIE:

Concerned.

LOUISE:

Angry.

CHARLIE:

Enraged.

LOUISE:

I wouldn’t go so far as to say enraged, but… It’s the truest story

I’ve ever told. BLACKOUT

Addendum Dialogue from lines “Musician Enzo Toppano” to “A-ha! I play two!” (p. 21-22) sourced directly from Webber, K., & Measham, T. (1996). Circus! (p. 49). Powerhouse Publishing. Dialogue from lines “What job do you do?” to “Oh, don’t be in a hurry. Some other day.”(p. 24-25) sourced directly from Webber, K., & Measham, T. (1996). Circus! (p. 65). Powerhouse Publishing. “I’m a victim of perspective”, (p. 13), Stoppard, m. (1969). Albert's bridge (p. 37). Faber and Faber. “It is mysterious. Elusive. And can only be reached through fabrication and imagination.” (p. 13) Ebert, R. (2021). Herzog's Minnesota Declaration: Defining 'ecstatic truth' | Roger Ebert | Roger Ebert. Rogerebert.com. Retrieved 5 June 2021, from https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/herzogs-minnesotadeclaration-defining-ecstatic-truth.

43


Alice Andrews: No Woman Here My piece, No Mad Women Here, is a metafictive exploration of women in literature throughout time through the lense of L'ecriture Feminine, a literary theory by Helénè Cixous, which details a kind of writing that is outside the masculine economy of patriarchal discourse. Set as a modern day forum, my piece hear's the stories of three significant literary figures. Lilith, the first wife of Adam, adapted from various biblical texts. Catherine, the wild 'hysterical' woman adapted from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. And Amy Dunne, a modern day deviant who successfully framed her husband for her murder, adapted from Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl. Through the exploration of these three women, and the incorporation of the voice of Helénè Cixous, I hope to enlighten you on how the writing of women can have profound impact throughout the literary timeline.

No Mad Women Here “A life of feminine submission, of 'contemplative purity,' is a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story.” Sandra M. Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination

Transcript of the 203rd annual Women in Fiction Symposium PREFACE The host of this year’s symposium is Hélène Cixous, a post structuralist feminist who pioneered the theory of “L’ecriture Feminine”7. She has been a successful literary theorist for decades, and published many iconic works such as The Laugh of the Medusa. She founded the first Gender Studies centre at the University of Paris VIII. Her theory has opened the minds of many academics and readers across the globe.

7

A female style of writing that gives voice to feminine concerns, coined by Hélène Cixous in The Laugh of the Medusa

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L'écriture Féminine: The term meaning ‘feminine writing’, coined by Hélène Cixous, stemming from Lacan’s idea of the literary sphere being controlled by the phallus8. She advocates the notion of women writing women, a movement encouraging women to reclaim their identity within the atemporal space of literature and present a new perspective on the nature of the representation of females. An avant garde and deconstructive force, diminishing the patriarchal foundations of literature and allowing liberation in gender, writing and sexuality.

Speaker Notes Welcome, distinguished guests, to the 203rd Annual Women in Fiction Symposium. Please welcome our host, Hélène Cixous, who will be your Master of Ceremonies for these proceedings. Keynote address - Hélène Cixous: Welcome to mes soeurs, mes frères et les autres; the very foundation of modern feminism. Welcome to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Welcome to Chanel Contos, Margaret Atwood - been a while Margaret! Mary Wollstenstone - I didn’t know if we would have the pleasure of your company today, Mary. Ms Woolf; Ms Plath. I also acknowledge one of my own great influences, Simone de Beauvoir. And welcome to every other familiar face I can see here today. It is truly an honour to speak before this magnificent array of women, and I thank you for all that you have done for our ongoing cause: feminism. I have been asked to host the annual Women in Fiction Symposium. I am Hélène Cixous, and the thème du jour this year is one that is truly relevant to current and ongoing feminine movements: Power Dynamics in Heternormaitve Partner Relationships. I have asked you all here today to hear a few moving tributes from women whose overcoming of suppression has paved the way for all feminists in the modern world. Lilith, a forgotten transgressor, who showed no fear in disobeying god themself. Catherine Earnshaw, who discovered that her lifelong ‘love’ Heathcliff, was nothing more than the embodiment of a fragile masculine égoïste ‘egotistical’ is, I believe, the correct translation - who couldn’t handle rejection and so violently exploited her daughter whilst her ghost was haunting him. Lastly- but most recently - Amy Dunne, a modern day ‘social deviant’ if you will, whose plot to frame her husband resulted in national media coverage, as well as becoming the best master manipulator of those surrounding her and the patriarchy itself. Applying my theory 8

Theory of phallogocentrism, coined by Lacan and adopted by Cixous, whereby writing, thought and language is inherently centred on the masculine

45


of L'écriture Féminine and Gilbert and Gubar’s ‘Madwoman’ trope9, we will examine the real implications of power in the patriarchal literary sphere, and those who suffer the most under its oppressive hand. For, if you “censor the body then you censor breath and speech at the same time”10. So without further ado, let’s all welcome our three keynote speakers with applause. To begin, we have Lilith, the original female transgressor, was banished from Eden for attempting to gain equality. She was written as a ‘villain’, ‘temptress’ and ‘whore’. Unbroken, she was painted as a demon. When I think of Lilith, this Pavana quote comes to mind: “In a world full of Eve’s, I stand with women who wear serpents around their hips and paradise between their legs.” We applaud her efforts. Please welcome Lilith to the stage.

Lilith I was a woman punished for wanting equality. It started when they wrote me out. Submerged in a sea of sin; the archetypal female monster of the canon. Wrote me as the ‘whore’, the ‘villain’, Oh I was no angel; but they are eternally determined to situate me within a liminal binary space. Nothing more than an infertile rotten seed in soil waiting to be fertilised (unlike precious ‘Eve’, our every-woman - still a bloody international treasure at this point. Deplorable, really. Still, we worship her and reincarnate her in almost every female representation in the arts.) I came first. I came before her - and haven't we been led to believe this patriarchal world is a society built on supremacy and hierarchy? I like to be on top - both literally and figuratively. Imagine if maternal desires, sterotypes and the discourse of motherhood were centred around me; would infanticide be the norm and baptism by fire the latest trend in birthing practices? Mother Lilith instead of Mother Eve? No one seems to care that we were moulded from the same clay. Two leaves from the same branch. I was the real forbidden fruit - an incompliant and non conformist woman - although I do find ‘she-devil’ quite endearing. You won’t read about me in the Old Testament. You’ll even struggle to come by me in Hebrew 9

Gilbert & Gubar’s literary trope of the ‘Madwoman’ which critiques this liminal representation of women as hysterical and/or mad, coined in the 1975 novel The Madwoman in the Attic 10 From Cixous, H. 's work The Laugh of the Medusa in relation to L'écriture Féminine, advocating to liberate the female voice 46


texts. The Babylonians will say I’m a horrid winged creature who preys on infants (of course I'm an infanticidal maniac, how else do you make sense of a ‘fallen’ woman?). The Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians will agree with them. To most, I'm a temptress (we’ve never heard of that one before, have we? Hello Abigail, a movement called the Witch Trials springs to mind). Isaiah told the world I was nothing more than a banished wilderness demon: “Indeed, Lilith (night demon) will settle there and find herself a place of rest”11. Classy, Isaiah. They called me the ‘succubus’12. Ironic, isn’t it? A succubus looks like a beautiful maiden and yet is an evil, dream invading parasite - isn't that a paradox? So much for their ‘angel’ or ‘whore’. I’ll accept that - I’m hearing an enigmatic, powerful being. So go ahead. Call me a succubus. And yet, without me, Eden would be nothing; a utopia cannot exist without a dystopia. The inferno would be an unweeded garden, Lucifer would be playing with fire starters, Adam would be a bachelor. Yes, how could I forget that it is one rule for us and another for them; the double standards still ensnare today. Yet, I am voiceless, marginalised, deviant, ’other’. To appropriate Grace Tame, yes, applause is needed, “Well, hear me now13…” I can’t remain quiet. “God” so self righteously proclaims himself the all-knowing, almighty artist creating human creatures, shaping the human race with his own hands (the puppeteer ever so gently pulling and tugging on the marionette) from mud, dust or from the bodies of others. Eve was made from Adam's rib. Born subjugated. Born submissive. I, however, was made from the same lump of clay pulled from the earth by God’s omnipotent hand, created from the same model of a person. Breathed our first breath together, took our first steps through the garden together. An equality; a partnership (or so I, or any logical person, thought). Alas, the narrative turned. I guess you were right, Hélène, only women can really write women!14 Things were good in Eden. God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky15. The moon and the stars kept us company at night. The seeds of life were being sown before our very eyes. And all the time, God’s omnipresence reminded us we were not alone. And with that, came the now all too familiar shift from protection to suffocation. Recognisable from a mile off these days, yet foreign and impossible then.

11

Extract from Isaiah 34:14 A term that refers to a female demon who has sex with sleeping men 13 Appropriated from Grace Tame’s Australian of the Year speech; Australian activist for sexual assault survivors and founder of ‘Let Her Speak’ campaign to empower female voices to share stories of abuse 14 Appropriated from Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa, a call to arms for female authors to write about female experiences 15 Extract from Genesis 2:19, Old Testament of the Bible 47 12


God told us our purpose. Our purpose was nothing more than procreation. Adam, the seed bearer. Me, the seed carrier. It has been submission and inferiority since the beginning of time...literally. Still we carry, we serve. Whether this is my personal bias or not, I felt a bit hard done by with the kinds of roles we were assigned. (understatement of the century). Just as I had struggled, being subjected at the hands of my equal, he struggled. For the idealistic depiction of Adam and Eve containing a lovely relationship with no struggle for power of dominance, alas, is not realistic. And so, I went on top. Transgressive, I know, but I highly recommend it ladies. He couldn’t stop me, as much as he would try: ‘I will not lie below,’ I had said. And he said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be in the superior one.’ And so I responded, ‘We are equal to each other in as much as we were both created from the earth.’16 And my goodness, was it worth it. A dramatic finale for our stagnant, morose relationship. No happy-golucky ending here. No running off into the hills together, hand in hand. Instead, completion, if you will. His tears, an embodiment of the sadness and devastation of emasculation. Not even his pathetic phallus could bring me nearly as much pleasure as seeing him struggle did. Call me masochistic, sadistic, evil, heard it all before. Quaint, really, how the simple act of reversing physical positions could cause him so much pain. Adam tried to make me submit. I felt his weight on me, I would struggle to breathe beneath his sweating body, waiting for him to finish. But he could never understand how it feels to be a woman stuck under a man; a docile body17. I would cry and fight, to no avail. That's when my wings grew.18 Before God could say anything, I used my devilish, terrifying wings, pronounced the name of God in vain, and flew into the skies and across the momentous river surrounding and entrapping the garden. Straight up, and into paradise. Then off to the red sea. God sent his little minion, Gabriel, to find me. He told me that as

16

Extract from Hebrew Text the Alphabet of Ben Sira 78: Lilith A theory by Michel Foucualt that expresses how systems of power enforce docility on women's bodies. (1979) 18 According to Jewish folklore, Lilith grew wings and flew away when Adam finally forced her to succumb to him and be subservient 17

48


punishment, I would lose hundreds of my demon children every day; I’ve never been the maternal kind anyway. So go ahead. Kill my babies. Cosy up with Precious. Little. Eve. She’s always been my blonde girl19. My foil. Maternal anxieties never bothered me. I took it one step further; infanticide is a pleasant pastime, I think. And if that’s not enough, late at night once the men are asleep, I slip through the windows or down the chimneys and have my way with them20. I would love to read you a short extract from my upcoming novel being released later this year. A manifesto of my ultimate creative genius: The inferno. The realm of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellow men21. Lilith was exiled in disgust, punished for her crimes. But ultimately the release from the garden was the greatest gift that she could be given. For the Inferno is a place where the toxins of complacency are cleansed, and the rigid rules of purity and submission are erased. The fire which reigns down onto the frozen lake of Cocytus22, punishing those who have sinned and liberating those who could no longer submit to the omnipresent hand of God. And so she came down from hell and entered earth - it was only a coincidence that heaven became utopia, it could just have easily have been hell. It was her turn to create havoc on this paradise. She found the snake, the very one from the garden of Eden. Creeping, stalking and aligning itself. She lingered, pervading through the external facade of masculine dominance. She pounced; cracked the whip...bending, contorting, squeezing the snake into unbearable agony, twisting it around itself. It squirmed, wriggled, and protested. And with a single snap, it was split in two. To be no more. And so, the vile, demonic, baby-eating monster began what would make me famous. Not with the Christians, of course. Their evil-phobic demenours prevented them from ever worshipping me for what I really was. For I was not a vixen, nor a deviant. I wasn’t created with the sole purpose of causing chaos and wreaking havoc. I was created as an equal to somebody who didn't want me to be an equal. Born into unfavourable

19

A reference to a stereotype of superior beauty and status, from Drivers License, O. Rodrigo, 2021 The succubi phenomenon 21 The first of three parts of the Divine Comedy; an epic poem written by Dante Allighieri in 1306, depicting Dante’s journey through hell, or The Inferno, said to be a space that Lilith embodies 22 “The River of Wailing”, a frozen river in the lowest ring of hell, the 9th circle, occupied by Lucifer. Detailed in Inferno, Canto 34 49 20


circumstances. Am I that horrible, that terrifying, that loathsome, that God, the all forgiving, all loving one, banished me? Never to return? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing23. The take home message here is: not all agentic women are evil. A life consumed by submission and sacrifice does not need to be tainted and painted in red as soon as those without control try to take something back. And with that, I implore all of you listening here, to think not only about the portrayal of me and others, but the cascading change we are trying to begin. Hélène Cixous: Thank you Lilith for that fascinating presentation. Moving now to our second speaker. Catherine Earnshaw was a woman who found herself trapped within a loveless marriage, and plagued by her young love’s vengeful anger and violence that started from childhood neglect. The immense impact the gothic tropes in this novel had on the world of literature is timeless. We must applaud Emily Brontë, as without her, Cathy wouldn't have existed, let alone existed as the transgressive, strong woman that she is. I would like to share with you this important extract from the novel in question: “But it was one of their chief amusements to run away to the moors in the morning and remain there all day, and the after punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at ... they forgot everything the minute they were together again.” So without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce Catherine Earnshaw to the stage. Catherine Earnshaw You know me, the girl that ran wild on the English moors, an embodiment of the moors, if you like. That's certainly how I have been represented by my contemporaries. The gothic heroine, trapped in the landscape that stifles yet reinforces my confinement and reflects my suppressed inner feelings. The naive damsel in distress; perhaps in a white dress on horseback? A hysterical woman, who couldn’t pick a lover. A rebel without a cause. If you don't know Wuthering Heights then you would know Kate Bush’s overwhelmingly high-pitched haunting 70s hit, “It’s me I’m Cathy, I’ve come home, I’m so cold”. So many hysterical women these days, I wouldn't blame you if you had me confused or lumped me into the category of just another madwoman. And mad I am! I want to unpack with you all of the profound damage a patriarchal lens can do to a character, albeit to a woman and her psyche.

23

Appropriated from Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa, a call to arms for female authors to write about female experiences

50


There is no denying that I am a woman of agency. And I am eternally grateful to my creator, Emily, for writing me as such. However, I have my own afflictions, both physical and psychological. Contrary to popular belief, my only goal in life was not falling in love and living happily ever after, with … Heathcliff. Now don’t get me wrong, I did love him. And I received great joy from haunting him. But I really need to start from the very beginning to help you truly understand the troubles and issues he has caused me and so many others. Most importantly, my own daughter. That devil Heathcliff. A demon lover and ferocious natural force, a phenomenon studied throughout history.24 As the story goes, we grew up inseparable. I took a sudden interest in Heathcliff, maybe I was looking for a patriarch; he was more of an outlaw25. And so we would play together, all day, along the windy, wiley moors. The moors kept us company through the long, cold winter days. I never really thought ahead about a future with Heathcliff, I assumed we would just end up getting married. But Edgar Linton caught my eye. Marrying for money, not for love; for it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,26 and thank you Jane Austen for your timeless satire of the marriage plot. Alas, I fell for it. I did love Edgar, I think... And then I died. Tragic, really, but a classic plot device. One freezing cold winter's evening, I went into labour and delivered a healthy little girl who would go on to be named Catherine. I wasn’t doing too well though - 19th century medicine and all. So as I lay on my deathbed, I accidentally may have possibly forgotten to mention the name of my beloved Heathcliff. If anything, I believe it was him who killed me. Not literally, but the weight he had put on me my whole life eventually manifested physically and I couldn't handle it. Heathcliff wasn’t happy - understandable. I watched him through the windows, howling to the pitch dark sky:

24

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s theory originating in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) A theory posed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who divided individuals by a wheel of personality types 26 Jane Austen “Pride and Prejudice”, 1813, a novel of the same genre as Wuthering Heights that critiques the marriage plot and the values and attitudes perpetuated by the patriarchy 51 25


“May she wake in torment! … Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable!”27. Upon hearing the news that I died, and that his name was not the last word that passed through my cold, lifeless lips. I was touched, nonetheless. Because I do love him, even in my new form of a spirit. Unfortunately he died almost two centuries ago. But we had some good times, me and Heathcliff. Even after I died, I watched him for years. That is, until he kidnapped my child. Yes, you heard that right. He was holding young Catherine hostage as a maid for himself. Poor younger Catherine; inevitably placed within the cycle of abuse and subjugation that often manifests in such plot tropes as this. The love I had for Healthcliff disseminated rapidly after I died. Him manipulting her, keeping her captive, forcing her to marry his son for his own gain. She was young; impressionable. And I wasn’t there to guide her, or to look after her. She didn’t even know I was watching her. Because I died, and he lived on to watch her grow up. He watched her grow up with eyes of bitterness, because she had a part of me within her and he didn't. The intergenerational trauma that my father passed on to me passed on to my daughter. My own traumatic upbringing had transferred to another generation. But I stayed for him, he knew I was there. He couldn’t have continued if I wasn’t. Heathcliff and I loved each other as old friends do. We also loved each other as a husband and wife would. And that love didn’t waver once I became infatuated with Edgar. I wanted so badly to have a good life, an ideal life- heteronormative even. Call me old fashioned, but I always wanted children. Maybe I didn’t want a controlling husband, but these are the compromises one has to make when in the limited position of a Gothic heroine. And I was so excited to be pregnant, to bring a child into the world. I thought I could do the smallest bit of good, just something to redeem the years of deceitfulness that had haunted poor Nelly. I had left a path of destruction in my wake. I know Hindley resented me throughout our childhood. I know a part of him blamed me for being favoured over him. I also know that I shattered Heathcliff’s heart when I fell for Edgar, but I could not continue being the victim or the scapegoat for male ego. However out of my control that may have been, it all the same destroyed him. And that, in effect, destroyed Catherine.

27

Wuthering Heights, a Victorian gothic novel by Emily Brontë, set in 1806 and published in 1847, direct excerpt from Heathcliff after hearing of Catherine’s death.

52


If you would allow me, I would love to read you all a small extract from my novel which was released last year: This abyss, unutterably torturous. Her ghostly presence haunted the house long after her death. The sun would rise behind a thick layer of clouds, almost invisible. The fog cast a gloom over the moors. As grim as this sounds, the house was a space of liberation and freedom. Catherine, no longer confined by the liminality of mortality, was at peace. Wuthering Heights still stands today, over two centuries since Catherine resided in it. Its halls are shrouded in the memories of oppression. A prison, both physically and mentally. Catherine, The Woman in White. Her presence never left the Heights. Some might say it was a way of reminding people of what happened to her. Her cruel death and mistreatment of her daughter. It’s still visited to this day. People come to gaze upon the gargantuan walls and dark, foggy moors. They can see the trauma that haunts it just by looking at it. I spent a long time coming to terms with the damage that I caused and the consequences that presided long after my death. I was calling myself a madwoman. Try as I might, there is nothing a woman can do from beyond the grave. I could say I was a victim of circumstance, a product of my environment, but we all know that is not entirely true. Yes, the suffocating Victorian conservatism as well as the dominant patriarchal values that I lived under would have somewhat of a role to play in my behaviour. And I in no way want to criticise any of the Brontes, however, they too were a product of their environment. As much as a woman can strive to write literature that completely and utterly transgresses their contexts, there will always be a prominent aspect of writing that stems from one's surroundings. And for me, that meant that my independence and need to free myself from the suffocation of Wuthering Heights caused more damage than it did good. Goodness, even Kate Bush knew it: “Let me grab your soul away”. A soul snatcher. That, I am. Perhaps a bit more figuratively than she put it, still the message rings loud and clear. I was a wrecking ball, destroying the carefully constructed trajectory of people's lives and the marriage plot and teleological narratives. I don’t want sympathy. I don’t view myself as a victim, except to my circumstance. People do not see you - they invent you and accuse you28. I wanted to stick around for Heathcliff, bring him comfort. I wanted to stay for him, and for Catherine. If I couldn't be with her in the flesh as she grows up, the least I can do is watch her from another place. I know he cannot hear me right now, but I always hoped that he knew I was there. I’m still struggling to emerge from the 19th century ethos, be a female of absolute independence and agency. Emerge from being called ‘hysterical’. ‘Irrational’. A ‘rebel’. I didn’t live trying

28

Quotes from Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa. In this context, used by Catherine to explain how she has been portrayed throughout time as ‘hysterical’ or ‘wild’

53


to become a liberated woman, or a symbol of female agency. But if that’s how I can be remembered, then I think it was a life well lived.

Hélène Cixous: To wrap up today’s events, we have one last speaker. Her name is Amy Dunne, and if you haven’t heard of her, you won't soon forget her, as“Everyone Loves the ‘Dead Girl”.29 Amy was written by Gilian Flynn, a true crime author with an impressive repertoire. You might spot her this evening somewhere in the audience. Now, Amy found herself in a relationship that was plagued by abuse, violence and coercion. Or did she? I believe that Amy is the perfect example of a woman who was forced to bargain with the patriarchy, someone whose options ran dry as she was trapped in a relationship. Gone Girl’s gruesome end creates a story that we can all learn from. Without further ado, please welcome Amy Dunne to the stage.

Amy Dunne Thank you, Hélène. Hello everyone, it’s me, Amy Dunne. Amazing Amy. Guess Amazing Amy isn’t that amazing anymore, huh? Sorry Mom and Dad. I’m not sure what you’ve heard about me, but it’s probably not all good things. It’s okay, I’m not here to impress people. I’m here to tell it how it is. These limited epistemes that characterise me as villainous are the same old tone-deaf binaries that cast women as angel or whore; temptress or saint. Now, there is a third option - a blend of angel and whore. Which equals villain. My husband was a prick so I framed him for my murder. Sounds like the latest Netflix hit, doesn’t it? Well, it's pretty accurate actually. But these reviewers are always so titillating. If that was the beginning and end then we could all go home. But what about the middle? It’s obviously not that basic. Cruella didn’t just skin dogs for coats - where's her backstory? Medusa didn’t just laugh maniacally - where’s her complexity? What are women to do when domestic violence and the subtle signs of emotional abuse are so poorly recognised? “Oh that just means he likes you…”; “But he is so good to you”. Women apparently still need

29

Gone Girl - Amy’s motivation for her scheme to frame her husband for murder

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rescuing or are required to play cat and mouse in a perverse hunt. When society continues its cultural narrative of victim blaming, what options does a woman really have? I hate to burst your bubble, but I am not a psycho and I am not a cold blooded, calculated killer. Binaries won’t work here. It is not that simple; as much as it may make for voyeuristic viewing for women alike who want to see me adopt the dominant/active subject in the power binary and ‘get back at all the men ever who ever did them wrong. There’s a twist. Beneath the surface there is so much more. Layers. Torment. Abuse. In fact, it is these very viewpoints that have divided feminists alike. Anti-feminist sentiment labelled me a ‘psycho’; not a smart thing to say to a calculated cold-blooded killer. To represent a female as a psycho murderous lunatic is taking us back to the days when female hysteria and madness were a convenient label for any emotional women who defied the patriarchal norms. Putting the madwoman back in the attic. But others would quickly counter this. I used the limited power I was afforded in the confines of my relationship - only I can save myself - society won’t! Murder is all well and good when your own human rights are in violation; you wouldn’t blink twice if I was a male serial killer. Yes, I masterfully exploited the unreliable narrator, because society loves a dead girl, pulling off an orchestrated publicity stunt that only a man could dream of. So, tell me: what exactly did I do to deserve being labelled psycho? I reinvented the femme fatale; imbuing it with villanous equality and a consensual manipulation of my own image. Some say this was a cry for help; a last resort. So, which is it? But Nick cheated on me and had the nerve to believe he got away with it. I didn't hate him enough to divorce him; that would be the easy way out for him. No, in fact, I hated him more than that. Enough that I faked my own death, and then made everybody (and I mean everybody), believe that he killed me. How is that for retaliation? And he may as well have killed me. He killed me in spirit, in body and in mind. He married an amazing Amy, and ended up with a mediocre, depressed Amy. But Nick got what was coming to him. He moved me to a faraway land, his hometown. Like a poor little damsel, abandoned in the bustling city, I was rescued from my tower and swooped off for a new beginning. Let me take you back to where it all began. The pinnacle of a mundane suburban life. Gated communities, perfectly manicured lawns, picket fences every which way - hello Stepford. This life wasn’t the life for me. I missed New York. But Nick had to care for his dying mother. And so we packed up and moved to the midwest. The midwest. A barron, draining wasteland. Imagine how I felt, forced to conform to the trope of an obedient housewife who so obediently 55


spent the day cooking and cleaning while my husband was somewhere else bonking one of his students. So there we were, nice and settled, entrapped in the suburbs of Missouri. I began to resent Nick for that. For making me leave my life, my friends, my family. And I don’t think I ever forgave him. Now you might be wondering, how did you get here Amy? How did a sweet, innocent ‘good girl’ grow up to be a manipulative liar? Well, the answer to that question is simple, really. I have been primed from birth, by the mere fact that there is no one to listen, no one to offer an alternate path to women. Society did this. When one cannot achieve voice or expression or autonomy, one is shocked when women become murderers - it's so against our natural temperaments and wiring after all. What a fallacy. If we look at the violent and murderous men (so many in fact that it has become completely normalised), they exist all around us. There are 137 deaths caused by domestic violence around the globe daily. We see them everywhere. Heathcliff (didn’t quite kill physically, but he did crush the spirit), Humbert Humbert, Othello, Hamlet, even as early as the Greek myths. Hera30, you were no vixen, simply hard done by. Proctor would have killed Abigail31 if he could have (Miller effectively did!), Bertha remained literally locked up in an attic32, Ms Havisham33, jilted by a lover, existed in her post-lapsarian Edenic garden. Unpruned. Unweeded. I think the metaphor is clear. Well, I took action. It was a conscious decision. A choice. One of the very few I had to save myself. Those chilling exposes you see - “what makes women kill?” is part of the problem. Again, we revert to casting the female as deviant, other, monstrous, devil, villain. And so I began to hatch my perfectly executed plan. You’ve heard it before, create a crime scene that had just enough errors to make the police suspicious. You see men do it all the time on TV. Bleached floors, and a haphazardly created mess in the living room. I learned from the best, after all. Make them think I was pregnant - I can commodify my body if others can. Everyone feels bad for a pregnant woman. You’re lying to yourself if you think the police won’t take the murder of a pregnant woman more seriously then the murder of a non-pregnant one. The twisted maternal instinct gone awry - surely a great case study for a local psych journal.

30

Zeus’s wife from Greek mythology, who is painted as a villain, despite being mistreated by the God of Gods himself A dionysian force from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, victim of the Salem Witch trials 32 A character deemed deranged and unhinged, from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, an example of the Madwoman in the Attic trope 33 Mrs Havisham is portrayed as ‘spinster’ gone mad due to being left by a man; a perpetuation of the madwoman trope in Charles Dickinson’s The Great Expectation (1861) 31

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I know what you all must be thinking of me right now. Amy, a terrible person, framing her innocent (albiet adulterous) husband for a vile murder. I urge you to understand the reality of my situation. I was a young woman, with a bright future ahead of me. Sure, it might have been a bit of overkill, the whole framing him for murder thing. But the principle of the matter is, I believe, extremely valid. It serves to highlight the limited options afforded to women in my situation. I was truly murdered a long time ago. For the first time I understood the pleasure of the male gaze. It was easy enough to invert it. I was watching Nick on the news the whole time I was away. Watching him look into the camera and plead for me to come home. He knew, I know that he knew. Knew I wasn't dead. He knew that my hatred and resentment for him had reached a boiling point. It was pure bliss to watch. To see him objectified. To capitalise on his emotions. And so I supposedly got my happy ending, I got to go home to my husband, name cleared. I had no trouble convincing the authorities I was a victim, which is not surprising; society loves a good victim/perpetrator complex as much as it loves a damsel in distress. I was never the villain in the public's eyes - women aren't capable of such calculated ploys of course. Then he hit me. For real. (Call me a pathological liar all you want. I knew there was some truth to what I was saying) Threatened to leave me, ironically - held me up against the wall by my neck. See? My fraudulent journal entries weren’t that fraudulent after all. “You bitch,34” he had said. “I’m the bitch you married”, I had replied. “The only time you ever liked yourself was when you were pretending to be someone they might like. I killed for you. Who else can say that? You think you would be happy with a nice midwestern girl. No way baby. I’m it.35” (Sometimes the only way to even the playing field with the patriarchy is to bargain with it. Why be gifted feminine allure if not to use it to my advantage?)

34 35

Transcribed from Gone girl; Arnon Milchan; Joshua Donen; Reese Witherspoon; Ceán Chaffin, (2014) Transcribed from Gone girl; Arnon Milchan; Joshua Donen; Reese Witherspoon; Ceán Chaffin, (2014)

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He says I am delusional. But he can’t forget, I almost sent him to jail once I can do it again. And I reminded him of the marital contract that he was stuck in - more of a confining thought for him rather than me. But I guess I did frame him for murder? All is fair in love and war, they say. But this isn't freedom. My preferred alternate ending didn't make it to the screen. I'll give it to you now; an alternate script. A new grand narrative: Voiceover narration: I killed for him. Killed for him. And he loved me more for that. He was stuck with me, till death do us part. In some dark, twisted way, I think it made him more attracted to me. The sadistic, masochistic pleasure he would derive from my evil almost made me love him back. [Amy and Nick are lying in bed, Nick stroking the top of Amy’s delicate blonde hair] Nick: You drive me crazy, baby. Amy: I know I do. Nick: Where do we go from here? Amy: We’ll have a baby. They will grow up in Missouri and have a good life. Nick: That sounds nice. Amy: Yes. It just depends on if you’re going to be here to see it. Voiceover narration: But I made sure the knife was always sharpened. At the end of the day, one must understand that I am more than just a cold blooded killer out to seek revenge on all men. I was a young woman whose prospects were squandered by her husband. Consumed; devoured; forgotten by society. That’s marriage, baby. 58


Closing remarks - Hélène Cixous: Thank you Amy. And thank you Lilith, and Catherine. You are all inspiring. It’s eternally refreshing to hear from women who have been historically subjected. Those who can forge a new path. I believe that women like you can help in eradicating the all-too-familiar madwoman trope. To hear women reclaim their narratives with pride. We must kill the false narratives that are preventing the live ones from breathing36. Reframe those tropes which confine us. Stepping out of the narratives which confine us. To share for the benefit of others. That is solidarité féminine, for women to write their stories. The Laugh of the Medusa shall sing on.

36

Quoted from Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa, a call to arms for female authors to write about female experiences, a commentary on how in order to present a new perspective for women, the old, confining perspective must be, in effect, ‘killed’ 59


Anjalee Desai: A Rich Myth or a New Lorde? The Dialectical Possibilities of a Feminist Poetic "Resistance is sustained...by recollections of broken tongues giving us ways to speak that decolonise our minds, our very beings" - bell hooks “Drawing inspiration from the multiplicitous voices innate to third wave feminism, my critical response aims to celebrate the diverse means through which the feminine identity may be reclaimed from the patriarchal traditions of the Western Canon. I accomplish this by interweaving comparative analysis of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde’s poetry, theories and interviews. In this way, I interrogate the composer’s alternate methods of self-actualisation, ultimately suggesting that it is through friendship and contentious discussion that both poets are able to reinstate subjective female ’selves’.” A Rich Myth or a New Lorde? The Dialectical Possibilities of a Feminist Poetic *** Foreword Tracing the movements of feminism, from Women’s Suffrage, Second Wave Feminism, Intersectionality, #MeToo, and (more recently) #TeachUsConsent, we may locate numerous instances wherein the complex layers of multiplicitous experiences, have been reduced into a monolithic cry. In turn, my critical response acts as a poignant reminder to observe that which lies beneath the compartmentalisation such cachets impose upon feminist thought. Here, we may discover a plurality of perspectives, both conflicting and overlapping, that are enriched through an embrace of the dialectic. By interweaving the poetry, theories and interviews of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, whose friendship appears to be founded as much on their opposing views as their shared, I traverse the composers’ alternate approaches to mythology. And so, as I grapple with a polyphonic discourse wholly resistant to containment, I find myself enticed by the resounding echoes of these diverse feminist voices.

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From Mono to Multi-Myth Bestowed with an ubiquitous presence, the mythologies of the Western Canon have come to both constitute and subjugate female selfhood37. The duality of this schism, underpinned by a pervasive phallogocentric discourse38, has arisen as a highly contentious issue amongst postmodern feminist poets. This predicament is of particular significance, in relation to mythology, which has arguably been most reductive in its subsumption of the complex feminine identity. Certainly, distinguished individuals such as folklorist Maria Tartar have suggested this, disputing the homogeneity of female experiences within the ‘monomyth’39 template - an enduring narrative arc she believes “utterly fails as a model of women’s experience”40. To address this void, where Adrienne Rich’s poetry underscores the imperative to rewrite a canonical history of patriarchal ownership over female narratives, Audre Lorde’s poetry highlights the necessity of establishing a new canon entirely. Yet, when comparatively examining poetic works that attempt to undermine canonical tradition, conventional literary criticism is largely ineffective, as the linear argument nullifies the complexities and contradictions central to postmodern feminist pursuits. In this way, an insular misconception has been promulgated: that of feminism as a singular voice of dissent41. Instead, the dialectical method of argument proposed by G.W.F. Hegel seems more appropriate when grappling with disparate perspectives. Hegel’s dialectics enable one to navigate a contradictory process between opposing sides, termed as the ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ respectively. The disparate aspects of this dichotomy are resolved through the emergence of a third element, ‘the synthesis’, which “grasps the unity of opposition between the first two determinations”42.

37

A definitive subjectivity in existence, broadly defined by Diana Meyers as an ongoing and improvisational process of exercising self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction skills. 38 Extending the Derridean notion of logocentrism, Helene Cixious denotes a phallogocentric discourse characterised by its “virtue of affirming the primacy of the phallus”, essentially constructing systems of meaning that privilege the masculine. 39 First coined by Joseph Campbell, the ‘monomyth’ theory asserts that an overtly masculine hero’s journey, consisting of distinct stages (i.e ‘the call to adventure”) is the ultimate narrative archetype, that manifests itself in various forms but is a commonality to all mythology. 40 Maria Tatar, Heroine with 1001 Faces (S.L.: Liveright Publishing Corp, 2021). 41 Deborah L. Siegel, “The Legacy of the Personal: Generating Theory in Feminism’s Third Wave,” Hypatia 12, no. 3 (1997): 46–75, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810222. 42 Julie E Maybee, “Hegel’s Dialectics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (The Metaphysics Research Lab, 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/.

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As such, this essay intends to structurally appropriate Hegel’s ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’43 trajectory, in order to interrogate the trope of revisionist mythology, as a means of reclaiming diverse female identities within feminist poetry. In turn, my response frequently shifts between the thesis, which asserts the potency of revising pre-existing canonical structures exemplified through Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck (1973) and the antithesis, which contends the limitations of this revisionism in light of Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn (1978). However, where Hegel sought to overcome “dialectical contradictions”44, through sustained synthesis I aim to embrace these diverse voices of dissent, instead locating the poetic richness of feminism in its potential to liberate from hegemonic ideologies, by holding incompatible ideas simultaneously. The Loaded Term of Feminism DC45: We cannot escape the hold of the feminine on the unconscious, which is precisely why we must work within myth to reinterpret and transform, rather than merely reject46. bh47: Marginality...offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds48. Like most ‘isms’, feminism is a multifaceted term that cannot be homogenised into a singular definition. The narrowing of any ‘ism’ in this way, imposes a monolithic view upon micronarratives49, ironically transforming that which intends to dismantle ideology into an ideology itself. Hence, within this essay, although analysis will be framed through the works of two feminist theorists, a myriad of individuals (theorists and critics alike) have contributed to the evolutionary literary waves of this pluralistic movement. Drucilla Cornell’s strategy of ‘mimesis’ in Beyond Accommodation (1999), advocates for movement within the gender hierarchy, with the intention of imbuing new meaning. Through her affirmation of the feminine as a performance that can be restylised, Cornell proposes to reinterpret myth from within the canonical

43

Within this essay, I acknowledge that the application of Hegel’s dialectics will be removed from his contextual values and teleological impulse to reach unity. This is because in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, it is under the same premise of ‘natural order’ that enables the synthesis to “come about on its own accord” that he argues “woman...has her substantive destiny in the family”, whilst her male counterpart “has his actual and substantive life in the state, in learning and so forth”. 44 Julie E Maybee, “Hegel’s Dialectics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (The Metaphysics Research Lab, 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/. 45 Drucilla Cornell 46 Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 182. 47 bell hooks 48 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 49 In light of a growing “incredulity towards metanarratives”, Lyotard advocated for the proliferation of micronarratives, as postmodern society became alert to difference, diversity and the incompatibility of individual aspirations, beliefs and desires.

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premise. It is in this way, she suggests that the “ontology of gender identity”50 may be “deconstructed not just to expose the normative injunction that lies at its base, but to protect the possibility of a different destiny”51. As such, we may perceive Adrienne Rich’s utilisation of revisionist mythology, as an anticipatory demonstration of Cornell’s ‘mimesis’. Alternatively, bell hooks’ emphasis on the liberating realm of ‘marginality’ in Yearning (1990), instead privileges “a site of creativity and power”52 that celebrates heterogeneity, as a means to dethrone monolithic myths from beyond the confines of canonical tradition. Where hooks posits the literary ‘margin’ as an “inclusive space where we recover ourselves”53, I find resonance with Audre Lorde’s employment of an unconventional, intersectional aesthetic. {I} A Poetic Experience: In the Centre or From the Margins? AR54: I wish we could explore this more - about you and me, but also in general. I think it needs to be talked about, written about: the differences in alternatives or choices we are offered as black and white women…55 AL56: Adrienne, in my journals I have a lot of pieces of conversations that I’m having with you in my head...I’ll put it in my journal because stereotypically or symbolically these conversations occur in a space of black woman/white woman, where its beyond Adrienne and Audre, almost as if we’re two voices...57 When examined in tandem, it becomes increasingly apparent that although certain resonances exist between both Rich and Lorde’s conceptions of feminist poetry, it is in fact the “differences in alternatives and choices” that have arisen from divulging authorial intentions and personal experiences, which enable each text to successfully reclaim diverse feminine identities. Perhaps by engaging in a dialogic between the “two voices”

50

Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 148–49. 51 Ibid 52 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 53 Ibid 54 Adrienne Rich 55 Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 713–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173739. 56 Audre Lorde 57 Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 713–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173739.

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of one another, but also with the micronarratives of myriad other women, the poets’ works can coexist as alternate, yet equally viable means through which one may innovatively write back to the stable Western Canon. In her essay, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision58 Rich interrogates an enduring masculine authoritative presence, symbolically evoked as the “Man, who was not a terror or a dream but a literary master,”59 through metatextual commentary: “[Woman] goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together...she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men.”60 In this way, Rich suggests that such patriarchal constructs have obstructed authentic articulations of female selfhood and thus inhibited “her way of being in the world”61. However, when seeking to destabilise tradition, Lorde’s appropriately named essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House62, would imply that Rich’s proposed resistance to consciously confront the “images of Woman in books written by men”63, remains constrained within the discourse of patriarchal oppression. She underscores this in: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”64 By illuminating the ironies in the only perceived mechanism through which women may revert their subordination being that which facilitates their oppression, Lorde is able to substantiate her compositional shift towards the ‘margins’, as a defiant assertion of resistance, against the uncompromising Eurocentric narratives of the Western Canon.

58

Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as ReVision,” College English 34, no. 1 (1972): 18–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/375215. 59 Ibid 60 Ibid 61 Ibid 62 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin Books, 2018). 63 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as ReVision,” College English 34, no. 1 (1972): 18–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/375215. 64 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin Books, 2018).

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Rich’s use of revisionism sees her extract knowledge from this very Canon, to then employ latent creative potentiality to envisage new ways of existing within the world. Her feminist poetics of intervention in her anthology Diving into the Wreck, help to reimagine the literal, historical and mythological conditions of women’s lives. Through engaging in this form of ‘mimesis’, Rich composes within the “utopic realm” coined by Cornell, which fosters a “dialectic between ‘alterity’ (thinking otherness) and ‘embeddedness’ (our restriction to historical circumstances)”65. The dialectic is realised in her titular poem “Diving into the Wreck”, where Rich innovatively appropriates the epic form, undermining canonical structures and affirming Cornell’s postulation of ‘mimesis’ as a strategy that enables a “shaking up from within”66. Here, Rich utilises various tropes of the ‘hero’s journey’, with buried treasure and a quest - each a simultaneous acknowledgement and re-evaluation of outmoded literary conventions67. For example, the hero is a woman and the quest is a disparaging critique of the hegemony. In addition, the unconventional treasure is knowledge; insight into the personal and cultural founding of gender interactions, as well as a development of selfhood that is only obtained via criticism of ingrained tradition. Due to the all-encompassing nature of this form, “Diving into the Wreck” serves as a “master narrative”68 which is built upon throughout the other poems within the anthology. Alternatively, embracing those who do not conform to the western ‘mythical norm’, Lorde’s intersectional literary aesthetic encompasses all women - regardless of race, sexuality, age or class. In her anthology The Black Unicorn, she abstains entirely from engaging with canonical texts that sustain the teleological “mode of the oppressors''69. Instead, through inhabiting a ‘marginal’ space outside of the hegemonic ‘centre’, Lorde’s privileging of difference enables her to engage with multiplicitous voices and thus reclaim diverse feminine identities. In this way, Lorde’s literary endeavours “create spaces where one is able to redeem and reclaim the past”70, whilst concurrently eliciting “the legacies of pain, suffering and triumph”71 as a means of transforming present reality.

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M.J. Clark, “Deconstruction, Feminism, and Law: Cornell and MacKinnon on Female Subjectivity and Resistance,” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 12, no. 107 (2005): 109–10. 66 Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 148–49. 67 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The Critique of Consciousness and Myth in Levertov, Rich, and Rukeyser,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (1975): 214, https://doi.org/10.2307/3518965. 68 Noah Christopher Brooksher, “‘Insane for the Destination:’ Disrupting the Teleological Impulses of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck,” W&M ScholarWorks, no. 948 (2016): 45, https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/948. 69 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 70 Ibid 71 Ibid 65


Lorde’s use of the poetic form, embodies hooks’ accentuation of our compositional capacity “to envision new, alternative, oppositional aesthetic acts”72. Primarily, Lorde accomplishes this is by disrupting conventional grammatical rules and employing ambiguous syntactic strategies73. For Lorde, this decision is both self-conscious and politically divisive, as she argues “[W]e were tutored to a function in a structure that already existed but does not function for our good”74. As such, within her anthology poems tend to feature sparse punctuation, with the exception of the ends of stanzas, evoking a stream-of-consciousness free from the ‘oppression’ of correct punctuation and thus destabilising the ‘stringent authority’ of grammar. Maintaining the pre-existing literary framework Lorde forsakes, Rich instead exemplifies the possibility for “mimesis as de-sistance”75, asserting the need to reinvent cultural standards according to feminist terms. In “Diving into the Wreck”, she accomplishes this through the story of a diver burdened by a “book of myths''76 - a motific representation of the patriarchal constructions that justify female subordination and expunge women from the historical record. Upon descending the symbolic “ladder” shielded in “body-armor of black rubber”77, the diver delves literally into the ocean, but metaphorically into the personal and collective unconscious. Once the premise of this quest has been established, the poem's palimpsestic qualities become apparent, as Rich reveals her persona is equipped to revise the “book of myths”, carrying a “loaded camera” (to record reality) and a “knife blade” (to cut through illusion)78. The subversive nature of this exploration is reinforced by the ocean’s changeability, an evolution captured through polysyndeton, “its bluer and then green and then black”79 and the absence of a coherent rhyme scheme. Rich employs these discontinuities purposefully, in order to illuminate the inherent pitfalls within the logic of androcentric culture80. However, in subsequent verses, Rich unequivocally rejects this initial ambivalence through her speaker’s decisive didactic statement, “I came to explore the wreck”81, with the “wreck” symbolising the ruins ensuing a phallogocentric discourse that has repressed authentic feminine identities. As her speaker clarifies her pursuit is of “the wreck and not the story of the wreck”82 Rich imbues her poem with self-conscious intent, as her

72

Ibid Lexi Rudnitsky, “The ‘Power’ and ‘Sequelae’ of Audre Lorde’s Syntactical Strategies,” Callaloo 26, no. 2 (2003): 473–85, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3300873. 74 Ibid 75 Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149. 76 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 22–24. 77 Ibid 78 Ibid 79 Ibid 80 Claire Hurley, “‘Writing as Re-Vision’: Female Creative Agency in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich,” Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts, 2016, 158, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474237970.ch-020. 81 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 22–24. 82 Ibid 73

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persona delves deep into the dominant mythology that occupies a tenacious place within our unconsciousness and instead meta-poetically releases female selfhood from the oppressive grips of the patriarchy. However, identifying traditional discourses as “a place of struggle”83, Lorde underscores the constraints of such a process of ‘mimesis’ and instead invokes a compositional shift towards the ‘margins’. In “The Black Unicorn”, Lorde appropriates the mythical unicorn from Western folklore, transforming that which is typically white and male, into a black female. To supplement this, she subverts the dominant iconography of the unicorn’s phallic horn (“it is not on her lap where the horn rests / but deep in her moonpit / growing”84), transmuting this symbol of masculine authority into an expression of unadulterated feminine sexuality. However, in “mistaken for a shadow or a symbol”85, Lorde subsequently demonstrates the impracticality of this reconfigured emancipatory vision, much like those of Rich, suggesting that the identity of the black unicorn has been subsumed by hegemonic ideals. She reiterates how this systemic discrimination continues to prevail, illustrating that although the black unicorn is “restless” and “unrelenting”, it is still “not free”86. Through illuminating the Eurocentric values tethered to dominant mythology, Lorde is able to demonstrate the necessity of a counter-hegemonic discourse derived from the ‘margins’. Nevertheless, identifying the subjugation of women’s “lived experiences”87 that canonical tradition has perpetuated since its inception, Rich substantiates her poetic “dive” into its mythology as a means of actively exposing this patriarchal paradigm. In “Waking in the Dark”, the speaker considers the stigmatisation of menstrual blood, alluding to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of hysteria in “You call it hysterical bleeding...You dip your finger into it and write / You faint at the smell of it”88. Through the active voice employed by the speaker and the repetitious male “you”, Rich reiterates the hegemonic domination enacted by the masculine89. She locates this subordination in Judeo-Christian mythology, whereby the apprehensiveness towards menstrual blood (supposedly originating as a curse to punish Eve’s transgression), has served as the basis for excluding women from the sanctuary in numerous dioceses. Rich parallels this discriminatory tradition by equating the speaker’s menstrual blood with ink, underlining how the formation of canonical texts “without [women’s] knowledge and consent”90, has subsequently expunged substantive 83

bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (Penguin Classics, 1978), 3. 85 Ibid 86 Ibid 87 Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 25. 88 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 7–10. 89 Noah Christopher Brooksher, “‘Insane for the Destination:’ Disrupting the Teleological Impulses of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck,” W&M ScholarWorks, no. 948 (2016): 25, https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/948. 90 Ibid 67 84


feminine literary perspectives. In this way, Rich scrutinises “a man’s world”91 wherein women are continually obstructed from acquiring a subject position on their own terms. Seeking to refigure not only the oppressive gendered system Rich describes, but also intersecting Eurocentric paradigms, Lorde turns to the ‘margin’ as a “site of creativity and power”92. In “A Woman Speaks”, Lorde mediates on the necessity for broadening the feminist representational frame, with her speaker’s profound declaration “I am / woman / and not white”93. Here, Lorde claims the authority to both confront the shortcomings of a canonical discourse that has denied access to women of colour (“my magic is unwritten”94), whilst simultaneously empowering them to resist all manner of discursive erasure, through the high modality in “when the sea turns back / it will leave my shape behind”95. To achieve this, Lorde denotes a transition from the ‘othering’ of Graeco-Roman tradition towards West African mythology96, as she alludes to Mawu (“moon marked and touched by sun”97) goddess of the sky and mother of all Dahomean deities. As her speaker reveals she is “still seeking” her “sisters / witches in Dahomey”98, Lorde acknowledges that reifying the insidious influence of Western subjugation, is an ongoing process both in literature and reality. Revealingly, although through radically differing means, both composers utilise the cosmic significance of their “poetic event”99 to return to the root of feminine experiences and recreate this in the minds of their reader: Rich in revisiting “the wreck itself” and Lorde in rediscovering “the black unicorn” previously “mistaken for a shadow or symbol”. In this way, the poems become interrogatory acts in themselves, inviting a relational mode of being in which the female ‘self’ is understood in the event of understanding others100. Conceiving of poetry in this manner establishes an ethical model for a feminist hermeneutic - one in which the complexities of multiple interactions with the patriarchy can be holistically accounted for. {II} A Discourse of Broken Tongues

91

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 7–10. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 93 Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (Penguin Classics, 1978), 4. 94 Ibid 95 Ibid 96 Primarily drawing upon the Dahomey and Yoruba cultures of Western Nigeria. 97 Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (Penguin Classics, 1978), 4. 98 Ibid 99 Jack Underwood, “I Guess You Had to Be There - Jack Underwood,” Five Dials, May 29, 2016, https://fivedials.com/fiction/i-guess-you-had-to-be-there/. 100 Alice Templeton, “The Dream and the Dialogue: Rich’s Feminist Poetics and Gadamer’s Hermeneutics,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 7, no. 2 (1988): 283–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/463683. 92

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AR: If I ask for documentation, it’s because I take seriously the spaces between us that difference has created, that racism has created. There are times when I simply cannot assume that I know what you know, unless you show me what you mean. AL: But I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the process of discovering. AR: It’s not. Help me to perceive what you perceive.101 Both composers’ “request for documentation” evocatively captures the disjunct between locating repression in tangible evidence and counter-hegemonic intuition. Whilst Rich contends that such ‘documentation’ enables her to conceive of differing experiences, Lorde highlights the futility of this stance, since ‘documentation’ is overwhelmingly situated in canonical narratives that have historically excluded black women. Yet, perhaps when we overcome the insular lens applied to feminist thought, we can observe that it requires multiple discourses, both counter-hegemonic and revised, working in conjunction to address institutionalised orthodoxies. Rich appropriately defines revisionism as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction”102. She does exactly this throughout her anthology - continually revisiting, redefining and re-evaluating to cultivate subversive mythological narratives. In part, her desire to so wholly interrogate these archetypes must stem from her recognition that: “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male dominated society.”103 Where Rich endeavours to reconcile difference through self knowledge, Lorde advocates to embrace intrinsic ‘differences’, as she contends that: “Difference must be not merely tolerated but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”104

101 Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 713–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173739. 102 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as ReVision,” College English 34, no. 1 (1972): 18–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/375215. 103 Ibid 104 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin Books, 2018).

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Utilising subjectivities as the impetus for poetic craft, Lorde demonstrates how composers may write from the literary ‘margins’, “giv(ing) name to those ideas that are until the poem is written nameless and formless”105, in order to innovatively dismantle the rigid confines imposed by the canonical ‘centre’. Trivialising the tropes intrinsic to this canonical ‘centre’, Rich initiates her revision of various gendered literary conventions, reinforcing Cornell’s conception of “metaphoric transference”106 by subverting binary constructs which have repressed the feminine identity. Rich challenges a well-known sailor’s superstition heavily rooted in Greek mythological narratives surrounding nymphs and sirens - the paradox that suggests women on board ships are a sign of misfortune, whilst bare-breasted figureheads of women are a calming influence upon the sea. She reclaims this archetype of a woman on the front of a ship, with “the drowned face always staring toward the sun”107, through subversively conflating the sun’s ‘hope’ with a conventionally immobilised and objectified figure. Her exhibition of covert female strength, also inverts the traditional conception of women’s ‘subject’ relation to authority. Rich extends this by imbuing a radical fluidity in the Jungian archetypes with “the mermaid whose dark hair streams black”108 and “the merman in his armoured body”109, rendering the prescribed genders upon which canonical discourses are predicated synonymous. However, seeking to reinscribe the discourses of intersectionality that have endured marginalisation on multiple fronts, Lorde incorporates West African divinities within her poetry, using “outsider knowledges and transgressive knowledges”110 as tools for transformative resistance. This is evident in Lorde’s poem “Dahomey'', in which the speaker satirically refers to Eshu/Elegba111, the later inscribed male versions of the African goddess Afrekete. Lorde inverts this overshadowing by denoting an image of female solidarity as “four women joined together”112 and “mock Eshu’s iron quiver standing erect”113. Implicit to this mockery of Eshu’s erect phallus (the ultimate symbol of masculine authority) is the transgressive suggestion that women can ridicule, master and preside above phallogocentric tradition. Likewise, Lorde counters the potent portrayal of the male deity Shango, with an authoritative female presence, “Thunder is a woman with braided 105

Audre Lorde, Poetry Is Not a Luxury (1993; repr., Germany: Osnabrück, 2019). More specifically, Cornell challenges traditional Western notions of representation, in turn exploring an ethical dimension in the very act of representation—one which permits the object of representation to “be in its difference.” 107 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 22–24. 108 Ibid 109 Ibid 110 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 111 In many Dahomean religious rituals, the part of Eshu-Elgeba is danced by a woman with an attached phallus 112 Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (Penguin Classics, 1978), 10–11. 113 Ibid 70 106


hair / spelling the fas of Shango”114. Here, she demonstrates that without the female diviner, the fa, or destiny prescribed by Shango115 cannot be known. As such, “Dahomey'' encapsulates in microcosm how Lorde utilises her contemporary identity poetics to reinstate a complex ancient past with an ongoing dynamic culture. Hence, whilst “metaphoric transference”116 is incompatible with Lorde’s endeavour to represent intersectional experiences that Eurocentric mythology negates, the device is central to Rich’s poetry, which intends to obtain female liberation by reinterpreting canonical discourse itself. Rich transforms the realm of “the hermit’s cabin”117, dominated by the mythological Hermit of Cape Maleus118 into the subversive depths of “the hunters’ shack”119 which exists under the matriarchal authority of the Roman goddess Diana120. As the speaker, “a woman dressed in old army fatigues”, navigates this alternate Dionysian environment, she encounters “the wildwood / where the split began”121. In this way, Rich conflates her mythological allusion to Diana with the revisionist yet distinctly biblical metalanguage of Genesis, to illuminate the deeply ingrained nature of gendered passive/active dichotomies, whilst simultaneously imbuing a subversive complexity into such archetypal portrayals. Upon coming to this realisation, through the truncated statement “But finished.”122, the speaker is able to articulate her transcendence beyond the constraints of “a man’s world”, obtaining a liberated status “against / the law / of gravity”123. Thus, in utilising a discourse of metaphorical displacement, Rich affirms the autonomous positioning of the feminine, without repudiating it as an imposition124. Yet, recognising the “narrow parameters” a canonical framework accounts for, Lorde exemplifies how ‘marginal’ spaces invite artists to contribute to a discourse that celebrates “all the complexity and variety of cultural traditions which have shaped them”125. In “125th Street and Abomey”, the speaker through 114

Ibid Shango is the Orisha (goddesses and gods - divine personifications) of lightning and thunder, war, and politics. In Nigeria, the head of the Shango cult is frequently a woman. 116 Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 31. 117 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 7–10. 118 In Graeco-Roman mythology, the Hermit of Cape Maleus was stranded during a voyage and subsequently lived off a cliff for years, spending the remainder of his days gazing out to sea at the depths where the bright hope of his life had disappeared. 119 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 7–10. 120 In Roman religion, Diana is recognised as the goddess of wild animals and the hunt. 121 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 7–10. 122 Ibid 123 Ibid 124 Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 182. 125 Susan Bordo, “Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern Bodies,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 1 (1992): 159, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178218. 71 115


apostrophe, calls upon Seboulisa the goddess of Abomey (“I see you Seboulisa”126) to enhance her speech and impart “the woman strength of tongue”127. This association is extended as the speaker identifies with the “severed daughter”128 of “Seboulisa mother goddess with one breast / eaten away”129. The brutal association can be perceived as an expression of admiration toward the Dahomean tradition whereby Amazon warriors cut off their breasts to improve their archery, as well as a contextual reference to Lorde’s personal experience with a mastectomy. For Lorde, conflating this empowered mythological goddess with her own experiences and politics of breast cancer constituted a feminist ethical imperative, as she encourages truth-telling about “the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation...the function of cancer in a profit economy”130, which she suggests can help to liberate women from the confines of a racist, capitalist patriarchy. Upon uniting her voice with Seboulisa’s, the pair brazenly begin “laughing (their) name into echo / all the world shall remember”131. By immortalising a discourse of black deities developed “at the margins”132, Lorde undermines the hegemonic suppression of feminine difference on both a cultural and individual level. Interestingly, both poets' subversive utilisation of discourse displays a highly personalised consciousness in intent and effect, that affirms the radical potency of écriture féminine133. Rich exhibits an ironic awareness of her own poetic engagement with what Lorde denotes as the ‘master’s tools’ through the quasi mea culpa, “This is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk to you”134. Here, Rich acknowledges the constraints of value-laden canonical discourses, whilst simultaneously underscoring the efficacy of exploiting “the myth-making tradition”135 in order to dismantle the foundations underpinning the hegemonic ‘centre’. Alternatively, Lorde’s poetry actively partakes in a counter-hegemonic discourse predicated upon “the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences”136 intrinsic to the ‘margins’: a limitless realm “where there are no charters”137. Collectively contributing to a discourse of difference and displacement, each poet highlights how “resistance is sustained”138 by the “broken tongues”139 of multiplicitous dissenting female voices. 126

Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (Penguin Classics, 1978), 12–13. Ibid 128 Ibid 129 Ibid 130 Mary DeShazer, “Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives,” The University of Michigan Press, 2013, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3znzfk. 131 Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (Penguin Classics, 1978), 12–13. 132 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 133 Translating to ‘women’s writing’, the phrase was first coined by Helene Cixious who remarks “woman must write herself”. 134 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 135 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as ReVision,” College English 34, no. 1 (1972): 18–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/375215. 136 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin Books, 2018). 137 Ibid 138 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 139 Ibid 72 127


{III} Selfhood and the Dialectical Friendship AL: Do you realise, we’ve come full circle, because that is where understanding and knowing mesh. What understanding begins to do is to make knowledge available for use, and that's the urgency, that’s the push, that’s the drive. AR: That you had to understand what you knew and also make it available to others? AL: That’s right. Inseparable process now.140 Where I initially sought to locate a dialectic in feminist poetry, as Rich and Lorde acknowledge how “[they’ve] come full circle” in discussion, I too arrive at an unanticipated realisation: that the composers’ comparative richness lies within a dynamic friendship. Through an “inseparable process” that is distinctive for each poet, both successfully “make knowledge available” regarding female selfhood that is elusive and enigmatic, but most poignantly, devoid of patriarchal interference. Rich utilises mimesis to transcend the stringent identities imposed by normative gender hierarchies. In “Diving into the Wreck”, she privileges androgynous descriptors, “I am she: I am he”141, which are emancipated from gendered conventions. Interestingly, this proposal stands in contention with Cornell, who insists upon affirming a new choreography of sexual difference determined by ‘the feminine’, as opposed to “the postulation of a neutral person”142 that is “no longer defined by the bipolarity of our current representations on gender identity”143. However, perhaps it is this very neutrality that offers Rich the freedom to penetrate the crux of dominant mythology, before subverting it from within. Certainly, Rich herself suggests this through the pronoun transition in, “We are, I am, you are''144, in which she posits a collective identity as an act of self-recognition, that serves as a compelling invocation to reconcile disparate selves. Potentially, this ambivalent assertion of gender identity, corresponds to Cornell’s “imaginary domain”145 - a liberating “space for the contestation and representation of sexual identification”146. Therefore, as the poem

140

Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 713–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173739. 141 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 22–24. 142 Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 151. 143 Ibid 144 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 22–24. 145 Pheng Cheah et al., “The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell,” Diacritics 28, no. 1 (1998): 19–42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566322. 146 Ibid 73


reaches its conclusion, punctuation becomes sparse in order to elucidate the speaker’s mounting selfactualisation147. Yet, where Rich’s notion of transcendence seeks to “conceive of alternatives”148 that reconcile feminine and masculine identities in a patriarchally dominant world, Lorde’s mantra that “divide and conquer must become define and empower”149 instead locates this freedom in embracing selfhood that exists beyond the confines of Western canonical tradition. Lorde’s representation of intersectional identities correlates with hooks' invocation to depict transformative subjectivities, which exhibit the multiple facets of marginalised perspectives. In “Between Ourselves”, Lorde challenges the colonial imperialist paradigm which represents black identity one-dimensionally, through static notions of universality. Instead, Lorde engages in Sappho’s tradition of the ‘Lyric I’ as her speaker traverses between the different axes of identity that exist within oneself. This plurality is evoked sensually as the speaker “looks in (her) own faces”150 and “tastes the colour of (her) grandmother’s first betrayal”151. Each of these multiplicitous dimensions introduces complexity into the African American subject, giving representation to their shared experiences, familial relationships and self-perceptions. In this way, Lorde’s use of the subjective ‘I’ aligns closely with Rich’s poetic fluctuation between gender pronouns, with each composer underscoring the multifarious nature of identity. Despite this, Lorde also acknowledges the ‘otherness’ that remains embedded within marginalised identities, through the parallelism in “the other in ourselves / the self that we hate / in others”152. Hence, Lorde adopts “frontiers of difference”153 that dismantle the homogenising tendencies of hegemonic “master narratives” which obstruct authentic expressions of African American selfhood. Revealingly, in “Incipience” Rich acknowledges that the process of reclaiming gender identity through revisionism is potent but gradual, underlining how “nothing can be done / but by inches”154 as the speaker documents their life “hour by hour, word by word”155. To foreground the primordial origins of such hegemonic constructs, Rich denotes a prehistoric ice age, anachronistically aligning the ice “forming over 147

Claire Hurley, “‘Writing as Re-Vision’: Female Creative Agency in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich,” Feminist Moments: Reading Feminist Texts, 2016, 158, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474237970.ch-020. 148 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as ReVision,” College English 34, no. 1 (1972): 18–30, https://doi.org/10.2307/375215. 149 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin Books, 2018). 150 Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (Penguin Classics, 1978), 117–19. 151 Ibid 152 Ibid 153 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). 154 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 11–12. 155 Ibid

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the earth”156 with the societal stasis derived from stringent gender norms. She illuminates how these ingrained orthodoxies have also infiltrated dreamscapes (“A man is asleep in the next room / we are his dreams”157), drawing parallels to the conventional perception that defines women solely in relation to men. Challenging Lorde’s advocation for the “creative function of difference”158, Rich locates transcendence within unity through her speaker's transgressive declaration, “outside the frame of his dream we are stumbling up the hill / hand in hand”159. Through diverting the male gaze, alongside purporting a revisionist portrayal of the antediluvian period160, Rich actively reframes outmoded societal expectations, envisioning a collective freedom devoid of constrictive prescribed identities. Unlike Rich, for Lorde authentic selfhood is not coherent but subjective and acquired through engagement with “oppositional worldviews”161, such as that of the conventionally repressed lesbian conscious. In “Recreation”, Lorde establishes the body as a locus for this subjective presence in “we cut the leash / you create me against your thighs”162, highlighting the polysemic nature of recreation. By harnessing her poetic style in this way, Lorde is able to elucidate the joy and electrification that emanates from lesbian bonding, whilst also embracing alternative expressions of sexuality. She reinforces this through her emphasis upon corporeal experience in “my body / writes into your flesh”163, which metafictively signifies a rewriting of traditional family values that privilege heterosexuality. As such, through criticism of traditional writing implements (“paper and pen / neither care nor profit / whether we write or not”164), Lorde proposes a mutual form of bodily writing that defies the heteronormative capitalist logos inherent to this masculinist public sphere. Therefore, through embracing “decentred” identities, Lorde accentuates the pluralist reality of female selfhood. An Elusive Endpoint “Despite the vital friendship between Lorde and Rich, or perhaps because of it, both poets were able to question their own everyday practices of collusion with the very systems that oppressed them. As self-

156

Ibid Ibid 158 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (London: Penguin Books, 2018). 159 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973), 11–12. 157

In biblical cosmology, this period accounts for the time between the fall of humans and the Genesis flood narrative. 160

161

bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1990). Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (Penguin Classics, 1978), 84. 163 Ibid 164 Ibid 162

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identified lesbian feminists, they openly negotiated the difficulties of their very different racial and economic realities.” 165 And so, when considering Rich and Lorde’s “very different racial and economic realities”, the question of revisionist mythology as a “practic(e) of collusion with the very systems that oppressed them” remains a source of significant contention. Yet, through withholding a neatly-elucidated outcome, their dialectical poetry, theories and interview instead celebrate something much greater - a “vital friendship” predicated upon uncompromising oppositional views. As Rich passionately advocates: “Don’t let’s let this evolve into...‘Yes, of course we understand each other because we love each other’. That’s bull”166. Perhaps, therefore, as we depart from this distinctive relationship, which leaves the echoes of “broken tongues” intact, we observe a microcosm for the voice of the feminist movement itself. A voice that is a dissident expression of incompatible perspectives that are able to resist any form of unification through synthesis. ***

165

Claudia Rankine, “Adrienne Rich’s Poetic Transformations,” The New Yorker, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/adrienne-richs-poetic-transformations. 166 Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” Signs 6, no. 4 (1981): 713–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173739.

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Lara Finlayson: GUTTED My creative short story “GUTTED” explores female wounds surrounded by and maintained through various patriarchal hierarchies that stigmatise female biological processes. Inspired by my fascination with the Abject Art world, my piece intertextually builds on the experiences of previous women in art and literature, harnessing the energy of the MeToo era. I sought to expose these wounds in all their monstrosity and grotesqueness, specifically how they manifest themselves in the rotting womb of heteronormative marriage.

GUTTED Dear Reader, he gutted her.

Dear Husband, I gutted you.167 SPRING168 167 168

Brontë, C. (1847). Jane Eyre. Harper & Brothers of New York. Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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It seemed strange that she had such a fancy for this man. He had an impatient face and thin greying hair; it's not as if he had anything to distinguish himself from the hundred others - he hadn't169. But with the aching reminder of her seedless stomach, she decided his aura was mysterious. She became drawn into his reclusive nature, mesmerised by the repressed anger that exuded through painful droplets of sweat. The way his eyes strained when he lifted a heavy box; the ease with which he walked past dead birds on the street; it was so inspiring. Under the holy spirit, she swore herself to him, morphing her shaking body into an offering. She was not wealthy enough to afford a fancy dress but chose synthetic lace over yellowing second-hand. There was an old legend about a bride who bought a gown previously worn by a corpse, where embalming fluid from the dress seeped into her pores and poisoned the woman. Moral of the story: being poor will kill you170. Meanwhile, he fidgeted in a second-hand suit, adding a layer of sweat to the fluids already embedded in the threads. Only months later, the gold ring rusted in the beds of her fingers, and she felt the scent of copper rubbing on her tongue. It left a grey and green branding on her skin. She liked to think it was the marriage running through her veins, that she was infused with the spirit of divinely ordained love. The girl who had everything.171 Soon, he was promoted to a supervisory position at his workplace; from butcher to administrator. She did not know the exact nature of his occupation, only that it would provide the opportunity for children, and riches. Next to the abattoir, the Supervisor was given a small cottage house. It was already furnished with floral settees and timber tables. The soon-to-be nursery in the attic space, which would serve as her interim studio, overlooked a large field of fertile ground. There were gardens bright with sinuous rills, where many incense-bearing trees blossomed; and forests ancient as the hills, enfolding sunny spots of greenery.172 The gentle hum of grazing cattle was meditative, and from the window, she admired the scenery, blissfully inhaling the fragrance of citrus and fresh soil. She sat there waiting, her dainty fingers poking at her hair. Waiting for what? I'd like to know.

169

Mansfield, K. (1920). Je ne parle pas Français. Heron Press. Machado, C. (2017). The Husband Stitch. Graywolf Press. 171 Cecily Brown, The Girl Who Had Everything, 1998, Oil on linen, 99 1/2 x 110 in. (252.7 x 279.4 cm). 172 Coleridge, S. (1816). Kubla Khan. Christabel. 170

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It was Spring. Her life was going to change. She felt it.173 SEEDBED174 The night of their wedding, he ached for a lust-stained175 bed, for the confirmation that hymeneal blood would bring. She told him to use her body as he saw fit. She had tender breasts that fell outwards, and nipples the same colour as her lips. When her purity was confirmed in the trickle of murky redness, he gripped her hands, gold on gold, and writhed at the sight of his untainted wife. Her body stayed frigid the whole time, struck by a perverse strain of naivety. She had come vested all in white, pure as her mind.176 I am your doll, a prop for a movie playing in your head.177 He was stupid with pleasure; as revealed as a milk-drunk baby. You can be the baby you want to make. He scooped her breast out of her bra and let out a high-pitched whine. You want me so bad you would die. The consummation had been raw and finite, but a success in many ways, as he showered in the rain that poured from her immaculate flesh. I wish you would die.

173

Carver, R. (1971). Fat. Harper’s Bazaar. Vito Acconci’s 1972 performance Seedbed at Sonnabend Gallery, in which he masturbated beneath a ramped floor for 5 days, 8 hours a day. 175 Shakespeare, W. (1603) Othello. (5.1). 176 Milton, J. (1658). Methought I Saw my Late Espoused Saint. The Poetry Foundation. 177 Roupenian, K. (2017). Cat person. The New Yorker. 79 174


With the insurgence of that memory, he entered the living room where she ate a burnt plum cake. It was afternoon, and the oak trees were deep orange, with fiery reds and bronzes. The meat package sat on the kitchen counter, festering in the rising temperature of its juices. To him, it was medication, compulsorily eaten. With one last attempt, he pulled her close, so that she could consume him. And for a moment, they were together, united by a little death178 that buried them deep below the carpet. Shrouded down beneath the ground, she imagined the salt and soil and sweat and worms, their mouths filling with tar. Shower in my blood of dead virgins, in the corpses of orphaned cubs. In that total, wet darkness, the seeds he planted deep in her gut shrivelled up and died, the red soil itself was unyielding. The fountain filled with blood beneath her skin dribbled down the side of her leg. He jerked away; his fingers coated in crimson. He stared at his palms in disgust. She laughed. Sniff my copper body, Follow the blood smell like a dog, Lick me with a lolling tongue. The rumours had been true. That I am a dirty girl dressed in white? Love me from behind your veil. She moved to the spare room across the hall. It had a bassinet and a baby mobile. Only a cold draft fluttered the white ribbons. Clear windows with white borders lined the wall. White paint peels in corners and a cream pacifier, untouched, lying on an embroidered handkerchief. Freckles on the rubber. The only evidence of life were the holes bitten into infant-sized onesies that hung from hooks - the air ached with the aroma of old moth-breath179. Such a desolate place. A place where wolves mate.180 178

French expression ‘Petite mort’ meaning the sensation of post orgasm as likened to death. Plath, S. (1660) Morning Song. Collected Poems. 180 Serbian Idiom Vukojebina meaning an out-of-the-way place. 179

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That was nine months ago. Now, the room had become a hot chamber, the womb of blood and ghosts. The door remained locked; only he had the key to this hell-gate181. The window into the field, the view of the workers and the animals, was her insight into his world. Her dark green pebble eyes surveyed the men below. As she weaved, she scanned their bodies, zooming in on their arms, legs, ears, crotches, gums, teeth, sweat… SHHH… Come on, focus. Her dead lips smiled182 at them. They wretched at the knobby knuckle skin folded on her chest; squirmed at the way her dark long hair was tangled in the buttons of her blouse, how she threaded those hairs into her tapestry. She watched their mouths whisper, conjuring in her mind the rumours being spread. The butchers, working late and early See me through the window clearly, Like a demon, glaring cheerly. With a flair for the dramatic. Beneath the moon, the butchers weary Piling the bones in lines to bury, Listening whispers, ‘Tis the fairy,183 The madwoman in the attic.’184 It was almost theatrical the way they covered their eyes, only to leave gaps between their callouses to prey on her nakedness with their gaze. They wonder whether I am a beast or a human being. They see my dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hiding my head and face.185They say I snatch and growl like some strange wild animal. I watch as they imitate me, grovelling on all fours before they leave the field to skin the next cow.

181

Shakespeare, W. (1606). Macbeth (2.3). Carter, A. (1979). The Bloody Chamber. Gollancz. 183 Tennyson, A. (1833). The Lady of Shalott. The Poetry Foundation. 184 Gilbert, Gubar. (1979). The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press. 185 Brontë, C. (1847). Jane Eyre. Harper & Brothers of New York. 182

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Every so often, she caught one of their gazes, and stared vacantly back at them. She would shriek in silence, her open lips making no sound to overpower their whispers. Silence is safe.186 THE HORROR WITHIN187 Every afternoon, he brought a package wrapped in paper and tied with a fraying string back to the house. Inside were serrated pieces of meat; lamb, beef, or whatever else had been processed that day. This was her dinner. A strict diet to be followed every meal. An old wives tale told him that if a woman eats enough meat, raw and fresh, she is bound to create a meat of her own. His mother told him this when it became apparent that he could not get his wife pregnant from his source. So, he resorted to the one nearby; the abattoir. She had not been inside the slaughterhouse yet. She knew there was an assembly line of animals, that they were split down the middle, that their bones and skin were dried out and thrown away. Still, she refused to go inside. Because the abattoir has been inside me. He wished for her womb to absorb the juices, for the wetness of the steak to soften her concrete gates that poison his seed upon entry. In her mouth, the meat would be chewed into a flaccid sac of nourishment. Inside of her, the tendons and veins would wrap around her gut, and contort it into submission. They would strangle her tubes with the strength of a swinging blade, ripping insides in two. Inside, I am already a slab of meat, pulled through the assembly line. Pieces of meat dangle from hooks around me. Exploited, tortured, and then hung out to dry. This butchering is no less painful than the sensation of his gaunt wrist clutching my neck, his chicken skin straining against his own exasperation as he shovels the meat down my throat.

186 187

Collins, W. (1859). The Woman in White. All the Year Round. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. Columbia University Press.

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In his slaughterhouse, the carcasses are made of serrated edges and bare bones. Slippery fingers press against bare tissue, leaving purple marks that mark out the butchering. So methodical, so intentional. My body goes limp, welcoming the jarring shocks of torture; the same as the slashed carcasses. The same as the meat packages. Those packages. I wretch at their stench; the stench he brings home, the blood tangled in the hair on his chin, the bits of flesh in his cleats188, his skin glowing from the ache of death. I want to sew my eyelids shut.189 He clutched her torso the way one would nurse a child. In the folds of his embrace, she melted to the ground. Her body was so frail, he willed for her to eat. To be fed190. To feed two. With two fingers, he pushes a clump of beef down my throat, severing it down the middle191. He focuses his violence with a pipette’s precision, swelling my brain against my skull, bloating my throat in the shattering violence of the process. There is no breath, only heaving. The pressure of being upside down cements my eyelids back. I cannot darken the terror in front of me; no end to the slicing, the meat smell, the explosion of red muck. A warped ringing sound pulses between my ears. It comes from the cow bell he has fastened around my neck. Saliva pooled in her mouth, there was foam between her teeth - it gathered in my hair leaving droplets of residue that stuck to her cheeks. She had almost ingested the mouthful. All the warmth from inside has left. The death smell is too close to me. The stink tells the truth about who kills and who is the victim.192 I flap around, embarrassing myself in front of other carcasses. The meat packages. Like them, I had not known my body was mapped out from the moment I was born; refuse and corpse, life and death. 188

Bates, G. (2021). In the Dreams in Which I am a Widow. The New Yorker. Ivana Bašić’s 2016 sculpture Sew my eyelids shut from others. 190 Sexton, A. (1981). The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator. The Poetry Foundation. 191 Halal meat process to remove blood from meat as it is considered Haram (unclean). 192 Holzer, J. (1979-82). Inflammatory Essays. 189

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She swallowed. Good girl. In her eyes, he saw the dying flame of life's desire, made mad because hope was gone.193 He dropped his head, nodding back and forth. It seemed to echo a prayer. We'll pray. We'll pray. We'll pray for the last time. We'll pray194. But I am fertile, there is no need to pray. My wounds reproduce themselves, the ones you planted inside of me. They breed across my flesh, feeding off the meat you give them. To them, you're a father. Let's not pray. DEEP THROAT195 He unlocked the door to her room and led her into the kitchen; the centre of family activity. He recited the contents of the space, showing her how lucky she was. A clean and efficient kitchen saves a wife countless steps in the preparation of meals for her husband. An abundance of cabinet space, a countertop, cooking units, a built-in oven, and other handy and helpful features.196 She could plan her cooking just the way she wanted it while peering off at the cattle eating their last meals. There was once a tale of bats who blinded a woman. Pinned to the roof beams, stitched up in their ammonia reek197, they watched as mosquitoes sucked out the woman’s blood throughout the night. The insects eventually became their prey, a straw to the juice. Yet at dusk, in their nocturnal drowsiness, they became hungry and restless, seeking the blood from its source. Entering through a gap in the wall, they chewed the woman's eyes out as she woke from her slumber. Her shrieks were drowned out by the unsettling sounds of chattering and chirping. It got to the point where you could no longer tell what was flowing, tears or blood. The bats were only satisfied when her eyes were hollow sockets. Then they flew away into the sunlight, their faces pinched shut, as private as dreams. I am awake in the place where women die.198

193

Coleridge, M. (1861) The Other side of the Mirror. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Carrie 1976 Soundtrack - Pino Donaggio. 195 Mona Hatoum, 1996, Deep Throat, she performs the ritual of eating while projecting an image of the inside of her body onto the surface of a dinner plate situated on a table between a fork and a knife. 196 Living the American Dream, 1950s Suburban Life from the Kinolibrary Archive Film Collections. 197 Wunderlich, M. (2020). The Bats. The New Yorker. 198 Jenny Holzer (1998) Lustmord. Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin. 84 194


Knock, knock, knock.199 She wore her pearls as though they were part of her decolletage. Pressing against her, bulbous and nurturing. I know he sees the supple white leather of my torso, exposed by the buttons of my blouse; the course of his gaze leaves a sticky residue upon me. He sits down to be delivered breakfast; to be dissolved into the sensory overload of an appetite satiated. It would be her turn in the afternoon; the meat package would wait for her. Warm milk200 is spilled across the tiled counter. I touch the skin that solidified on the surface of it and stick my finger into my mouth. It glasses over my tongue; with every harmless particle absorbed, a gagging sensation arises. My organs shrivel up and chunks of bile form in sizes I did not know were possible. I slip into confusion, clouding dizziness. The nausea is intoxicating. He melted into the angular pits of the mahogany chair, slumping with what appeared to be six jointed limbs protruding from a pot-belly and a mandible that drooled for a feast. But I am only drawn to the hoary poached egg, suffocated by vinegar and deflated over time. It is undercooked, with viscous clumps of discharges that cloy to the ceramic plate. A swollen bulge of yoke clings to a pool of thick ejaculate. It is sullied by a single black-violet clot. With the egg placed in front of him on a blue and white willow plate, he glared at his wife with disdain. This was not the breakfast he had requested; it carried the smell of her womb. My mouth splits into dryness, thirsting for the wetness of this hen’s blood. I stand beside him, one hand on his shoulder, the other clutching a moisture-laden fork. I take his face with its fine hairs, he wretches. I position his mouth and shovel the nodules of eggy mucus between his teeth. The sound of gnawing. Masticating. Devouring.

199 200

Shakespeare, W. (1606). Macbeth (2.3). Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. Columbia University Press.

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I can feel the vibrations in my earlobes; the vile gags and moans. Here is a mouth, a cavity, just bloodied by that which was once feathered. I want to touch him where he has too much hair. Where he creases like last night’s roast beef. It found its way back up to his throat. Retching between mouthfuls, he sputtered the sediment onto the plate; a vomit of sour breakfast stubbornly clinging to its own mass. The puke swaddled down his chest; greengrey with flecks of orange. She waited for him to scratch away the louse lodged between the prickles of his beard. My stomach stirs at the imagined taste of the concoction. He raptures me in the same way he humiliates himself. There is a dampening deep within me. I can feel it spreading; warm and pulsating, like soggy bread crumbs in the lace of my undies. His eyes were furrowed in a syrupy concentration of horror. He had not noticed the faint trace of blood on his chin. If only it was from him snacking on me, then we could both be full. SUMMER201 At the end of each frangipani branch, there were deep red fangs that spurted out of a green casing. He poked the end of the branch, and watched it wobble in recovery for the next minute. They were sharp and threatening, seemingly antithetical to the perfumed petals they would soon transform into. An artist here had so much to paint, to draw, to consume; the comfort of the tall leaning trees, the white wax of the flowers. But, locked up in that attic, she traced the walls with juice from the meat packages. She looked deflated from within; the hollows of her face were purple caverns that could not be filled. Her body was covered in goose pimples, like sesame seeds.

201

Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

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Like chicken knickers.202 A couple of years ago, he signed her up for a sculpture art class. They were encouraged to experiment with different mediums and processes. He had heard of one student who went so far that she never returned, driven crazy by the downward spiral of creative revelation. But his wife, in the spirit of trial and error, ordered a batch of butterfly chrysalis online. When the package arrived in the mail, the pupae was concealed in a patch of cotton bedding. They were cockroaches. Crushed and petrified. Tell them. He remembered watching how disturbed she was, overwhelmed by a sadness that could not be undercut by the curious mind of an artist. Inside that box of half-transformation, faces were pushing out of cocoons, legs sticking out into dark packaging, some bodies hard, some soft. All were captured in their temporary casing, their predestination perpetually incomplete. Tell them how I decided to lower her own body down to where the roach was lying. Any sculptural form she made appeared juiceless, and frozen, surprisingly inorganic. Realising they would never become butterflies, she felt guilty for ordering the chrysalis in the first place, for violating evolution. Tell them how I inserted the oozing drops of excretion into her mouth; how I ate that feverish white matter that spurts out of them when crushed. She should not let their fragile metamorphosis be ruptured by her conceit, for the sake of art. Tell them how my skin fell dry to the floor, and transformed into moist larva - you saw my body grow wings, and antennae in a brown casing, my belly entirely reborn and made for the ground. Tell them about the crazy artist who never came back to art class.

202

Sarah Lucas, Chicken Knickers, 1997 (an image of the artist's lower body wearing white underwear to which a chicken has been attached, its rear orifice in the position of her vulva).

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Tell them it was me. He suggested she paint some pretty pictures, and stay away from those otherworldly creatures. She was only hurting them and herself. Instead, she could decorate the new house; make it just the way she liked. I have the urge to spew cockroaches all over your body. MEAT JOY203 He stooped slightly as he thrust the beef at his wife’s face, backing her against the wall of her room. She was so frail now that she crumbled to the ground under his force. She did not open her mouth, for fear of the meat finding its way in. He touched her shoulder, so affectionately and tenderly, it almost brought him to tears. This husbandly care, this desire to provide sustenance for his wife; he imagined it would have made his mother proud. He mashed the beef into a pulp on his wife’s lips, parting them with the force of a swinging blade. Her clenched teeth released an animal cry of distress. He did not know what it meant. Around the back of the slaughterhouse, there is a wastage pool. A festering puddle of decomposing flesh. I taste it in the air, feel it in my ears. He had not listened to my pleas to leave this death space. Those flexed jaws; these lolling tongues; the rime of saliva. All I hear are the calling cries between the undulations of that pool. I cannot tell if I am pulled in or if I jump in. It does not matter. The flashing eyes, the floating hair. I want to weave a circle around them and close my eyes with holy dread. But I had already fed on their bodies and drunk the toxic milk of Paradise.204 The ghosts swim in my eyes, crawl under my ribs. The blood, the char; they lodge themselves inside of me. Tufts of fur and hair and lashes strangle the tendons between my bones. Hogtied from within, they wrap bows on my teeth, turn my saliva thick with red205.

203

Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy, 1964, kinetic theater performance where eight naked figures (men and women) crawl around raw fish, raw poultry, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, scraps of paper, and one another. 204 Coleridge, S. (1816). Kubla Khan. Christabel. 205 Date, T. (2021). What Angels Eat. The New Yorker. 88


But my skin stays on. I absorb the pollutants, the ghosts, the blood; I mother the orphans, corporealise the souls. Their vibrating shrieks morph into whimpers, a noise so soft it tickles the lining of my gut. The swamp settles, purified of its effluent. Now within, the ghosts wrap themselves into me; they blacken my hair, thicken it. My arm hairs, once a soft layer of fluff, grow rough and coarse; the same as a cow's fleece. I cannot forget the hair; the undying effluent fur. His pained expression begged why she had stopped eating. I bleed the carcasses you eat. Why? Why? I am the carcass. You will eat me. Whywhywhy? I had a dream206. AUTUMN207 The wind was loud against the window208

I think about the blood smell

She walked to the fridge for plums

and smelt the blood smell

She mixed the cake batter in a bowl

where there is a blood smell

She placed the mixture into the oven

I taste the blood smell

She wove red and blue thread on a stool

tying in the blood smell

She got up to pee

while the blood smell burns

Hot smoke filled the kitchen

I see the blood smell

She dusted the plum cake in sugar

The blood smell is alive.

She ate a slice in the shape of a small triangle.

I smell of the blood smell.

206

Kang, H. (2007). The Vegetarian. Changbi Publishers. Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 208 Oberman, M. (2021). The Wind is Loud. The New Yorker. 207

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THE IMPROPER209 When the bleeding first started, she tried hard to stay clean, to disguise the menace of her flow. But when he found the blood-soaked sheets and stained clothes on laundry lines, he whispered stories of fear and pain into her ear. There was once an old woman who retained her youth and beauty by sucking the vigour from young girls’ menstrual blood. The promise of fertility and adolescence, the thrill of the first clot in a menarche. But when she could not find any blood-soaked pads to lick, she withered to an old woman, and died, living only as the myth of the Beautiful vampire.210 That story was enough to scare her into a bath211; to strip off her contaminated layers of age and infection - the stench of infertility. The smell – that red smell... it gets into my hair. It gets into my fingernails, underneath the dried flakes of skin that encrust them from endless gnawing. Blood in my mouth, blood in my ears. I am drenched in the stench of pennies, slippery and sodden. I spend hours in the water trying to get it out. My skin moulds into the lobed fleshiness of a picked baby – it is as though I am turned inside out and plopped whole onto a plate, like fish guts into a pan. Still alive, I am passed around by instant connoisseurs who could only admire the odour of my bloated intestines. I would be delectable; my ribs sucked dry, wiped clean. With the soap in her hand, she rotated back and forth slowly, upward and downward. Back and forth, round, up and down, back, forth, round, up and down … she was shedding, renewing. This water was her nourishment; it could feed her until she was bloated and full. She felt for the damp spots on the ceramic, heavy with the remnants of his body. His fluids. His discharge. They kissed her with spit bubbles of cleanser, leaving a soapy residue across her flesh. His kisses are blood-sucking leeches that gnaw at every one of my crevices. There are no faces, no bodies, no skin - only anonymous draining. Perhaps, she could be happy after all, rid of this wound by his kisses.

209

Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. Columbia University Press. Kenealy, A. (1896). The Beautiful vampire. Fantasy and Horror Classics. 211 Mikvah cleansing ritual in the Jewish tradition. 210

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They slurp at the lumps and elastic clots that float in the water, until they writhe inside the gash of my crotch; the space between my thighs that culls fanged roses212 Blood ribbons out of my limbs, my cheeks, a watercolour of red ink213. In the spores of my skin, they harbour crimson meals. Sucking on my nipples, swallowing my eyes. Insatiable in their indulgence. I imagine the taste of blood and meat and flesh and char in their mouths, on their black breath - I am glad I can be of use to them. It is almost a beautiful sight - a red painting of pus and blood. She crawled out of the bath and stared at her naked reflection. My cheeks are slack, my skin green. It feels as though he has taken steel wool to my gut from the inside. The bathwater oozes in a pool of crimson, the moon spilling in. I stand on the dress, crumpled underneath my feet, and empty my bladder on it, aiming for the red spots. She was cleansed. Purified. Vestal. Born into darkness, the red gurgles in the cave opening inside of me. It is gathering, pooling. My tongue pulsates, swollen in the sickening blend of blood and ghosts, hair and fleas - a fragrance diffused throughout the house. The fragrance of my womb. With slippery eyes, I twist the thread of the meat package. It is licked with the grime of my unseeded corpses. I tug it through my needles, and weave and weave and weave.

WINTER214

212

Creed, B. (1968). Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection (Vagina Dentata). Screen. Volume 27. Cixous, H. (1976.) The Laugh of the Medusa. The University of Chicago Press. 214 Morrison, T. (1970). The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 213

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It was a dark and moonless night. He laid in their bed alone. Beside him, there was a hardcover bedtime story, an old tale he had reserved only for the ears of his offspring. Even he hadn't read it yet. The colours were faded and images stained - occasionally being used as a coaster - but the words remained as clear and touching as they were at their conception. The story told of a husband and wife that were once killed by wolves. Their bodies were found ripped apart and strewn across their isolated cabin. Years later, neighbours claimed to see their daughter resting in the rushes along a riverbank, suckling two wolf cubs that gnawed at her breasts until they were bloodied and sore. But the daughter did not seem to mind, because they were hers and only hers. She had found a sanctuary in their muzzles, a peace that did not exist anywhere else. Let me tell a different story. The orphaned daughter ran naked with the wolf pack, wild and feral; a lost cause. Her sequined eyes reflected the moonlight, tricking farmers into luring their chickens to her glow, where she tore the birds apart in an explosion of feathers. The carnivore incarnate.215 This version is better. She stood alone in the nursery. The studio had white walls, a white canvas. The taste of meat was hot on her breath, and for a moment, it was comforting, as though a craving had been satiated. Perhaps, there really was a meat inside of her, more than just the constant churning of slaughter. A maternity that would mean bliss for her body, a silence to the souls. There is a sac lodged in my gut – it is the meat package. It grows inside of me, leeches off my frail flesh. My body contorts in agonising ways to expel it. Organs shrivel up within. My ribcage expands, it balloons in a compulsive pressure to thrust my gut down again. Bile in my mouth, tears under my eyelids. I am drenched in the stench of my own repugnance, slippery and sodden. Between the shattering violence of each convulsion, there is a simplicity to the hurling. I gag on threads lodged in green-grey phlegm and decorate the canvas in front of me with a puddle of acid reflux. In the retching that thrusts me forward, I give birth to my medium. To my portrait. To myself. 215

Carter, A. (1979). The Company of Wolves, The Bloody Chamber. Gollancz.

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‘Rennet on canvas.’ OUT OF ROT, INTO ROT He refused to enter her room. You refuse to enter my womb. He feared that, if he did, he would grow a rash216, the same as the one that grew on him as a child because his diaper was always dry. Swollen bumps plagued his thighs, flaking at the touch. He would writhe in the pain, but could not scratch it, incapable of satiating the anguish. Never relieved by empty bowels, he held in the defecate. He needed the heaviness of a crowning, a refusal to surrender to the barren pleasure of release, of wetness. If he had been lavish with his excrement, it never would have stopped. He would have been stunted in a void of an endless purge. And so, the dryness of the diaper rubbed him red, rubbed him clean. He would have always held it in for the sake of being clean. A chamber of stained-glass windows. A confessional. Don't make me forget the foetuses in street gutters. I summon the ghosts of orphaned animals. They are coming, coming.217 Surging through my veins, ripping out of my linings. I push them out. I birth the red muck in clots, tearing at my insides. This room, so small and dark, was becoming a cave. Secret and public. Full and empty. I weave, threading the blood into the web. I weave, pulling out clumps of souls and spreading them across the white walls with my fingers. I weave, painting tombstones218 that hide me in a brown cave of blood and mucus. A crimson aura. A reek of blood.

216

Zeitner, R. (2008). A case of Sadomasochistic Transference: The Analysts Contributions to Perverse Enactments. The Psychoanalytic quarterly. 217 Doshi, T. (2017) Girls are Coming out of the Woods. The Poetry Foundation. 218 Mehwish Iqbal, TOMBSTONES, 2018, Silk screen, collagraph, etching and embroidery (7 works).

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Each smear becomes more tangled, the smell more potent, my mind more unbound. I mould clots into flowers on porcelain jars and paint the wallpaper in layers of grime. Everything is red. Rippled. The lining of a hollowed-out woman. It is so hot between these haunted walls. I could paint them until I am dry. The door was slightly ajar. She glared at the glowing opening until her eyes met his. A thin strip of dewy spit coated his lips, perspiring in frustration. His lips ooze with piss-yellow puss. I smell his anxiety. There is a tremor in my gut. It is stirring, it is hunger. I want to bleed. I want to bleed with him. Distorted by the fractured light, she cradled her belly. I know this will lead him to me. His eyes became soft and sombre, as he whispered in pleads of paternal ache. I pull him down the mouth of darkness219, into my menstruating vessel of dead life. Inside of her, it was murky and wet. The room was the same. Rays passed back and forth as their bodies moved, back and forth, back and forth.220 He seemed impoverished, engorged by the sensation of lying in

219 220

Plath, S. (1963). The Bell Jar. Heinemann. Bukowski, C. (1977). Love is a Dog From Hell: The 6-foot Goddess. HarperCollins Publishers.

94


somebody else's blood. All of his edges were sharpened. Fingers, tongue, gaze; all weapons made to puncture her, to gouge her out until she is bruised and hollow. But where he is round, that bloodied cock, I am safe. It is smeared with my blood. He tastes it, drinks it. He wrings out my body, like a sponge. I am gutted. What remains is my hollow womb, rotting, and spreading through the walls in a violent insistence. Outside, the cottage was all silent, all still. But inside, he was trapped, her foot lodged in the door of his freedom. No longer could the knock, knock, knock221 bring him breakfast. No longer could he tap on the gates of her unseeded uterus. No longer could he fertilise her molten core with his limp meat. He is mutilated by the abattoir inside of my stomach. My bowels stun him, skin him, tear him where he hurts most, in the place he gives life. I have no control over the process, no way to satiate his screams. Instead, I slaughter him in the same way he butchered those animals, in the same way ordered the deaths of the ghosts he now absorbs. She had woven him into her womb. CASTING OFF THE WOMB222 Somewhere far, far, away, on an isolated field, there is an abattoir. Next to this abattoir, is a cottage, where a husband and wife once lived. Years ago, it overlooked the grazing animals, with an endless view of bush and nature. The woman was an artist, who painted picturesque landscapes and the occasional self-portrait, constantly catching the men that worked below her studio in long gazes at her beauty.

221

Shakespeare, W. (1606). Macbeth (2.3). Casey Jenkin, Casting Off My Womb,’ a 28 day durational artwork in which she knitted a 15m long passage from yarn inserted daily in their vagina to mark one full menstrual cycle. 222

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I want drops of blood to be ink on my canvas, drawing out the image of destiny from the twists and movements of my palm. I want to dance in a puddle of my oozing sores, to burn threads in flames of anger. I want ropes on the back of my hands I can strangle with.223 Her husband, the Supervisor of the abattoir, was a successful businessman, with care and precision unheard of in his occupation. Every day, he took home meat packages home for his wife; a fresh and nutritious meal for a potentially blossoming mother. In the corner of my room, he is naked and crunched into a ball. He waits to be fed, to be told to sleep. Puerile, and sedated, he cries as I weave and paint and play; his empty howls carrying the pain of a whining baby. Together, we are locked behind a Red Door,224 in an endless cycle of half-moons, a gut of living death and of dead life225. But now, the cottage is overgrown with ferns, and climbing roses, and ivy, that obscures any window, any line of sight, into that house. Only the shadow of her moving body is visible through the trees. I am infatuated by the ribbed outer coating of the red nursery walls. The menses, released from the tidal basin suspended between my hips,226 are strewn across the bassinet, the onesies, the pacifier. I am in awe of the ever-replenishing paint. She is redecorating. There are stains in deranged swirls as if the hands of demons are pressing through the wallpaper. A scarlet colour, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifice. Some say she killed her husband, and now plays dress-up with his corpse. Others say the figure in the window is the child of the long-dead couple, whose ghosts still haunt the house. Either way, it is known that the wife became insane, born unbalanced by the thread of a madwoman.

223

Duffy, C. (1993). Havisham. Mean Time. Chiharu Shiota, Red Door, 2013, Oil and watercolor on paper, 15 7/10 × 11 4/5 in, 40 × 30 cm. 225 Cardinal, M. (1975) Les Mots pour le dire (The Words to say it). Van Vactor & Goodheart. 226 Lorde, A. (1982). Zami, A New Spelling of my Name. Persephone Press. 224

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I weave myself together with hair strands pulled out of my shower drain and the threads of meat packages, tying myself to the taut tendons of severed necks and the tufts of floating fur. There are industrial stamp markings of pigskin, and ribs with ivory scars etched into them. Watercolours in my veins blend into a thick gel. I paint on canvas with blood of different colours and scents; tea, strawberry syrup, acid, and jelly. Woven into my flesh are faeces and tears and grass and the trimmings of matted fur. I am a tapestry of souls, a thread of abject monstrosity. She was not the first to find it sewn through her. I am not the last. 227 Nobody knew for sure what happened inside of that cottage. Nobody knew why the couple disappeared or for what reason the house remains abandoned to this day. Regardless, there is no need to worry, for it was somewhere far, far, away.

227

Groff, L. (2021) The Wind. The New Yorker.

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Francesca Herro: Mummy Dearest: The Ubiquitous Grotesquerie of the Maternal Body Inspired by my fascination with Medusa's ‘abject and grotesque’ maternal body, my ficto-critical represents my pilgrimage throughout the western canon, exploring literature’s representations (which I refer to as a simulacrum) of haunting and liminal pregnant forms forced to incubate masculine evil within the womb, omitting patriarchal violence from the literary gaze. Particularly interested in two works that stand at the juncture of the countercultural revolution, Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby” (1967) and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye'' (1970), I interrogate the extent to which these works use the ‘monstrous maternal’ either as an expression of resistance, or an ironic perpetuation of traditional patriarchal values. My Accidental Pilgrimage: A Looming Traveller Midway along my journey, I had stumbled off the path. Frightened of being alone in so dismal a valley,228 I wandered into the shrine of Minerva. There he was, another of Ovid’s lascivious men lying naked on a bed of spring flowers, his pale arms planted stiffly on the gorgon’s stomach. Athena, warrior goddess of war, screened her virginal eyes with her aegis229, a seemingly tender gesture with morbid justification; she must not be aroused by the situation. The story continues; Medusa, inseminated by the divine seed of her rapist nurtured it wearily, her marble beauty fatiguing as the bulbous mass of flesh inside her slowly expanded. Her long hair twisted into writhing snakes nestled tightly into her scalp. Her worshipped body became mutant and engorged. Her tongue, once soft and pink, now lolled a poisonous grey between her fanged teeth. Too ugly to look at, the gorgon was banished, quietly slipping away into the trackless woods. I followed her inside; intrigued by the towering alien trees that shook out dry leaves and seedless ferns onto barren ground. And there I watched Perseus, a valorous traveller; evading the dry tangle of branches, unflinchingly stepping over the jagged stone portraits of men that had stared too long. Creeping up behind the monster, he briskly seized tufts of her snakes with his fist, striking her in the chest with his sword. Two 228

Dante Alighieri and Thomas William Parsons, The First Canticle, Inferno of the Divine Comedy, G.P. Putnam And Son, (1867). 229 A shield or breastplate emblematic of majesty that was associated with Zeus and Athena 98


of her offsprings emerged from her decapitated neck; “The great immortals grateful Perseus prais'd, And to three Pow'rs three turfy altars rais'd.”230 I tried to retreat, but the oily dark bodies of Medusa’s snakes clung to my shoes as I frantically stepped through the sordid mixture of placenta and blood. Drawing closer to me, the deafening echoes of girls lolloped off disconsolately between the towering trees.231 There were more bodies like hers, branded with a multitude of scars.232 The Shackles of Writhing Snakes: An Introduction Deftly slipping in and out of the generic limits of the classical myth, I find the writhing snakes that bound Medusa to her fatal narrative seamlessly inserted through the canon. Her trajectory: rape, grotesque pregnancy and violent birth has proliferated through a Baudrillardian process of simulacra233, reproducing images of an impure and corrupt female body. Within this complex matrix of referral and imitation entrenched within the literary imagination, the womb exists as a metonym for the manifestation of evil; a tabula rasa for the permeation, incubation, and exorcism of male violence. As passive, empty vessels for the exploitative purposes of male atonement, it is the women’s role and expectation to ameliorate that evil, martyring themselves for the ethical function of society and its new generations. As I move through the canon, in and out of Chaucer's bawdy folklore, Milton’s melodic blank verse, Dickens’s exaggerated grotesquerie, and across the Atlantic to Hawthorne’s ornate prose, I find myself pausing at the juncture of the counter-cultural revolution, among the emergence of critical race theory and second-wave feminism. Here I find the trajectory again in Ira Levin's Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). Is it possible that the radically changing literary landscape can both use and break the steady simulacra, challenging these stable phallocentric images of female bodies?

230

Ovid and Rolfe Humphries, Metamorphoses, vol. 4 (1971). Angela Carter, Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Vintage Classics, (2020). 232 Tishani Doshi, Girls Are Coming out of the Woods, Copper Canyon Press, (2018). 233 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, The University Of Michigan Press, (1994). Jean Baudrillard in his philosophical treatise ‘Simulacra and Simulation,’ defines the term as significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, ‘the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence are rendered legible.’ Indeed where the theory ordinarily is applied to visual signifiers and symbols that are reproduced as a result of the late 20th century, defined by emerging technologies and consumerist culture, I find it is an apt framework for interrogating the inherently artificial monstrous female archetypes that have proliferated throughout the literary canon. 231

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Reading Levin’s novel, I remain ambivalent. Although criticising the patriarchal power relations that operate in and through the private spaces of domestic homes and relationships, Rosemary’s rape is diluted through a poetic euphemism that omits representation of male violence. Thereby the female form becomes the focaliser through which this violence is given significant literary representation, the grotesque corporal state a metonym for the incubation of society’s evil. Interestingly, just like Medusa’s consciousness is decapitated in order for her children to flourish, Rosemary’s birth neutralises his potential feminist commentary, becoming the vehicle through which, the lineage of male violence continues. Perhaps then it is Morrison’s proto-intersectional work that breaks the cycle of this simulacrum, emancipating her female protagonist Pecola from this trajectory. Where her rape carries intertextual echoes of Milton’s Satan, Morrison denies her audience the comfortability of euphemism, locating the source of Pecola’s rape within white supremacist tradition and the insidious exploitation within the intra-racial hierarchy. Revising the literary tradition of a woman's womb fertilised by masculine evil, Morrison refuses to allow this aesthetic monstrosity to foment in the way her protagonist is perceived, rather averting our gaze onto the external horrors of an insidious culture of racial superiority. Ultimately, where Pecola gives birth to death, this acts as an ambivalent symbol that evokes both pathos and hope, severing the perpetual cycle of insidious violence that she sees as bound to the black female experience. At the end of my journey, I will come to the conclusion that literature has an unending potential to challenge stable phallocentric images of female bodies with the unique ability to construct multiplicitous voices within their narrative. Where Rosemary’s body is relegated to a site of abject monstrosity, Morrison propels her work into an intersectional sphere, revealing the grotesque patriarchal and white supremacist values that lie at the core of the simulacrum. America’s Pivoting Consciousness: A Preamble to Context The late 1960s saw a period of great change that swept across America, the turbulence of the postmodern movement, calling into question dominant patriarchal and white supremacist values within literary texts, tracing them back to stable origins of power and hierarchy. Levin’s novel emerges out of the second-wave feminist movement, with a discourse that sought to emphasise plurality and sexual difference,234 piercing through the horrors of institutional sexism that

234

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory : An Introduction (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, (2008). 100


shackled women to stifling narratives of domesticity. Influenced by emerging feminist theorists Betty Freidan, and Carol Hanish, his work echoes the sentiments of the feminist slogan “The Personal is Political”235 to interrogate the misogynistic power relations that operate inside the private spaces of the home, relationships, and the bodies and psyches of individuals. Questioning with poignant insight, “There are plots against people, aren’t there?” Rosemary metafictively foreshadows the novel’s baroque trajectory and deterioration. Karyn Valerius, who views Levin’s utilisation of the Gothic as “a generic spin that transforms the lovely into the abhorrent...disrupting dominant representations of femininity,”236 views his appropriation of “female paranoia” as a model for feminist theorising, interrogating the exploitation that occurs within Rosemary’s intimate relationships, the domestic sphere “less a sanctuary which is violated, than a trap which ensnares her.”237 Applying this logic, through her anagnorisis, “this is no dream, it's a reality,” Levin uses Rosemary as a mouthpiece, to assert the reality of monogamous Christian relationships, her paranoia illuminating to readers the similarities between the quotidian experience for women and the fantasy that Levin constructs. The central image that foregrounds the expectation of matrimony in, “Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse had signed the lease on a five-room apartment,” is undercut by a looming gothic aesthetic, the “Bramford, old black and elephantine...prized for their fireplaces and Victorian detail.” The “nursery” which is decorated in ‘white and yellow wallpaper... clean and fresh’ pays homage to Charlotte Perkins Stetson’s short story “Yellow Wallpaper”,238 solidifying the room as the locus of Rosemary’s disempowerment and gaslighting. Alternatively, responding to the growing civil rights movement, Morrison criticised the racial disempowerment perpetuated through the projected American image of the ideal, white nuclear family. Writing among a generation of black feminist academics (such as Audre Lorde and Angela Davis), she reveals a specific form of patriarchal abuse - a misogynoir 239 - that forces I am aware about the contention around this term, whilst I am using the metalanguage of a second wave feminist, this language undeniably has been debated and revised by intersectional queer theorists. When I use the term *women, it's not an all encompassing experience. 235 Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, 1970. 236 Karyn Valerius, ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects, College Literature 32, no. 3 (2005) 237 Lucy Fischer, Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’’ Cinema Journal 257, no. 1 (1992). 238 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, The New England Magazine, (1892). 239 The term Mysoginoir was coined by queer black feminist Moya Bailey, who created the term to address both an historical anti-Black misogyny and a problematic intra-racial gender dynamic that had wider implications in popular culture. Misogynoir can come from Black men, white men and women, and even other Black women. It was initially used to discuss intersectional disempowerment toward black women in popular culture, and has been applied to Beyonce and Meghan Thee Stallion’s experiences of intra-racial sexism in the music industry. 101


black women to contend with an intra-racial hierarchy forged out of internalised white supremacy.240 Setting out a two-dimensional scene of white suburbia in the primer text, Morrison foregrounds the systemic racism that structures and defines Pecola’s world. Laying bare the syntax of static isolation at the center of our cultural texts, Morrison recite:241 “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here the family, Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat. It goes meowmeow…” In the style of the Dick and Jane series, her robotic tone speaks to the aggressive erasure of black bodies by hegemonic portraits of White America. Reversing the conventional horror trope that imagines “the threatening monster” as an encroachment on white normativity,242 her sardonic quality “who will play with Jane?...Daddy will play with jane” sinisterly foreshadows the creation of insidious sexual violence within this locus of white prosperity. Inverting its grammatical structures and hence the paradigms it seems to establish, “Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhite,” Morrison moves through chiasmus, eroding the coherent and monolithic American dream narrative. Her statement of inquiry; “There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how,” prefaces the framework that incites community responsibility and an interrogation of the oppressive systems and values in place that foreground Pecola’s subjection to racial violence.243 The Satanic Conception: A Canonical Rape And the bodies were coming closer, I could feel it. Shifting behind towering trees, I was thrust behind the thick foliage and into the bawdy tales of Chaucer. A disgruntled corn farmer crept into the Miller's daughter's bed as she was sleeping, the light hum of her snores triggering a jolt of excitement She couldn’t “make a fuss.” Lying with her, or on her, she only awoke to the slow lag of

240

A hierarchy within the black community Shelley Wong, Transgression as Poesis in the Bluest Eye, Callaloo 13, no. 3 (1990), p 471 242 Ryan Poll, “Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 51, no. 2 (2018), p, 69–102. 243 Gabriela Salazar, “Reading Toni Morrison: Rethinking Race and Subjectivity with Giorgio Agamben and Joan Copjec,” University of Vermont, (2017). 241

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his breath on her face. Four times they “were one”,244 we are told. Four times she was forced upon, we are not told. When it was over, she began to weep. The cold, absent space beside her congealing a pang of loneliness and disappointment; doesn’t every woman adore a brute?245 The process of simulacrum which proliferates representations of women as the passive incubators for male evil is maintained by the euphemisms that surround patriarchal violence.246 Because of the way the male gaze operates it is held steadfastly upon the female form, therefore omitting masculine violence from Levin’s socio-cultural critique. He attempts to use the setting of a ritualistic ceremony, satirising the supernatural to better represent the quotidian experience for women in monogamous, heteronormative matrimony. Where her rape is both ritual and spectacle, “a thin black wand...drawing designs’ on her stomach - her body turning into a kind of relic or artifact,” Levin aestheticises the female ‘designated coital sexual position’ as passive and undemanding as a source of horror. The coven members whom initially intervene in the rape, mimic traditional Christian bedding practices occurring during consummation,247 “The women grotesque and slack breasted… were chanting - a flat, unmusical, foreign tongued syllable,” drawing attention to the stifling religious moral codes synonymous with procreation, that serve the production of dogmatic ideology. However, where Lenin privileges a gothic, lyrical aesthetic as a mode for representation of sexual trauma, his visualisation of the rape invites a scopophilic gaze248 omitting the violence from Guy’s action’s, erasing any accountability. Where Guy is described with, “hands hot, sharp nailed, yellow furnaced eyes, and smell[ing] of Sulphur,” the emphasis on sensory imagery that intensifies his zoomorphic representation has resonances with the salacious, pagan ‘Pan’ recognised within Olympian consciousness for his human impulse and sexuality.249 As Guy repeats “exciting strokes, pushing his wonderfully big” phallus into the

244

Geoffrey Chaucer and Sheila Fisher, “The Canterbury Tales, The Reeve’s Tale,” W. W. Norton & Company, (1392). 245 Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” Poetry Foundation (1960) 246 Holly Hendersont, “Feminism, Foucault, and Rape: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, (1989). 247 The act of bedding on the wedding night was not considered a private affair, but rather a public investment in a couple. It was common for families and friends to bring the couple to their bed as a way of endorsing the couple’s marriage. 248 Bidisha Banerjee, “Defiance and the Speakability of Rape: Decolonizing Trauma Studies in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Fiction,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, (2020) 249 H.B Gardner, “Devil in the Details,” Devil In The Details, (2020) 103


semi-conscious Rosemary, Levin dilutes and complicates the representation of male violence, positioning the audience to witness and admire his masculine virility. Instead, Levin casts Rosemary through a deeply entrenched notion of the beguiling seductress, uncomfortably blurring the lines of consent and violation. Employing a euphemistic quality, “He stroked her with both hands - [the] long relishing stroke… [becoming] a tickling between her legs,” her body acts as a tabula rasa, awoken and sexually oriented according to the implanted masculine seed. Her consciousness reaches sentience, not through experience or cognitive development, but as the muse, within the masculine expression projected upon her. Hence, casting her orgasms as consensual lust, Rosemary puts on a beguiling facade of modesty and humility, to disguise her intrinsic erotic desires; “‘Yes,’ Rosemary said. ‘That’s why I didn’t come to see you.’ She spoke sadly, so he wouldn't suspect she had just had an orgasm.” Ironically avoiding rape as a “communicable discursive object,”250 Levin views her “sadness” as a performance of the weeping Madonna in concealment of her “unfeminine” sexual awakening; omitting patriarchal accountability from Guy, he instead reproduces the monstrous simulacrum. The Satanic Conception: A Force for Resistance Trying to turn away from the violation before me, I stumbled, falling weightlessly down into Milton’s bottomless hellscape. In front of me was a woman violently embraced by her father, the howls and ceaseless gnawing echoing off the greasy black trunks. Ah! to describe how horrific251 Inflamed with both lust and rage, the immaculate sheen of her skin aroused him, with every jolt, his eyes shone like terrible sequins stitched onto burnished globes. Alternatively, through disposing of historical euphemisms that dilute the monstrosity of patriarchal violence, Pecola’s pain and suffering is made visceral, shattering the audience’s voyeuristic gaze. Prompting us to observe the power structures that facilitate sexual trauma,252 Morrison uses the overt ‘speakability of the female body’ as a powerful force of resistance.253

250

Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish, The Body of the Condemned,” A division of Random House, Inc, (1975). Dante Alighieri and Thomas William Parsons, The First Canticle, Inferno of the Divine Comedy, G.P. Putnam And Son, (1867). 252 Holly Hendersont, Feminism, Foucault, and Rape: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, (1989). 253 Bidisha Banerjee, Defiance and the Speakability of Rape: Decolonizing Trauma Studies in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Fiction, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, (2020) 104 251


We are initially exposed to Cholly’s childhood violation, “The flashlight man lifted his gun down from his shoulder, and [he] heard the clop of metal,” acting as a mimesis of the violent origins of the American national identity. Exhibiting the overwhelming power that the white hegemony wields in its relentless obliteration of black subjectivity and personhood, she employs an oxymoron, “With a violence of total helplessness, he pulled her dress up and lowered his trousers and underwear...[he] wanted to strangle her; but instead he touched her leg with his foot,” revealing a simultaneous lust and hatred born from the projection of black impotence and failure. The deafening and intrusive oral sounds of the white men “Hee hee heeeeee,” encroaching on his black masculinity254 catalyse his separation from the world of generative time, the trauma resulting in the seeming tyranny of quotidian repetition. Using resonances of Milton’s ‘Satan’ who violates his daughter ‘Death,’ Morrison translates the incest taboo and simultaneous ‘lust and rage’ that is present in Milton’s language (“though more, it seems, Inflam'd with lust than rage”)255 into an intersectional context. As Cholly advances to rape Pecola, her “shocked body” surprising him from the miasma of “the sheer weight” of his invariable marriage. Catalysing a “confused mixture” of his memories of his first encounter with Pauline and his hatred for Darlene, “he wanted to strangle her,” Pecola's “shocked body” arouses him, enabling him to access a time prior to the violent narrative beginnings which froze his bodily imagination. Thus, while trying to break from his repetitive diurnal existence through “a wild and forbidden thing,” Cholly perpetuates the cycle of violence, indicating that the transference of his own exploitation causes him a perverse pleasure. Indeed, Morrison illuminates an intra-racial hierarchy that manifests internalised racism in a woman’s body, rape acting as a breach with the world that has attributed irrevocable “ugliness” to her blackness.256 The juxtaposition between our hyper-awareness of the brutality of her rape and the complete disappearance of Pecola’s voice, “she was lying on the kitchen floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her,” inverts Levin’s masculine ‘insemination of Rosemary’s sexual awakening’ rather revealing trauma to erase one’s spiritual and sexual consciousness. Here, Morrison foregrounds the impossibility for a child to understand the power structures that facilitate their grotesque exploitation, putting the onus onto her audience to hold the monstrously hierarchical culture accountable for their permeation of gendered violence.

254

Bell Hooks, “Feminist Movement to End Violence,” Taylor and Francis Group, Inc, (2014). John Milton, Paradise Lost, Google Books, (1667). 256 Ramona Hyman, “Pecola Breedlove: The Sacrificial Iconoclast in the ‘Bluest Eye,’ CLA Journal, (2009). 255

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Splitting Cells and Stretching Tissues: Monstrous Pregnancy257

Distancing myself from that restless beast, I attempt another path only to find myself submerged under the thickened smokey fog of Dicken’s prose, blushing at the senile and indelicate hag, Mrs Gamp,258 that stood in front of me. Shrouded in heavy clothing that blazons doubleness,259 her enormous abdomen propelled outside of her voluminous rags, her swollen face like the fleshy tissue of the inside of a plum. At the core of Lenin’s nescience is his misogynistic representation of Rosemary’s pregnant body as a site of impurity and corruption. The symbolism of Rosemary's grotesque corporeal state suggests that maternal bodies are the incubators for society’s patriarchal violence, problematising Levin’s critical intentions in its omission of the source of evil. The emphasis on Rosemary’s unrestrained desire and culinary defilement through the visceral, vampiric imagery, links the pregnancy to “temporary misrule and chaos,”260 hence casting the maternal body as in a state of flux and insatiability. “Rosemary found herself chewing on a raw and dropping chicken heart...She looked at herself in the side of the toaster, where her moving reflection had caught her, and then looked at her hand, at the part of the heart she hadn't eaten held in red-dripping fingers.” If we cast our minds back to Levin’s representation of Rosemary’s rape, again Levin emphasises the feminine unquenchable appetite, awoken and oriented according to the masculine seed which has been implanted in her. If we contrast this to Guy’s representation who is seemingly invisible within the narrative trajectory (“Guy was doing the Pall Mall Commercial”) Levin’s incubation of masculine violence exists undeniably within the grotesque maternal form, omitted entirely from the patriarchal source.

257

Julia Kristeva, “Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection,” Columbia University Press, (1982). Charles Dickens, “The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit,” Digireads Com, (1844). 259 Cynthia Malone, “Near Confinement: Pregnant Women in the Nineteenth-Century near Confinement: Pregnant Women in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel British Novel,” College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, 2000. 260 Renate Lachmann, “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture,” University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 106 258


Additionally, recalling etymological origins of teratogenesis,261 where the non-normative pregnant body is dangerous in its liminality and supposed impunity, Rosemary’s “metamorphosis,”262 which takes place once her pregnancy is established minimises her femininity and thus sexual appeal. Where Studelska interprets a German word for this state - ‘Zwischen263’ - which translates to 'between', while her changing body and maternity dresses signify sexual difference, she changes her hair to a “boyish pixie cut” and loses weight (Guy says; you look terrible… You’ve lost God-knows-how-many pounds), relinquishing her ‘Madonna perfection,’ plummeting into desexualized androgyny. Applying Kristeva’s notion of ‘abjection,’ Rosemary's maternity is horrific because it represents the feminine body in its most terrifying form: “that which does not respect borders, positions, rules”.264 Where she says to Guy, “you haven’t been looking at me”, Rosemary serves as an ambiguous figure of motherhood, defying the surface cues of femininity, rather becoming an abject site of incoherence, incongruous with the societal structures that demand gendered aesthetic cues.265 Seeing this ambivalence as a physical impediment, unable to carry out the dutiful maternal roles of an archetypal feminine women, her monstrosity is perpetuated through sickness, “The pain grew worse, grew so grinding that something shut down,” the visceral imagery echoing the sentiments of a society that perceives pregnancy as a physical impediment. Thus, existing in an ambivalent space, menaced but menacing, domestic and yet alien to the normative family struc-ture, Levin positions Rosemary as a a powerless incubator of masculine evil, obfuscating its patriarchal core with the simulacrum of the monstrous maternal body. Fortified Institutions: The Monstrous Society Behind Mrs Gamp is a more sophisticated, slighter woman, her swollen stomach incongruous with her small hands placed delicately over it. Clarissa266 was standing benumbed in the blackish

261

The process by which congenital malformations are produced in an embryo or fetus. This is a quote by Walter Evans but retrieved from: Lucy Fischer, “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’’ Cinema Journal 257, no. 1 (1992). Metamorphosis is central to horror where the key to monster movies is mysterious psychological and physical change directly associated with “secondary sexual characteristics.” 263 Jana Studelska, “The Last Days of Pregnancy: A Place of In-Between,” Mothering Forum, (2018). 264 Julia Kristeva, Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. Columbia University Press, (1982) 265 Andrew Scahill, “Deviled Eggs: Teratogenesis and the Gynecological Gothic in the Cinema of Monstrous Birth, University of Colorado, (2018). 266 Samuel Richardson, “Clarissa: Or, the History of a Young Lady,” Houghton Mifflin Pub, (1747). 262

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marsh, the thick, motionless water sullying her bourgeois drapery.267 With every stride she drove me slowly backwards. Her potted womb descending down where no Sun illume.268 In “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison refuses to incubate society's evil’s in Pecola’s body, rather highlighting her pregnancy as incongruous with her youth and vulnerability. Foregrounding the state of pregnancy as heightening Pecola’s vulnerability, forcing her to contend with a body that is doubly disorderly and nonnormative. We get small insights into her corporal form as she draws our attention to the distortion of a young body, her “little protruding pot of tummy,” incongruous with her childish and naive fantasy, “I want them blue.” Existing in tension with socially sanctioned notions of beauty, her pregnancy, blackness and femininity render her a reviled and grotesque juxtaposition to the white, male, Washingtonian ideal, Pecola is “America's composite physical other”,269 the reversal of the idealised “Dick and Jane” predicated in the initial prologue. However, unlike Levin who actively casts horror on Rosemary's changing form, Morrison illuminates the extent to which Pecola always functions for the exploitative purposes of namely black men, who seek empowerment through her physical vulnerability. Through revealing Soaphead Church’s grotesque emulation of a transcendentalist intellectual, presenting a dog as a possibility of contact with God, Morrison averts our gaze on the Pecola’s pregnant black body as a powerless receptacle for alleviating the community’s disempowerment. Interspersing a moment of pathos and affection, “she reached out and touched the dog’s head, stroking him gently” with images of violent spasms and seizures that echoed her own, “Choking, stumbling, he moves like a broken toy in the yard… A spasm jerking his body,” Morrison renders abject racism a grave perversion of nature. Drawing attention to his “lightly browned skin and cinnamon eyes,” bestowed to him by his “noble British ancestor, Sir Witcomb,” Morrison alludes to a pride and confidence derived from interracial miscegenation. Identified ironically as “what one might call a very clean old man,” Soaphead rationalises predatory behaviour with the virtuosity of an enlightenment intellectual, cultivating illusions of power

267

Angela Carter, “Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, The Werewolf.” Vintage Classics, (2020). Dante Alighieri and Thomas William Parsons, “The First Canticle, Inferno of the Divine Comedy,” G.P. Putnam And Son, (1867). 269 Elizabeth McNeil McNeil, “Un-"Freak"Ing Black Female Selfhood: Grotesque-Erotic Agency and Ecofeminist Unity in Sapphire’s Push,” Oxford University Press on Behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States 37, no. 4 (2012), p, 11–30. Un-freaking black female selfhood cites disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland Thomson, who talks about the black grotesque aesthetic as a tool of resistance and empowerment in rejecting white norms. I however don’t think by utilising a grotesque aesthetic Morrison in this way, rather I believe she is inverting a horror trope in order to emphasise the monstrosity of the white gaze and white exclusive spaces. 108 268


through adopting the language of the altruistic Christian; “It is because I wept for you that I had to do your work for you.” His fantastic delusions of grandeur and an inverted perception of reality offer an assessment of the cultural destruction that black people bring upon themselves in order to emulate Eurocentric intellectual models, his grasps at a white personhood allowing him to remove himself from his own marginal identity. Undermining Soaphead’s attempts to construct a sacramental story,270 inviting Pecola to inhabit the dream of white aesthetic, Morrison blends the language of catholic liturgy, “I have found it meets and right to do so,” with the patternly quality of a fairy tale, “But she will. And she will live happily ever after.” Whilst Morrison portrays Soaphead as a debased madman, she allows us to understand that like Cholly, his manipulation comes from a place of intra-racial unacceptance, attempting to reciprocate the perverse salvation handed down to him by his white ancestors. Hence where Morrison inverts the incubation of evil within the maternal womb, her shattering of the voyeuristic gaze shines a light onto the external horrors of an insidious culture of racial superiority.

The Devil’s Gateway: Welcoming the Abject Which memory now shall paint in truth's own hue? I continued on the path stopping breathlessly at the woman, Hester.271 In a sullied white dress kneeling in submission, her angular face bowed down towards her child enmeshed tightly in cotton. She was consoling it, tenderly whispering to mask the menacing gnawing of the men edging towards her. Levin’s denouement betrays his feminist implications, in favour of an image of sacred motherhood. Quelling Rosemary’s feminist paranoia, her female autonomy is subsumed by a fabricated maternal instinct, ironically proving maternal love to be the anecdote to masculine violence. In her essay, ‘The Personal Is Political: Enclosed Settings in Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy,’ Estella Dieci attempts to prove Levin’s intent on making feminist statement about Rosemary’s embrace of the “abject” that she births, occupying the space between sanctity and disgust.272 Her acceptance of her satanic offspring serves as an icon of empowerment, ‘signaling the celebration of the anxiety which images of

270

Yale Courses, “Toni Morrison, the Bluest Eye,” www.youtube.com, (2008). Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Scarlet Letter,” Applause, (1850). 272 Estella Dieci, “The Personal Is Political: Enclosed Settings in Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy,” Georgia Institute of Technology, (2018). 271

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women threaten to evoke.’273 Removing the barrier between the domestic and occult, “Rosemary stepped into the second closet and ducked down. Through a keyhole she saw… Minnie and Roman’s apartment,” she negotiates the topographic geography'' that connects “idealized childbirth and its disturbing terrain.”274 The closet, which was at the locus of their rumours of cannibalistic witches acts as a vaginal passage, creating a continuity between the heteronormative, nuclear space and the devil’s workers.275 However, Rosemary’s traversion of the ontological binaries that Levin sees as problematic, exists in tension with sacrifice and eternal damnation. Though he might have questioned the structures that facilitate Rosemary’s sexual violation, the denouement effectively forces Rosemary to ameliorate her experiences of rape through maternal love, decapitating her female consciousness in order for her children to flourish. Where Rosemary sees her own baby “suffering” in the midst of a coven of witches, “surrounded with black gowns, rocking carelessly,” her impulse to nurture overpowers “you should oil the wheels. That could bother him.” Where a contemporary audience might view it as a profane parody of sacred maternity, Levin potentially champions this version of womanhood, viewing it as a moment of redemption. Embodying the gothic heroine, the indication that Rosemary’s rape and pregnancy was merely a “time of trial,” highlights Levin’s conclusion that maternal love is the ultimate anecdote to masculine evils. Reversing the previous anagnorisis “this is no dream,” Rosemary’s perception of reality shifts from that of feminist paranoia (“this is reality”) to an acceptance of grotesque motherhood as a divinely-instituted mission,276 “a sign from heaven, a divine message to be stored away,” martyring herself for the ethical function of society. Using the language of Christian redemption, “Oh father in heaven, forgive me for doubting! Forgive me for turning on you… Oh Jesus, dear Jesus, help me save my innocent baby!” Rosemary wholly embodies the catholic iconography of the Virgin Mary, a symbol of her self-sacrifice for her child. Where the coven shouts victoriously, “Hail, Rosemary!” the ambivalent prefix “Rose” destablises her virginal purity, alluding to the birth as metonymic for the extraction of ‘sin’ into the world, becoming the vehicle through which, the lineage of male violence continues - an inversion of the Christ narrative. Hence, through the last lines of the novel, recited tenderly by Rosemary: ‘one little smile Andy Candy,’ Levin draws upon the simulacrum, alluding to patriarchally contrived maternal roles that render mother’s the ethical repositories for emerging generations.

273 Rhona Berenstein, “Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby and Mothering,” The Journal of Popular Culture 24, no. 2 (September 1990), p, 55–73 274 Lucy Fischer, “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’’ Cinema Journal 257, no. 1 (1992), p88. 275 Karyn Valerius, “Rosemary’s Baby,’ Gothic Pregnancy, and Fetal Subjects,” College Literature 32, no. 3 (2005) 276 Lucy Fischer, “Birth Traumas: Parturition and Horror in ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’’ Cinema Journal 257, no. 1 (1992). 110


The Devil’s Departure: Disposing of the Abject The morning was near, the cobalt sky still kindred with fading stars. Behind Hester was Tess, a slight woman with auburn hair, carrying her child in a small deal box under her tattered shawl. Where nettles grow and the trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts,277she buried it in a small spot of hollow earth. Where all the conjecturally damned are laid.'278 However, Morrison's teleological end point, refuses to rebirth the manifestation of hatred through Pecola’s body. Where the deceased child, embodies the abject279, she severs the perpetual cycle of insidious violence tethered to the black female body, disturbing identity, system and order.280 Instead, through purging the manifestation of patriarchal, white supremacist violence, the abject baby is replaced with Claudia’s imagined re-construction of black personhood: “I thought about the baby that everyone wanted dead, and saw it very clearly. It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with great O’s of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing thick lips, and the living breathing silk of black skin.” Resisting and protecting Pecola’s baby from the imagined grotesquery that exists around it already, the narrative acts as a tender protective veil from the violent monstrosity of the white-supremacist gaze. The humanity and tenderness of Claudia McAteer seeking to re-configure external colonial attitudes, undermines the monologic discourse of racial hatred manifested within American consciousness. This framework is analogous to Claudia’s treatment of her white baby doll. Dismembering the symbol of a white consumer product, “Tracing the turned-up nose, poking the glassy blue eyes and twisting the yellow hair,” Claudia destabilised the construction of white beauty, interrogating the conflict between selfacceptance and society's intolerance of black female bodies. Where she announces, “I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable,” Morrison positions Claudia as a symbol of resistance to extolling white beauty values, as her metafictional undertones reject the monologic discourse that legitimise prejudice in a white supremacist society. Finally, delineating the disconnected, 277

Angela Carter, “Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.” Vintage Classics, (2020). Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the D’Urberville,” Tatran, (1973). 279 Julia Kristeva, “Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection,” Columbia University Press. (1982). 280 Julia Kristeva, “Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection,” (1982). 278

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fragmented familial experience of Pecola from the more cohesive and relational experience of the Claudia McAteer, Morrison’s denouement celebrates the healing potentialities of continued connections with culture, traditions and ancestral knowledge. The reference to marigolds, flowers and seeds, “I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to the marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers,” suggests an imminent seeding season where new ideas and values can be sown and flourish. As the narrator affirms, “the end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between,” Morrison illuminates a potential to clear the abject ‘waste’ from society and rather usher in a new environment of social change where the seeds of connection and African American values are planted. By testifying Pecola’s story, Claudia plays the cathartic role of a storyteller, ushering in a new environment of critical interrogation and social change where the seeds of connection are dispersed into the literary landscape.

Keeping Vigilant: Piercing the Simulacrum It is clear that Medusa’s trajectory: rape, grotesque pregnancy and violent birth, has proliferated throughout the literary imagination, rendering the maternal body incubators for the permeation, incubation, and exorcism of male violence. Even in the case of Levin, who attempts a rigorous interrogation of the shackles of the heteronormative domestic sphere, his representation of the monstrous maternal form destabilses his ability to offer an authentic feminist critique. Ultimately, Levin simply constructs a tale where Rosemary is terrorised by an unknowable and unnamable source, the omission of male violence failing to hold the patriarchal institutions he seemingly refutes accountable for their perpetuation of sexual violence. Alternatively, through speaking the unspeakable in the midst of conspiratorial silence and a representational absence,281 Morrison uses ‘the abject’ to break the monstrous simulacrum, Tracing this simulacrum through the canon, I have landed upon literature's unending ability to obfuscate the loci of patriarchal violence, rather manifesting horror within the most vulnerable members in society. Beware of these signifiers.282 For if we remain entrapped within the writhing tangles of simulacrum, we will be mercilessly dragged back into the authority of it’s patriarchal core. Beware of the diagnosis of

281

Catherine Romagnolo, “Opening Acts Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction,” University Of Nebraska Press, (2015). 282 Helen Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” The University of Chicago Press, (1976). 112


insanity and of monstrosity as they will condemn your creativity. Trick them! Subvert them! Use it as a springboard for resistance.283

283

Helene Cixous “The Laugh of the Medusa,” (1976). 113


Madeline Kunstler: ‘I’m Dying, You Sadomasochistic Torturer!’ Inspired by Netflix’s interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and the highly unregulated yet violent world of video games, my Major Work transports the concept of audience participation within a digital text into the literary realm. My essay explores how texts appropriated by feminists, such as Angela Carter and Deena Larsen, across varying forms and contexts can challenge the patriarchal sanctioning of the violent objectification and abuse of women through engaging, confronting and further involving the reader as an active participant in the text. More specifically, I interrogate the way in which the digitally interactive text can bestow an ethical responsibility upon an active participant by positioning them as complicit within the violence of the narrative, as opposed to the traditional text in which the reader passively consumes the discourses and values, therefore having a greater impact upon both feminism and the moral correction within the reader. Trigger Warning: Hypertext included in this essay may lead to graphic depictions of violence and abuse, which some viewers may find confronting. Reader discretion is strongly advised. …. This essay explores the way in which second and third wave feminists have appropriated the ‘Bluebeard’ narrative in order to prove the ethical responsibility of the receiver of the text and their complicity in the ongoing violation of women. Perrault’s 1697 fairy-tale ‘La Barbe Bleue’ (Bluebeard) offers a protofeminist criticism of patriarchal and hegemonic paradigms through the process of defamiliarisation, in order to challenge the punitive marital laws of his late-seventeenth-century context that served to uphold a socially permissible culture of violence towards women within the patriarchal institution of marriage. Building upon Perrault’s didactic intention, Angela Carter’s 1979 short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (from her anthology of the same name), a second-wave feminist reimagining of the Bluebeard narrative, demonstrates the endurance of these archaic and misogynistic discourses regarding the abuse and commodification of women, which Carter achieves through a postmodern subversion of the familiarised literary tropes of folk lore within Perrault’s original narrative to prove the ethical responsibility of feminist writers to disrupt these reductive discourses. 114


Whilst Carter inverses and seeks to restructure hegemonic paradigms, which demand acknowledgement of their own existence, Deena Larsen’s third-wave re-appropriation extends upon the deconstruction of these misogynistic discourses by mandating that one must participate in these paradigms either to affirm or deny their institutional power. Through its post-postmodern form, Larsen’s digitally interactive Flash fiction ‘The [Somewhat Disturbing But Highly Improbable] Princess Murderer’ (2003) exemplifies the power of the interactive text in destabilising hegemonic discourses, particularly those that ultimately perpetuate a culture of desensitisation towards violence, as Larsen positions the reader as complicit in the violation of women within the narrative, rather than allowing them to be merely a passive receiver of text. In doing so, the interactive text fulfils a moral obligation through reader complicity in the sanctioning of abuse against women and thus the perpetuation of misogynistic discourses outside of the text. In awarding agency to the reader to disrupt patriarchal paradigms, Larsen’s use of the interactive form is consistent with third-wave feminism, as the inclusion of intersectionality demands a subjectivity rather than a binary of gender discourses between masculine and feminine. In this way, the evolution of feminist discourses exploits the concurrent evolution of literary form and genre to go beyond acknowledging acts of violence towards women, extending the dialogic beyond gender paradigms and projecting it into the sphere of individual and subjective agentic ethical practice by positioning the reader as an active participant in the violation of the female victim. Thus, a text in which the reader is both active and critical is more successful in achieving a feminist telos, as the interrogation of patriarchal paradigms becomes more authentic.

La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard) “I’m in the demythologising business. I’m interested in myths - though I’m much more interested in folklore - just because they are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree.” - Angela Carter Through an appropriated form of the traditional fairy-tale, Perrault’s text is firmly placed within the didactic range in order to acknowledge and offer a proto-feminist critique of the hypermasculine violence inflicted upon women within societal boundaries. However, through the processes of defamiliarisation and desensitisation of violence within the narrative, Perrault is able to confront the reader with his observation of patriarchal paradigms and misogynistic discourses reflective of his specific context. In order to destabilise the concept of patriarchal control, Perrault hyperbolises male violence, expressed through the destructive hypermasculinity of the grotesque Bluebeard and the sadomasochist overtones of the narrative, 115


“(These were all the wives whom Blue Beard had married and murdered, one after another.)” (Perrault, 1697). Further, Perrault discombobulates readers through his confronting parody of the Fall of Man and the associated corruption of the Eve narrative through a biblical allusion to Eve’s prelapsarian curiosity, exhibited in the wife of Bluebeard, in order to critique the discourse of blaming the victim and the violent punishment of agentic women. Perrault utilises prelapsarian imagery to illustrate the sinful nature of womanly curiosity and exercising of female autonomy, which is ultimately punished, “But she was so very curious to know what was inside, that she made up her mind to venture in spite of everything. She then, with a trembling hand, put the key into the lock, and the door straight flew open.” (Perrault, 1697) In light of this, the desensitised yet violent blood imagery in “She saw that the floor was covered with clotted blood, on which the bodies of several dead women were lying” (Perrault, 1697) foregrounds the violence of the punishment inflicted upon women for transgressing male expectations of passivity and subservience by exhibiting prelapsarian curiosity. The extent of this violence and its ubiquity is highlighted in the subsequent description, “As she found that the key of the closet had got stained with blood in falling on the floor, she wiped it two or three times over to clean it; yet still the blood kept on the same as before. She next washed it, but the blood did not move at all.” (Perrault, 1697) Here, the blood is no longer confined to the butchered women, but permeates the space inhabited by them. Moving from the unnamed women, the threat of violence is extended to include “His [Bluebeards] wife, who was almost dead with fear, now fell upon her knees,” (Perrault, 1697) as she too falls victim to unmitigated abuse. However, for all of his proto-feminist sentiments, in his assignation of pathos to his female characters and critical representation of masculine violence, Perrault ironically offers a punitive characterisation of the nonagentic female in his condemnation of passivity, framing it as complicity in one’s own abuse. Thereby, the fallacious assertion that female passivity is the permissive societal force facilitating their victimisation renders all efforts to depict this violence negatively redundant. However, Perrault demonstrates the extent to which masculine cruelty is permissible within the social and legal bounds of marriage and patriarchal institutions, thereby fulfilling a proto-feminist purpose in his challenging of the dominant discourse surrounding female ownership by a husband, which was still upheld by matrimonial law in the late-seventeenth century. Perrault interrogates the unreformed marriage law by parodying the idea that a woman’s body is the property of her husband’s, defamiliarising the audience with the concept of male ownership of the female body within marriage, as the wife has willingly “bound herself legally to a monster” (Ruddick, 2004). Subsequently, Perrault warns of the consequences of upholding this law, as Bluebeard is able to “exercise his murderous perversion under the protection of unreformed marital law. For as the absolute master of his wife's body, he claims the right to punish her 116


disobedience by cutting the culpable object to pieces.” (Ruddick, 2004). Perrault suggests that because the woman has sworn a marriage vow, she loses her identity and is subject to Bluebeard’s masochistic violence in which she can legally be “reduced to a chattel (a body) that he can dispose of as he wishes.” (Ruddick, 2004), thus interrogating the discourse surrounding fundamentalist masculinity and the expectation of female subservience, yet also the extent to which hypermasculine violence is accepted by society. By exposing this socially-sanctified concept of a husband’s autonomy over his wife’s body, Perrault beseeches the reader to apply a critical lens towards marriage laws, instead reaching fresh and informed perceptions that challenge this hegemonically endorsed authority. Therefore, Perrault imparts a Humanist message, in that unjust and unrevised laws allow for abuse, as this philosophy had not been extended to the marital laws by the time of Perrault’s writing. However, Carter recontextualises this judicial travesty through a second-wave feminist reading, using this tale as a vehicle through which to disrupt hegemonic discourses of her context in which hypermasculine violence inflicted upon the female victim is still socially permissible within patriarchal institutions of the 20th Century.

The Bloody Chamber “I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode” - Angela Carter In her second wave appropriation of Perrault’s 1697 Bluebeard, Carter pathologises male violence into extreme sadomasochistic cruelty in order to illuminate and alert the reader of the extent to which female victimisation and sexual abuse is socially permissible within the patriarchal institution of marriage, as although Perrault’s narrative stops short of explicit torture in his representation of hypermasculine violence and abuse within patriarchal paradigms, it does not necessarily denote that society prevents or actively condemns the occurrence of such extremes. Through the enhancement of violence and explicit erotic undertones, “a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like the scimitar he held,” (Carter, 1697) Carter displays an awareness of rigid gender roles within masculine/feminine relationships. In doing so, Carter transforms Perrault’s titular character Bluebeard, a symbol of absolute patriarchal rule, into ‘The Marquis’, a signifier of the hubristic and insatiable male gaze and an intertextual allusion to the Marquis de Sade from whom the sadist tradition originates, described by Kari E. Lokke as “the quintessence of the negative animus archetype—the ruler of a land of death who tortures woman and cuts her off from life […] [he] murders life for her” (Lokke, 1988). The Marquis, who is constructed as an atemporal figure, “a stone on the beach whose fissures have been eroded by 117


successive tides,” (Carter, 1979), essentially exists as a manifestation of the destructive capabilities of archetypal patriarchal culture and hypermasculinity, using his “instruments of mutilation” to enact sadomasochistic fantasies which are “most pornographic of all confrontations” (Carter, 1979) in their conflation of sex and violence. Yet, Margaret Atwood posits that Carter’s enhancement of gendered sexual violence within The Bloody Chamber functions as "a 'writing against' de Sade, a talking-back to him;” (Atwood, 1988) rather than an indulgence in sadomasochistic pornography. In addition, Carter utilises the gothic setting of The Marquis’ ancestral abode, “that private slaughterhouse of his” (Carter 1979), as a signifier of the fetishised world of Sadeian erotic fantasy and the epicentre of his narcissistic selfdeification. Yet, Carter’s use of the isolated setting in which the female victim is physically alienated from society, also emerges as a representation of the tradition of inherited misogyny, specifically an ancestral tradition of female objectification. Here, Carter is explicitly referencing the historical and patriarchal sanctioning of the violent objectification of women within societal boundaries, as well as the endurance of misogynistic discourses beyond Perrault’s context. Moreover, Carter challenges the role of the female as the objectified victim depicted in traditional folk lore, and rather stresses that both feminine and masculine sexual desire must be redefined to include the female as an active, agentic participant rather than the passive victim of violent male perversion. Carter foregrounds the idea of the male gaze as a violent patriarchal tool for female subjugation and objectification, and the ultimate facilitator of masculine aggression projected onto women in the form of sexual abuse, through the symbolism of the “ruby choker”, which represents the physical intrusion of the carnal male gaze upon the narrator. Indeed, Carter correlates absolute masculine sexual dominance with sight, as the gaze of The Marquis, is entirely threatening and authoritative in its subjugation of the female ‘object’. In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), theorist Laura Mulvey posits,“Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. (Mulvey, 1975). Mulvey extends upon this through her assertation that “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact [the act of being] women [seen] as...the leitmotif of erotic spectacle.” (Mulvey, 1975). The narrator is made passive by the active and all-consuming male gaze, shifting her identity in order to conform to the male’s fetishised desires. In accepting the aforementioned “ruby choker”, she becomes the passive object of his active gaze, “he would not let me take off my ruby choker, although it was growing very uncomfortable,” inciting his desire for power over her assumed passivity through “viewing pleasure.” In contrast, the narrator can attain a sense of agency in the presence of the blind Jean-Ives, since he cannot assert dominance over her visually, due to his inability to position 118


the female as object of the acquisitional male gaze. Further, Carter incorporates a motif of mirrors, “surrounded by so many mirrors!” (Carter, 1979), as the female protagonist transitions from female object to subject, both reflected and refracted, as critic E.B. Manley argues that “the mirror scenes establish the protagonist as oscillating between girlhood and womanhood, between a patriarchal view and her own definition of herself” (Manley, 1998). However, Carter’s protagonist asserts agency and rejects a totally passive role by recognising the innocent image in the mirror as one that has been socially conditioned to meet the needs of a phallocentric culture, which itself desires domination over the female object. Moreover, whilst Perrault’s folktale is narrated in the third person and the reader remains relatively distant from the woman’s psychological journey, Carter’s story is narrated retrospectively by the woman herself, allowing for a shifting focus and extension towards the female’s interior subjectivity, which is “foreign to the traditional fairy-tale” (Lokke, 1988) and subsequently allows the reader to “actively engage...in a feminist deconstruction” (Makinen, 1992). Within the first-person narration of the female victim, Lokke argues that by “acknowledging the glamour of sado-masochist self-annihilation as well as its ultimate brutality, ugliness and misogyny” (Lokke, 1988) Carter not only assigns the female greater autonomy in escaping the male gaze, but allows for the reader to actively “decolonise...habits of thought” (Makinen, 1992) regarding the role of the female as an object rather than a subject within the fairy-tale tradition. Thus, by attributing a partially active role within the narrative to the previously framed passive victim, Carter’s short story asserts that systems and cycles that perpetuate hypermasculinity, ranging from marriages of inequity to patriarchal religious traditions which demonize the agentic female, must be obliterated for women to be liberated from sexual slavery and socially-sanctified patriarchal violence. Carter subverts the hegemonic paradigms and misogynistic discourses present in the original Bluebeard narrative through her inversion of the familiar tropes of juvenilia and folk lore, making their traditional meanings “explode” in order to serve her second-wave feminist purpose. Carter’s subversion of familiar tropes in which she “challenges the readers’ expectations as they are forced to confront the damage being done to women” (Sawden, 2015) initially finds representation in the erotic symbolism of the lilies. The flower symbolism is aligned with the idea of “gazing for pleasure,” (Mulvey, 1975), a prominent motif of the text as the male gaze and exploitation of sight is a vehicle through which The Marquis is able to enact his sadomasochistic fantasies upon the female victim. The Marquis’ “skin of white funeral lilies” (Carter, 1979) aligns him with death, whilst also mocking a lily’s association with sexual anatomy, purity and death simultaneously, as scholar K.E. Lokke acknowledges that within the image of the lily, “death and phallic sexuality are one,” (Lokke, 1988) alluding to the lily’s natural form, but also The Marquis’ hyperbolised sadomasochistic tendencies. Similarly, Becky McLaughlin notes the “kaleidoscopic quality” 119


(McLaughlin, 1995) of the lily imagery in ‘The Bloody Chamber’: “One moment the lily represents life and the next moment, death.” (McLaughlin, 1995). She goes on to interrogate the symbolism of “the lily’s lush, white petals, [which] seem[s] bloated with fecund[ity][…]” (McLaughlin, 1995) before further destabilising the signifier in the qualifier, “and yet lilies are known as burial flowers[…]” (McLaughlin, 1995). McLaughlin extends this metaphor through explicit comparisons, “At first glance, for example, the lily appears to be a female receptacle, its stamen a clitoris, and the serpentine stem a phallus. On second glance, however, the penile shape of the lily begins to suggest the contours of the phallus and the coiled stem and all-encompassing vaginal “maw.” (McLaughlin, 1995) and concludes with a phobic fear in comparing the vagina to a “dark abyss into which man fears falling [and never returning].” (McLaughlin, 1995). The way in which the lily is both a yonic and phallic signifier, and simultaneously represents sexual anatomy as well as death, is mimetic of the way in which Carter conflates sex and violence to evoke the sadomasochistic tendencies of the Marquis, which are sanctified within the institution of marriage. The projection of these connotations onto the lily, which is also identified as a signifier of femininity, highlights the way in which both the sadomasochistic fantasies and the male gaze are violently projected onto the female as a derivative object of pleasure, as well as the instability of the signifier that allows Carter to subvert the literary symbols of folk lore in order to dismantle hegemonic paradigms. Subsequently, Carter indeed “attempts to decolonise our habits of thought” (Makinen, 1992) by working within and against archetypal conventions and literary tropes of the fairy-tale genre - such as the familiarised phrase from Perrault’s Little Red Riding Hood "All the better to see you" (Carter, 1979) in her effort to reveal how the Western canon has “shaped limiting concepts of gender and sexuality” (Bristlow and Broughton, 1997). By integrating such deep-seated literary traditions, the reader is forced to respond due to familiarity with the culturally obsolete when faced with the implications of Carter’s revised didactic narrative. Therefore, by inverting traditional narratives and motifs within the process of familiarisation, Carter forcefully positions readers as voyeurs of sadomasochistic violence and the violation of the female body to interrogate reductive discourses and decolonise preconceived ideas regarding notions of female victimisation within the inherently patriarchal fairy-tale tradition, which are thus sanctified due to the didacticism and cultural privileging of fairy-tales, which have traditionally been upheld within Western culture as determinants of what is deemed socially-acceptable.

The Interactive Narrative “For all its passing charm, the traditional novel...which Hegel called "the epic of the middle-class world" -- is perceived by its would-be executioners as the virulent carrier of the patriarchal, 120


colonial, canonical, proprietary, hierarchical and authoritarian values of a past that is no longer with us.” Larsen’s 21st-century context, in which the evolution of technology has facilitated the evolution of literary genre and form to include the digital text, allows for her experimental use of interactivity in reapproriating the Bluebeard narrative through an intersectional third-wave feminist perspective that seeks to dismantle gender roles and deconstruct the discourses that have endured beyond Perrault’s text as “they are always there, spectres...even if they are no longer,” (Derrida, 1993). In doing so, Larsen exposes the endurance of archaic, misogynistic values and the discourse surrounding the representation of the objectified female victim through the fragmented, multi-linear form and hypertextual components of the text that disrupts the traditional narrative form and reader experience. The Princess Murderer’s multimodal approach and hypertext structure presents readers with multiple pathways through which to navigate, blurring the line between fiction and reality through the myriad of tangents as readers select pathways within the diegetic world by clicking hypertext links, which can be described as “unlike print text, [hypertext] provides multiple paths between text segments, now often called “lexias” in a borrowing from the pre-hypertextual but prescient Roland Barthes” (Coover, 1992). However, the multiple paths of the text rejects the idea of a teleological endpoint and provides no definitive ending, unlike the traditional resolution of the fairytale in which the hegemony is restored to its ordered state, thus drawing the reader’s attention to the ongoing discourse outside of the text through its refusal to conclude the feminist dialogic that the text incites. In this way, whilst ironically unable to provide the reader with a teleological conclusion, the digitally interactive form is more successful in achieving a feminist telos as it relies upon a critical and active reader in its negation of a singular passage through the labyrinthic text. Moreover, Larsen’s text has disrupted the semiotics of the signified and signifier, as espoused by Saussure, and thus has transcended post-structural literary theory in order to deconstruct both the meaning of language and hegemonic hierarchies that support a rigid passive-active binary between masculine and feminine. Within Perrault’s original folktale, the wives (princesses) are the signifiers of female passivity and total submission to masculine control, whilst Bluebeard is the signifier of patriarchal violence. Extending upon Saussure, Larsen appropriates the metalanguage of literary theory to assign the reader agency in the dismantling of the meaning of signs, seeking to represent an agentic, post-feminist princess. To accomplish this, Larsen transfers autonomy from the patriarchal oppressor to the reader through the physical action of the ‘click’, which is indicative of the death of a princess. Further, by transforming the click as a form of access into the “forbidden room”, the death of the princess no longer signifies 121


Bluebeard’s sadomasochistic violence, “I’m dying you sadomasochistic torturer!” but renders Bluebeard an unstable signifier. Here the signifier of female passivity initially found in the characterisation of the princesses is also rendered unstable, as they actively speak back to their oppressors, confronting the reader and Bluebeard alike with the repercussions of enacting violence upon them. This notion is extended upon through the appropriated symbolism of the “bloody key,” which Larsen aligns with feminine disobedience and chivalric notions of unlocking female chastity, along with the phallicism of the penetrative key as a symbol of ultimate masculine dominance within Perrault’s original narrative. However, this idea is subverted through the awarding of agency to the princesses, thus destabilising the authority of Bluebeard by allowing the responder to assume autonomy, and by transferring the metaphorical ‘key’ to the reader through the hypertext form. Larsen’s digitally interactive text dismantles the fairy-tale form, whereby the reader is a passive receiver of the author’s didactic intention, by instead making the reader complicit within the violence of the narrative (literally through the process of clicking), which therefore has a more powerful impact upon feminism and moral correction in the reader. This allows Larsen to subvert and disrupt the dominant discourse surrounding violence inflicted upon the agentic female, as complicity within the interactivity goes beyond any acts of familiarisation or defamiliarisation. Although Perrault’s original narrative “assumes a moral position in shifting the blame for the murders onto the princesses (wives) themselves” (Bell, 2019), due to their prelapsarian curiosity and disobedience of Bluebeard’s order not to enter the “forbidden room”, The Princess Murder challenges this notion by positioning the reader as complicit in the sadomasochistic violence through drawing upon the notion of ‘you’ (the reader) as the participant of the text. Through the subjective narrative address ‘you’, the reader is positioned to identify with a character - either Blue-Beard, a princess (wife) or the detective, “Perhaps you are Bluebeard, or perhaps you are a princess. Perhaps you are a detective, come to solve the case.” Readers are presented with the idea that “with each click, a princess dies” and subsequently, “the conjunction between "you" and Bluebeard grows stronger” (Larsen, 2003), highlighting the greater moral obligation that the reader fulfils within the interactive text. Further, the use of the second-person narratological perspective in the hypertext ‘Don’t you believe in their pain? That is the only interpretation that saves you from being a psychopath’ (Larsen, 2003) explicitly and directly addresses the reader, who has previously been framed as partially complicit in the murders through their mouse-clicks. In addition to the use of the narrative ‘you’, Larson introduces an auditory motif, whereby every click triggers the sound of a woman’s sigh, suggesting that readers are responsible for the princesses’ deaths. Within the multimodality, Larsen also utilises self-reflexivity to explicitly draw attention to and dismantle the discourse of sanctified patriarchal violence and female objectification. 122


Whilst the interactive narrative is largely composed of direct speech, the extra-diegetic narrator selfreflexively reports a “scream” uttered by one of the princesses. In response, the princess pleads for “no more clicks” (Larsen, 2003), which self-reflexively references the way in which the reader clicks the mouse, resulting in the death of a princess each time. The screams reach beyond a “labyrinth of signs” (Larsen, 2003), which alludes to the hypertextual structure of The Princess Murderer, and subsequently highlights the self-awareness of its form as it implies that the figurative “screams” can be heard outside of the text, making them an extradiegetic component of the narrative structure. The reader’s complicity in the ongoing violation of women is further emphasised by Larsen as the syntactic construction, “I beg you”, places the ‘you’ in the object position, which explicitly sets up a dialogue between the princess and an ambiguous, unnamed addressee, in which the reader is able to assert agency through the action of the click. Thus, the text consistently positions the reader as responsible for the princess' murders and sadomasochistic violence in order to actively subvert the misogynistic and inherently patriarchal discourse of victim blaming. By imbuing the reader with a greater moral obligation through their complicity in enacting and therefore sanctifying abuse, Larsen exhorts the reader to critically reflect upon the ongoing violation of women both within the diegetic and extradiegetic worlds of the text. However, not only does Larsen involve the reader as an active participant in the text so that they are complicit in the violence, but the interactive form upholds Barthes’ vision of the ‘ideal’ text as established within the theory of ‘Narratology’ (1975), since the reader is essentially complicit in the creation of meaning within interactive narratives, and therefore embodies Larsen’s third-wave feminism, as the inclusion of intersectionality demands subjectivity rather than a binary of gender discourses between masculine and feminine, just as the ‘ideal’ text collapses the binary between between author and reader. This is because Larsen’s text relies heavily upon reader subjectivity, as the reader adopts co-authorship, which Barthes differentiates as‘writerly’ rather than the traditional ‘readerly’ text. Whilst the ‘readerly’ text involves fixed meanings, the ‘writerly’ text allows the reader to be involved in the construction of meaning, rather than to merely receive information passively, as according to Barthes, "the writerly text is ourselves writing,” which makes the reader “no longer a consumer, but a producer of a text.” (Barthes, 1975). Extending upon this notion of passive versus active construction of meaning via the reader within a text, Barthes argues that the ‘ideal’ text blurs the line between author and reader to allow for a plurality of reader-initiated meanings, “. ..this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are 123


indeterminable . . . ; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.” (Barthes, 1975) Not only does Barthes’ theory draw attention to the autonomy of the reader in creating meaning, but that the interactive form of The Princess Murderer provides liberation from the “compulsory author-directed movement” (Coover, 1992) that is inherently patriarchal, as the author-reader relationship replicates a dominant-submissive dichotomy, and steers away from the authoritative didacticism of the ‘traditional novel’ that is mimetic of patriarchal oppression as opposed to the traditionally feminine style of suggestion that the interactive form allows for. Thus, through the ‘writerly’ quality of the interactive form which Larsen harnesses, she mimetically bestows agency upon both the reader and the princesses in order to destabilise the discourse of female passivity, inviting the reader to subjectively interpellate discourses present in the text. By disrupting the traditional association pertaining to the reader’s lack of agency the ‘readerly’ text can be aligned with the princesses’ and the wives’ lack of agency within the narrative construction of the canonical fairy-tale. However, ultimately full autonomy is withheld from the reader as due to the limited number of narrative threads that can be followed, Larsen’s text maintains a ‘readerly’ function to some extent, as she still retains authorial control over the options available to the reader. Therefore, while presented with the illusion of autonomy, and by extension, exercising choice, the participant is still complicit in following one of the few narrative pathways available, which poses the question as to whether the princesses can ever become agentic in resisting sadomasochistic violence, or if we as readers can completely resist patriarchal discourses of violence or the influence of the author. .... Ultimately, all three texts highlight the extent to which the violation of women is endorsed and made permissible according to social and legal mores. Whilst both Perrault and Carter confront the reader without involving them, their respective texts are limited by context, form and literary genre in the deconstruction of patriarchal paradigms and institutions that allot space for the violent victimisation of women, as the reader remains a passive receiver of text and therefore may continue to uphold misogynistic discourses without any moral correction. However, by relying upon the notion of reader complicity in authorial decisions, Larsen’s digitally interactive text is able to re-appropriate the Bluebeard narrative within a third-wave feminist context, and in doing so progresses in its deconstruction of patriarchal paradigms by involving the reader in this deconstruction. Thus through the power of the interactive form, the reader assumes both a fictional role within the narrative and an authorial role throughout the interactivity, as well as an active moral and ethical responsibility in destabilising discourses of patriarchal violence inflicted upon women outside of the text. Whilst Larsen succeeds in disrupting the hegemonic 124


discourses observed by Perrault, the limitations of the interactive form, in that there can never be an infinite number of narrative options, the author still retains some level of control over reader choices. Therefore, the interactive form both succeeds and fails as a metafictive disrupter of stable signifiers, ultimately rendering both reader and author impotent in the dismantling of any dominant discourse.

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Amelia Malouf: The Whore, The Killer and The Skank Inspired by my own experience with patriarchal constructs, I metafictively investigate the lives of Nellie Cameron and Ruth Ellis, women silenced and villainised by the male gaze, and therefore aim to highlight an ingrained misogyny within our society. My voice both guides and interrogates the trajectory of the piece, whether it be meandering through the historical recreation of these women’s lives, the interpretation of the “patriarchal” courtroom, or the suffragette 'ladies lunch’ table that represents the bias of society. Through the investigative journalism of both a historical and modern context, I ultimately comment on the “feminist” world in which we live today, and how it was shaped by a history of patriarchal oppression. The Whore, The Killer and The Skank It was early 2016, when Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton were head to head in the final battle for the presidency. Flashing on the screens of televisions across the world were the words, “You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy”. The blatant misogyny confirmed what we had suspected: he could not possibly be the American President. Yet, on the fateful night of December 19, 2016, we were proven wrong. It felt as though, in that moment, a horrifying darkness formed above so many people’s lives. Donald Trump was America’s President. Or more accurately, the man who said “grab ‘em by the pussy” was the President of the Democratic World. I was thirteen. Following the exposure of Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behaviour, Alyssa Milano in 2017 wrote: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’[1] as a reply to this tweet”. By the next day, the phrase was posted over 700,000 times on social media apps, Twitter and Facebook. While the movement spread like wildfire globally, shining a light on the sexual abuse and signalling a hope that we will change, a flurry of reactions betrayed a darker truth: “She is lying” “As if she didn’t know what he wanted when she went to his hotel room late at night” 126


“Gold Digger” “She shouldn’t have worn that” I was fourteen. Fast forward to 2020, when I began to write this piece, and I am to believe that we have come far. Well we have since the days of tight corsets and female witch hunts. Now, in the land of our green and gold, women can vote, work, and have a commanding role on the global political stage. We can drive up and down coasts sans safety- ensuring watchman! We have a smidge of medical autonomy! We can even wear suits if that’s what we desire! (exclamations for enthusiastic emphasis). In this climate of feminism, surely it would not be possible for a seventeen year old to find her sexual choices the topic of discussion amongst a group of women, around the ages of 50-60? Let me set the scene. Mothers are seated around a table for their Sunday morning brunch. Their conversation likely skims over a series of relevant societal issues, perhaps the “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture under Scott Morrison’s leadership (which has now been definitely confirmed by the Brittany Higgins scandal). These women are informed. Intelligent. Cultured. They sit at their table like the women who came before them. Women such as Emmeline Pankhurst, Constance Lytton, Emily Davison and Millicent Fawcett. They have rallied against discrimination, rallied against inequality, rallied against reductive female identities. Rallied against Trump, Weinstein, and the many other misogynistic men in power. Later, one of their daughters would pass on the highlight of their lunchtime exchange. It was on the alarming news that a young girl, aged 17, was spotted hanging around her brand-spankingnew boyfriend. Her third of the year, they whispered. Initially they skirted around the topic. And then landed on a common view. She was a skank. A skank. And once the word took hold, it echoed around the table. How could we blame a poor boy for simply fulfilling his hormonal urges. But a girl! She mustn't hold much respect for herself. Turns out, I am the girl. I am the skank. And so, I too, find myself on trial for assumed sexual proclivities that transgress too far. Clearly placed on that tenacious binary, angel-whore. And suddenly I am not amidst the empowered cry 127


of #metoo or consent petitions. No, I am instead in 1920s Sydney, a time when being a skank saw you imprisoned. And sitting beside me? Nellie Cameron, convicted whore.

WHORES ON TRIAL Before we get to Nellie, let us turn our gaze on the courtroom. Perhaps you have visited one. Or watched enough Law and Order[2] or Judge Judy[3] to get the idea. There is usually always the man, who often maintains an oddly grim face, sitting long and stagnant behind a large wooden desk. In front of him, lies the thick, hard wooden stick he will use to assert his authority. The gavel. And this man is positioned in front of a large sword that hangs on the wall, poking slightly outwards towards the feeble crowd. And this lovely image is positioned neatly in between two large, girthy columns that stand straight and tall, again declaring ultimate authority. Is it me or is the courtroom actually a shrine to multiple manifestations of the phallus? Allow me to immerse you in this trial. This court is now in session. Judge (male): Be seated. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a criminal case against Ellen Katherine Kelly for her rejection of her evolutionary position in society. Maybe I could be a little more euphemistic. Let me try again Judge: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a criminal case against Ellen Katherine Kelly for her means of economic survival. Ok, that's a bit on the nose. Had we been in 1642 Massachusetts, we would have been listening to a criminal investigation into Hester Prynne, perpetrator of the same crime. However, we are in fact in the 21st Century For socially disruptive behaviour?

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Oh, here’s a good one! Judge: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a criminal case against Ellen Katherine Kelly for being a whore. Perfect! Judge: Mr Prosecutor, are you ready for the opening statement on behalf of people. Prosecutor: I am, Your Honor. Thank you very much. Judge: (facing the Jury) Everybody has their notebooks? Yes? Prosecutor: Thank you, Your Honor. Now, a word on the prosecutor. Of course, he is a fictional construct. However, he is also the product of my investigations into prosecution statements in a range of cases. For example, the opening statement of U. S. Attorney Robert Spencer in the Moussaoui Trial highlighted the intense and personal nature of the opening statements. Thus, the following is based on the structure and lexicon of these many voices of justice.[4] Prosecutor: Gentlemen of the jury, The year of 1926 dawned vibrant and swelling in inner Sydney. Sheltered from white wraths of surge by glistening towers -- Grand ramparts founded by the hand of God and man together, the lordly Harbour gleams[5], blessing each day as the seventh. In the city and beyond, ambitious gentlemen left their humble abodes to tend to the tedious work that kept the city beaming. In the homes, gentle wives, caring tenderly for the men and children that will soon return after the long days. Yet, behind those gleaming streets in Sydney's cities, the shadows sleep. What may have been normal days in the luscious city, with such promise and hope, soon became nights of havoc and misrule. The vibrant, blue sky became clouded with soiled air as the night fell, and slithering out of this magnificent world came the snake, hissing her lustful poison into the ears of unknowing gentlemen. And within a few hours out of that city came destruction, filth and dishonour. I mean, I feel like the Garden of Eden metaphor is a little far in the courtroom. 129


In those years of the 90s, and many before that, heartless, distasteful whores wait patiently to ruin lives in the underbelly of the city. Their lack of femininity and respect for themselves holds the power to wreak havoc amongst the most respectable people of our city. Our friends, our loved ones, our neighbours, all corrupt because a group of distasteful females feel too superior to serve their purpose in our society. Rejecting the roles curated for them over centuries. And one of them sits before you today. Surely such language wouldn’t be so readily used now. It was used throughout time, but now? A form of the word ‘whore’ actually appears in all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, except for Julius Caesar & Coriolanus. The variations equate to 59 times in his “high literature”.[6] Nellie Cameron whispers her curses into their naive ears at the end of each long day, stealing them from their families. She has received 73 criminal convictions during her life, mainly for the very reason she is here today; soliciting and vagrancy; and had the distinction of becoming the first woman in Australia to be convicted of consorting with criminals. She left her loving, wealthy mother alone. Abandoned. She was too selfish to stay and care. Too selfish to live a happy life with a man. How could we let someone like her continue to spread disease and disloyalty amongst the city? Hold her accountable for the horrible destruction of these hardworking, loving men and women’s lives and families. Thank you. I guess I can agree that 73 convictions are slightly concerning. But, is it necessary for the prosecutor to comment on the “horrible destruction” Nellie has caused for cheating men and families? That has absolutely nothing to do with the woman doing her job, Sir. Judge: Thank you, prosecutor. Defendant, are you ready? Defendant: Yes, your honor.

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My defendant’s opening is based on the Opening Statement by A. J. Jennings for the Defense in the Trial of Lizzie Borden. And given the 1920s context and rise of psychoanalytical theory as the science of the mind, I have given his argument a Jungian edge. Perhaps a male saviour story? Defendant: Gentlemen, Crime like this has always shocked the feelings and staggered the reason of men, but I think not one of them has been foregrounded the same way in which this crime is. The shocking character of Nellie Cameron is not one to punish, but instead one to nurture. You see, this young woman in her 20s, who has spent her life in a corrupted and dangerous world, has seemed, from the very start, limited in this courtroom. This is a case of no ordinary magnitude. The question of whether my client here, Nellie Cameron, has done anything to justify her being consigned to a felon’s prison or not is one that interests her very essentially, and interests the people very essentially. The public prosecutor assumes that these men were coerced by the luring curse of promiscuity, yet it is something far from that. Instead of a “superior”, ignorant woman, we shall show you that this young woman was not born sinful, but instead was broken by the people in her life. In a way it seems that he might be correct. My research into Nellie Cameron has proven her young life to be somewhat troubled. Perhaps some of you are aware of Carl Jung’s philosophy of the electra complex. The abandonment of Nellie’s paternal figure at a young age would, inevitably, lead to her attention seeking from other older males. This beautiful, helpless young girl was cruelly lured into the trap of corruption, with no true guidance from our society. And so, gentlemen, without wasting any more time, we shall ask you to see what lies before you. We have an opportunity here to save this scared, fatherless young girl. The responsibility turns to us, gentlemen, to nurture her back to sanity. What is it with men feeling the need to save women? Look at every fairytale; Cinderella, saved from evil mother by Prince. Rapunzel, saved from evil mother by Prince. Snow White, saved from evil mother by Prince. Even Thumbelina is saved by Fairy Prince. Regardless, I feel the need to break from this space, and take Nellie with me. Or rather, have her take me into her world.

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TAKE US HOME, NELLIE With much research, I find myself zooming out of the stifling phallocentric setting of the court and walking through the halls of Nellie Cameron’s home in 1926. It’s daytime. Actually, no, it’s the middle of the night. But I'm not me. I’m Nellie Cameron, in all her scholarly glory. Her 5’2”, small frame, her soft red curls, her innocent voice, soon to become ever-so adored by the underworld (including by the peanut crunching crowd of Australia in the Underbelly Series: Razor Gangs). We start on the night of her departure from her childhood, to a life of razor gangs and prositution. Call me Nellie. The dark halls echo with each step. The candle sticks stand erect along the tall, dark green walls, and the yellow flames flicker in the silence, marking a thick, terrifying shadow on the wall. Her heart beats in her ears as she creeps alongside the walls. She has done this midnight traverse to the pantry enough times to avoid the wooden planks that creek. However, this night is different. Instead of turning left at the large clock, toward the kitchen, Nellie will turn right, and will slowly open the back door, and slip into the black of the night. As she approaches the large door of her mother’s bedroom, she begins to slow down. She hears the soft weeping, as she always does. Before, she would have knocked, waiting patiently by the door with open arms ready to comfort her. Tell her it’s all going to be ok and she doesn’t need to listen to the women at the Ladies Lunch club. Who cares what they say? However, her mother wouldn’t come running out, falling into her daughter's arms. She wouldn’t reassure her worried daughter. Instead, she would open the door with a fire in her eyes. A fire that Nellie would only ever see in her mother’s glares. So, tonight was the night she had prepared herself for for years. She couldn’t try to comfort her mother anymore. She didn’t want her there. And she couldn’t stand the rumours and the gossip. The judgement. The hatred in the halls. She wanted to be free, to live in a world where her life wasn’t contained to a box of family secrets.

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And so, as she stood at the door of the hallway, she took one more look behind her. The candles flutter weakly, and, from the angle by the open front door, the shadows do not exist. It didn’t sadden her to leave. It didn’t frighten her as it has in her mind. It liberated her. With each step into the night air she felt more and more free. That is until she found herself the topic of discussion around a table of women who labelled her a skank. A BRIEF INTERLUDE: ETYMOLOGICAL ROOTS OF SKANK It is always interesting how certain words become embedded into our vocabulary. It turns out that the word emerged some time during the 1960s, the zenith of counter cultural movements. The height of second wave feminism. “DEROGATORY•INFORMAL a sleazy or unpleasant person. ● A woman who has many casual sexual encounters or relationships. ● A person (esp. A woman) regarded as an unattractive, sleazy, sexually promiscuous, or immoral (Oxford Dictionary) The term, skank, has been popularised in modern media, such as TV and books. The pop culture film, Mean Girls, referred to the “army of skanks” that are seen as the most promiscuous and hated in the school. Patrice A. Oppliger wrote a book, exploring the word skank in both preadolescent and adolescent girls, called Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualisation of Girls in American Culture. LADIES COFFEE Now we have heard from Nellie’s supposed life, let’s shift from this space. We are leaving behind the phallic court and the tale of a young woman, to hear some outsiders' thoughts. And not just any outsiders. A group of intelligent, feminist women.

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A women’s discussion group meets at the coffee shop across the road from the gloomy courtroom. The women enter the coffee shop, calling out “their regulars, please”, to the employees. On hearing the news of Nellie Cameron’s trial and imprisonment for soliciting and vagrancy, the women were riveted by the conversation. After watching what unfolded in the courtroom, they saw the woman confined within the walls of the patriarchal space of the court, and thus felt obliged to discuss their thoughts. These women are intelligent. They have studied feminism of all ages. Attending protests and meetings on a range of causes. As they find their seats around the large table, I place myself just beside Lucy, the youngest of the group, silently spectating. Well, that was an interesting case, ladies. What are our thoughts? Lucy, often neutral between the ladies, questions their thoughts on the decriminalisation of prostitution. Clemie, aged 54, nods agreeably, saying that it is so important for the safety of these women. Ava is in her early 30s, doing her masters in Sociology at Sydney University, and occasionally holds a different view on situations than expected. It also allows women to be provided proper services fairly! I only see benefits in that law, says Ava. The other ladies agree. I would also say that in today’s day and age, working independently may not be the safest idea, says Julie, one of the older ladies of the group. The women remain somewhat silent as they conjure reasons for and against this claim. While some agree, Madeline breaks the silence. Who cares if she wants to be alone in her work. I guess there are safety issues but there would be ways around that. If a woman chooses that then I don’t know who would stop her. Ariana fires back. Madeline, I would disagree. The regulated brothels would definitely ensure more safety and reduce the health risks for a female against multiple men. I don’t mean to diminish the strength of women, however, who knows what may occur if it's multiple large men against one woman. I guess, in a way, they're both correct. Ariana does make a good point, they need some protection. However, I can understand why it would come across as restricting female agency in the workforce. Anyway, let's skip forward

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So what are our thoughts on Nellie’s position as a prostitute, Clemie asks. Julie says maybe she wouldn’t be a prostitute if she had a stable family, especially considering her father left. I know we disagree with Freud, but perhaps on some level it's related to the electra complex? The women feel likely odd agreeing with such an absurd theory, however do consider it. Maybe she was morally off track, but the blame lies on her absent family, Ava says. She is obviously poor and uneducated, so she may not have many opportunities in life, says Ava. However, Lucy reminds her of Nellie’s status before entering that world. Olivia is another woman at this table, currently working as a local journalist. Either way, Ava, I would not agree that her economic status is the determining factor in picking prostitution as a career, she says. And she can do whatever she wants. Who are we to control her sexuality?, adds Madeline. Everyone around the table agrees in unison. That is exactly what these women stand for. Ava, feeling embarrassed for her mishap, corrects herself and strongly states that the women at that table, together, are not going to conform to the patriarchal stereotype of prostitutes. They are not exploiting their bodies, but taking agency in their bodies. I mean, imagine what life was like in her times! The 20s would have been brutal against women like her, says Lucy. She would have been seen as a whore. Ladies, people still think that, they just don’t say it, says Ava. We probably all do inside somewhere? The women become slightly agitated by Ava’s statement. I wouldn’t. Maybe others, but not me. We have an education in this stuff, Ava. Olivia, silently thinking about Ava’s point, poses another question. Ladies, I have an interesting thought. What would you think if your daughters or sisters became prostitutes? Silence. Oh, gosh, Julie whispers to herself. I would not enjoy that, Lucy says awkwardly. 135


Well, that took us back to the start, says Madeline. Olivia asks why everyone thinks that. The men are dirty, Ava says quietly. I guess even this proves it. No matter how much we may try, it appears that even the feminist, agentic and strong women are still confined to the patriarchal stereotype. GRANNY’S TALE Anywhom, we must proceed. I was speaking with my maternal grandmother about the focus of my piece (with numerous appropriate euphemisms), when she mentioned that "That Nellie reminds me of Ruth Ellis. She used to live on our street." I had never heard of Ruth Ellis but it opened a can of misogynistic worms that had me walking into another courtroom. This time hesitatingly behind Ruth - she had quite the reputation.

THE SECOND TRIAL This one takes us back to 1955. The case of Ruth Neilson, commonly known as the last woman to be hung in the UK. These rooms may look different but they are very much the same. Prosecutor: It was Easter Sunday, the 10th of April 1955, when Ruth Ellis stood in front of the Magdala public house in Hamsteep and shot David Blakely 5 times. You will hear lies. You will hear her deceit as she claims she had no choice but to forcibly end this abuse she supposedly endured. But she could have run. She could’ve saved herself. David Blakely was a man of true courage and respect. And this woman that sits before us, Ruth Neilson, shot David Blakey’s limp body 5 times. There is no humanity here. What really sits before you is a murderer. And no matter how many excuses will be made by both Neilson, herself, and her defendant, there is no explanation that can excuse the heinous act that this woman carried out.

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We cannot have this dangerous woman walking the streets, the streets in which our wives and children play. We cannot have this woman threatening the lives of men who may upset her. Her hysteria has transcended that of the regular women. She is a killer. Thank you Men have historically been so afraid of ‘dangerous women;. Particularly ones that challenge the strength of men. I do admit, she’s a murderer. But, considering the circumstances, it seemed as though it was not Ruth herself that was bad, it was the result of a tired and angry woman that has been consistently abused and mistreated throughout her life. Judge: Defendant, you may proceed. Defendant: Thank you, your honor. This plot that the prosecution has presented to you is false. Ruth is not an inhumane murderer, but instead a victim. She is a victim of the abuse that David Blakey inflicted on her. She is but a broken and betrayed woman, who repeatedly found herself in hostile, violent relationships. Ellis, whole-heartedly and committed, married Goerge Johntson Ellis in 1950. It wasn’t until much later she found out was a violent alcoholic. This gentle woman had that man's child, whom he abandoned without second thought. Imagine if that was your daughter, your sister, your friend. In search of another life of stability and happiness, Ellis pushed aside that fear for Blakely. Not only did he abuse her, but he caused her miscarriage. She had just lost a baby after being viciously beaten by the man she loved, and was desperately unwell. She did this for her safety, and her sanity. You see, this case is not about the murder. This case is about finding the true humanity within you to help this woman. She is mentally unwell, and needs help more than she needs a punishment.. When the lady in front of you stands before you, you will hear the true story and know that this act was the product of abuse, an act of insanity brought on by the tragedy of a failed romance, a romance that once promised stability for Ruth and her young son. Thank you.

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This shouldn’t be the response from the defendant. It's not about being ‘gentle’, or trying to oblige by societal norms. It is about being fed up. Every week in Australia in 2021, one woman is murdered by her husband or male partner. All those involved in investigating, charging, prosecuting, defending or trying a woman who has killed her violent/abusive intimate partner should be using a social entrapment framework - including consideration of sexual violence - to understand the facts.[7] Here is an example of a failed court case on a similar matter to Ruth Ellis’. Dr Chamari Liyanage killed her husband in June 2014 after years of holistic abuse. In trial, two psychatrists blamed her murder on “cult-like mentality”, which caused her to “lose the ability to do logical things like leave.” Dr Liyange was sentenced to four years in prison and convicted of manslaughter. "When I got to prison, it was a safe haven; I found my own peace in my mind and in my heart and it let me explore myself and be myself,"[8]. A woman feels more safe in prison than in a marriage. Judge: Prosecution, you may call your first witness. Prosecutor: Your Honor, I call to the stand, Ruth Neilson. Judge: Will the witness please stand to be sworn in by the bailiff. (Witness is sworn in) Prosecutor: Ruth Ellis, when you fired the revolver at close range into the body of David Blakely, what did you intend to do? Ellis: It’s obvious that when I shot him I intended to kill him. That is the only question that Ruth Ellis was asked by the prosecutor on the 20th of June, 1955 in the Number One Court at the Old Bailey, London. She was convicted as guilty just 20 minutes later. Ellis did not try to defend herself. From the minute she was arrested, and right through to the day she was hanged, she was satisfied she had done what she had intended to do.[9]

138


Shall we move to questions by the defendant, to grasp a better understanding of the coldblooded man killer? I assume this is how it would have gone, considering these are her actual responses. Defendant: Were you romantically involved with David Blakley? Ellis: Yes. Defendant: And tell us, what was your relationship like in the early days? Did you enjoy romantic strolls together? Did you cook warm meals for him, excited by his return from work? Ellis: Of course. What sort of wife would not stay up for their kind husbands? Defendant: Whilst you were in the relationship, did he physically assault you? Ellis: He only hit me with his fist or hand. I bruise easily. Defenant: Do you have reason to believe that your miscarriage was caused by David’s actions? Ellis: A few weeks or days previously, I do not know which, David got very violent. I do not know whether that caused the miscarriage or not. He thumped me in the tummy. Defendant: And, were you romantically involved with Desmond Cussen? Ellis: Yes Defendant: Did Desmond Cussen influence or assist the murder of Mr Blakely? Ellis: No Defendant: Did Desmond Cussen hand you the gun and drive you to the crime scene? Ellis: No. I had been given the gun three years ago by a US serviceman in payment for a debt, and I ordered a taxi to take me to the Hampstead pub. 139


CHANEL CONTOS Midway through writing this, a petition starts. Thousands and thousands of testimonies flooded the halls of schools, the streets in the cities, the minds of those held down, the minds of those that held down. A ripple effect empowered us to speak up against the entrenched misogyny even in our early experiences with boys. Boys that call us frigid if we don’t, skank if we do. And then the responses: “But she slept with everyone!” “She’s lying - he wouldn’t do that!” “Maybe if she wasn’t so drunk she wouldn’t be here.” Here we are again, back to the start. RUTH IN THE CELL Whilst the defendant may have tried to frame Ellis as a victim of abuse, she did not attempt to pose herself as innocent. However, if we look back at what we now know, we can assume that what occurred in that courtroom was nothing but a performance. Let’s take ourselves to the morning of July 12, 1955, the day before her execution, in which she was interviewed by solicitor, Victor Mishcon. Call me Ruth. She sat on the end of the hard bed. The whole prison is a grim survival of Victorian hideousness. [10]

Above the bed, hangs a black cross that stares down at her. The question of heaven and hell

often crosses her mind as she stares up at it. There’s only so much a woman can do under the constraints of a man. Sometimes, patriarchal bargaining is the only way out. He couldn’t continue to hurt her anymore. He wouldn't hurt her son anymore. She knew she would die for it. Guard: (opening the cell door) Ruth Ellis, you have an interview with Mr Victor Mishcon. Follow me”

140


The guard opens a sealed door to reveal a metal table in the center of an empty room. She sits on a cold, metal seat. Two men follow her in. Leon Simmons and Victor Mishcon. They look the same as she remembered, during the divorce to George. Victor in particular; the suit that sits slightly too wide on his thin frame, the dark, slicked haircut, his straight smile, his friendly eyes. She forces happy eyes and a big smile. Ellis: Mr Mishcon, Mr Simmons, how have you been! Let’s skip forward to the interesting stuff, shall we? Mishcon: And you were seeing both Desmond Cussen and David Blakely at the same time? Ellis: Yes, but it was mutual. Mishcon: Yes. Now, what were you doing with Cussen on the day of the murder. Ellis: We had been drinking for most of the weekend. Mishcon: Did he enlist you to kill David Blakely? Ellis: Mr Mishcon, he was abusive. I did it for my own safety and sanity. Mishcon: I will ask you again, did you kill David Blakely under Cussen’s influence? We can assume there was a part of her that wanted to maintain the facade she had held up during the trial. The one in which the crowds shunned her calmness and honesty. She wanted to protect Desmond, after what he had done for her. But there was something about Victor Mishcon that was almost compelling. The courtroom didn’t really care for the facts of the case. It only lasted 20 minutes. They cared that a person, particularly a woman of prestige, like Ruth Ellis, stood up and said ‘I shot him’. She did what an unfortunate man would do, but instead was framed as a hideous perversion of what we all know of the female. But Victor was asking for her side. Audience, you may question why she didn’t defend herself in the trial. She could have fought for her life. His death was provoked, after all. But when a woman in society transgresses what we all know, it often doesn’t slide, as it may for a man. And so, I suspect she felt as though this was her dying confession. There was no hope anymore, so why not be honest?)

141


Ellis: Yes. He did, in fact, give me the gun, and drive me to the crime scene. Of course, a part of what compelled me to kill him was to ensure my own safety. However, yes. Cussen taught me how to shoot, and how to kill. Victor and Leon look at each other. They really did believe they could save this woman’s life. Only issue: Ruth was already dead. THE ENGLISH PUB (Now, dear reader, I am going to take you back to the table. Different women, different venues, same idea. And guess who the centre of conversation is this time? Ruth Ellis.) The women’s discussion group meet again, but this time I place them in a typical English pub setting. Of course, I have never been to this pub and nor have my guests. But it allows for certain open dialogue. In the pub we sit at a long mahogany table, and on this controversial evening five women drink chardonnay out of plastic cups and eat cashews and Wafers with beetroot hummus. They range in age from their early twenties to their late sixties. These women come together for popular trials in Australia, to discuss interesting perspectives and different cases centered around feminism. Well, that was an interesting case, ladies. What are our thoughts? Matilda mentions how Ruth must have been a reasonably wealthy woman, considering she was somewhat well known and held a secure job, claiming she “could have left before Blakely became abusive”. The other women look Matilda up and down. Eliza, and somewhat the mother hen of the group, reminds Matilda of how Ruth may have been trapped in her position as a wife in society, despite her economic status. She says there’s a line women, particularly in the 50s, that women could not cross. And he was abusive. Jasmine, changing the topic, questions the opinions on the legitimacy of murdering an abusive husband. Ziana begins. If a woman feels so physically and emotionally trapped within a relationship, then it is clearly self defence. The court must acknowledge the mental state this woman may have been placed in before going for the death penalty. You see, darlings, the legal system renders the use of defensive force against an abusive partner as “unreasonable”[11]. It is not easy, legally, socially for that matter, for a woman to admit they killed their abusive partners, says Jasmine. 142


How would you know if she is telling the truth? What if he wasn’t abusive and she lied for money? That has happened before, says Matilda. Maybe that has happened, but silencing a woman that has claimed assault would go against everything women have fought for. In this case, Ruth Ellis knew she would die. It is not about whether she was lying, it's about having support. In her case, she never had that support, because she went against what men knew of women, says Eliza. Abuse was so normalised, adds Jasmine. It was an act of self defense, Matilda. Did you ladies hear about the miscarriage? He punched her so hard in the gut she lost a child, Bianca proceeds. The women shake their heads, horrified. Ziana gulps at her wine again. The asshole deserved it! Did you see the men in that trial! They completely undermined the importance of the trial and blamed it on her being a “hysterical killer”. Do you think she knew she was going to die?, asks Bianca. I mean, she did turn herself in as soon as she did it, says Jasmine. She had a son, right?, Ziana says. What happened to him? I heard she got pregnant four times. Only one baby made it, she terminated two and we know what happened to the last, says Bianca.

TODAY Many weeks after this dinner at the pub, I recounted my conversation about Ruth Ellis with my father. To summarise, he told me that my grandmother had never, in fact, lived on the same street as Ruth Ellis. He said he was pretty sure that they were in the same town, Knightsbridge, but that was when my grandmother was 10 years old, in 1965 (a decade after Ruth’s execution). It appears as though Ruth Ellis’ notoriety resulted in a persistent tale that ultimately silenced her own story. Similarly, with Nellie Cameron; her life became defined as a prostitute. In a way, her description as a promiscuous ‘skank’ can be translated to my own story. But it isn’t all fiction. Those “women at the table” were real. Some young, some old. My friends, my parents, my teachers. And no matter how hard these strong women may try, there is always a small part of them compelled by the whispers of the patriarchy. Whispers of the patriarchy 143


where a seventeen year old girl may find herself the topic of conversation at a brunch where the consensus is she is a skank. So, perhaps we can assume that Nellie and Ruth were not whores, or merciless killers, but instead were shaped by the gossip of the patriarchy.

144


Mayling Paton: Where Diyu Belong? The Hauntings of a Hybrid Identity Inspired by traditional Chinese ghost parables and the genre of Australian gothic fiction, my fictocritical response seeks to explore the intricate, multifaceted relationship between ghosts and the Eurasian identity, as informed by the fictional works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Simone Lazaroo. By identifying and deconstructing the tripartite meanings and connotations surrounding the symbol of the ghost (the ghost as ancestor, Westerner and Eurasian) through both a critical and creative lens, I interrogate the role of language and narratives in the navigation of liminal, hybrid identities, suggesting that it ultimately allows for an emancipation of self.

Where Diyu

[1]

Belong?

The Hauntings of a Hybrid Identity TRAVELLER IN-BETWEEN White bed sheets draped over wandering figures yelling ‘trick or treat!’ are perhaps what we first imagine when we think of a ghost. Or perhaps we see a wafting transparent spirit hidden beneath creaking floorboards, or the uncanny innocence of the Grady twins, dressed in matching, blue-ruffled frocks. These superimposed images offer a sprinkling of supernatural terror over the Western canon. But what I imagine is a bowl of oranges, apples and pomegranates arranged in front of my grandparents’ red shrine and the pungent woody scent of burning incense. I hear the soothing voice of Ama

[2]

as she puts

my four-year-old self to sleep with stories of banana-tree ghosts, or ghosts who chase after little girls who

[3]

don’t drink their soup, or, as Akong

would often interrupt to jokingly say, the ang moh gui.

[4]

And I

would laugh along, the dutiful Eurasian granddaughter, trying to ignore the fact that I was half ang moh. So I grew up with ghosts both as the grounding for the Asian cultural consciousness, the linkage of a rich cultural tradition which connects the wide diaspora, and as a symbol of the Western other.

[5]

Therefore, 145


my relationship with ghosts is complex; I am haunted by the ghosts of my ancestral past and those of the present. Trapped in the liminal space between these disparate meanings, I too become a ghost, where my self is undefined and symbols of cultural boundaries are blurred.

[6]

EXORCISTS, SHAMANS AND ME Both Simone Lazaroo, through the lens of a Eurasian female in her novel The World Waiting to be Made (1994), and Maxine Hong Kingston, as focalised by Asian American women in her fictomemoir The Woman Warrior (1976), invite us to engage in the process of cultural translation. In their texts, these composers each uniquely interrogate the tripartite meanings and connotations surrounding ghosts through a hybrid Asian lens. They establish the dialectical binaries of the ghost as Chinese ancestor and as Westerner, however, they then manipulate the unstable signifier of the ghost to become a metonym for the cultural invisibility and fluidity of the hybrid Eurasian identity. The Asian Australian or Asian American female identity is an initially strained synthesis of these two opposing worlds and meanings, and it is the collapse of the fixed cultural signifiers which define Western and Asian culture which causes a disjunct in identity for the Eurasian, manifesting in a difficulty to establish ethnic and spiritual ontological ground. However, by using the symbol of the ghost to capture the spectral liminality of the hybrid Asian identity, both the authors and their protagonists are able to successfully resist the interpellation of dominant cultural hegemonies. By expressing their personal narratives through an exploration of Asian and Western etymology, linguistics and narrative representation, the intangible, phantasmic, hybrid ethnic identity is made tangible and open to navigation, offering the potential for a liberating Eurasian experience. Lazaroo extends this in her redefinition of Australian landscape iconography to become more spiritually meaningful for those whose personal narratives are excluded from the national myth.

Thus, it is their distinct construction of meaning, through literature, in the ‘third space’

[7]

- the fluid,

ghostly realm between two cultures - which allows for the emancipation of a fully integrated Asian Australian/American identity. In doing so, the liminal nature of the hybrid identity allows it to be liberating, albeit challenging, and whilst it requires constant navigation, it no longer acts as a restrictive framework, rather, as one which offers freedom. The Eurasian identity - a ghost-like identity - is therefore able to transcend any fixed signifiers of culture, be it spatiotemporal, geographical, historic or spiritual.

146


ASHES OF ANCESTORS AND OFFERINGS

We recall what Ama

[8]

often repeated when tucking us into bed. Our ancestors are generous and

protective, smelling like the lingering, thick aromas of incense. But, unlike our ancestors, we must beware the ancestors of others; these ghosts are manipulative, vengeful and uncaring, like a bā jiāo guǐ

[9]

or a pontianak

[10]

who pulls you by the ankles away from your home to devour when your feet

droop over the sides of your bed. We still sleep curled up in a ball, our toes far away from the edges. The principal meaning of ghosts being nebulous apparitions of dead ancestors symbolises a cultural memory that a migrant can never forget or eradicate. Rather, it requires constant recollecting, retelling and reinventing.

[11]

Beyond the notion of superstition, the ghost reflects a ‘haunting past’, a linkage between

one’s current sociocultural context and that of one’s ancestors. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior offers an anecdote in which she manipulates signifiers of spirituality and language to highlight the strength of cultural bonds across the wide Chinese diaspora: ‘But ghosts can’t be just nightmares,’ a storyteller protested. ‘Once our whole family saw wine cups spinning and incense sticks waving through the air. We got the magic monk to watch all night. He also saw the incense tips tracing orange figures in the dark – ideographs, he said. He followed the glow patterns with his inkbrush on red paper. And there it was, a message from our greatgrandfather. We needed to put bigger helpings and a Ford in front of his plaque. And when we did, the haunting stopped immediately.’

The reverent fear, and yet, respect for one’s ancestors acts as a culturally uniting force, and the burning

[12]

of paper offerings allows the tributes to traverse the confines of the living world as a means to appease one’s ancestors and express one’s love and devotion. Through her purposeful use of nomenclature, in which she refers to Asian American women as ‘storytellers’, Kingston suggests that the maintenance of an ancestral, oral tradition allows migrants to voice their own marginalised narratives, since hybrid Asian literature exists on the peripheries of both Western and Asian literary canons. The metafictional nature of the excerpt emphasises the power of written and spoken language in reshaping the Western canon by incorporating Chinese parables and superstitions. Language becomes an instrument to navigate cultural roots - a way for migrants to interpret and reorder the world around them, and even form realities of their own. Kingston 147


highlights that it is through narrative revisionism - acts of linguistic and cultural translation - that ethnic identity can be asserted. However, the ritualistic processes directed towards ancestors are also used to placate the neglected dead. The Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi described how the ch’i (!) of an individual who died a horrific, unjust or untimely death often transmogrified into a vengeful spirit; it is this fear of ghosts that unites the Chinese diaspora just as fiercely as filial piety does to one’s ancestors. It is important to distinguish, however, between one’s ghost and ancestors; the category ‘ghost’ is fluid and relative, where ‘your ancestors are my ghosts, and my ancestors are your ghosts’.[13] Unlike ancestors, who are often humanised as watchful guides, ghosts are demonised as monstrous, otherworldly beings in both traditional and contemporary Chinese literature. The dehumanising anaphora of ‘it’ in Kingston’s characterisation of a ‘Sitting Ghost’, in, ‘it did not have the shape of a recognisable animal...it was bigger than a wolf, bigger than an ape...it is dangerous, it is real’, reflects Zhu Xi’s exploration into the ‘monstrous otherness’ of the ghost. By ascribing bestial characteristics to these ghosts, they become non-distinct sources of terror, neither fully human nor fully animal. Like Kingston, Lazaroo explores the meaning of one’s ‘ghosts’ and ‘ancestors’ by juxtaposing the two, allowing her to foreground the more complex applications of the term ‘ghost’ in her novel. The protagonist, in the fragment titled ‘What My Grandfather Believed’, retells and reinvents her Malay, Christao Eurasian and Singaporean ancestral beliefs, all of which are deeply rooted in a reverence for ancestors and fear of the ghost.

“He believed in pretending to throw manure from his backside at rude people so the hantus

[14]

wouldn’t get angry.” “He believed iron filings, knives, needles and pineapples could keep evil spirits away.” “He believed the souls of our ancestors exist after their death to help us find our own souls.” The somewhat humorous and absurdist image of manure, pineapples and knives acting as equally effective weapons to deter the presence of ghosts suggests the protagonist’s underlying awareness that these beliefs are rooted in farcical superstition. However, as the tone shifts to one grounded in a spiritual awareness, she subtly draws attention to the nuanced complexities of her ancestral beliefs. The anaphora of ‘he believed’ emphasises the significance of these spiritual beliefs in her culture, however, she does not affirm them as her 148


own. Instead, she allows for a reflection and mediation of such ideologies, inviting the reader to also contemplate the significance of the symbol of the ghost. GHOSTS FROM THE mOTHERLAND We picture people with sun-bleached, flaxen or flaming orange hair, and glimpse a calloused foot, a darkly tanned wrist, and then a wrinkled forehead. We see a flash of ghostly white skin marked by sunburnt fissures. These people seemed to be spliced into fragments; they are hollow, roving spirits, drifting aimlessly.

[15]

Ang moh.

Red-haired.

The Cantonese call them gweilo.

[16]

Ghost man. Or foreign devil. When we explore the malleable symbol of the ghost further, we see that, throughout literature, they are also representations of the marginalised outcasts of Chinese society – those who are not ‘fully Asian’. Through a Western lens, this could be interpreted as a potentially ironic inversion of colonial binaries, where the Asian is no longer deemed the exotic “other”, rather, the Westerner is the inhuman, ghost-like outcast. Until the late Han dynasty, ghosts featured heavily in cultural, religious, familial and philosophical “ghost discourses”, rather than written texts. Thus, the birth of literary ghost narratives, zhiguai, in the Six Dynasties

[17]

was a historical production where the process of transcribing oral narratives into a written

form solidified the nebulous figure of the ghost - making tangible the intangible. It was the creation of this genre that established the second meaning of the ghost as a “foil” to humans, the subhuman “other” in mirroring ‘human’ Chinese society.

[18]

Hence, the word ‘ghost’ became a metonym for a foreigner.

149


‘But America has been full of machines and ghosts - Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts. Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe...limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars.’ Kingston’s accumulative use of epithets and epistrophe ironically allows for a parodic narrative revisionism by which early Chinese immigrants tried to establish ontological ground and claim their legitimate status by incorporating their own experiences of alienation to debase and “other” the existence of Westerners. However, it is not the white skin of Westerners that led to the coinage of epithets which conflated foreigners with ghosts. Rather, the cultural lexicon surrounding ghosts as the subhuman foreigner derives from the intrinsic belief that they are dislocated from their ancestry and homeland. Kingston’s sentiments are founded in the Chinese character for ‘ghost’ (gui, 鬼), which itself has linguistic connotations of the character for ‘return’ (歸) since they are near homophones, suggesting that the ghost is defined by an inability to return – an inability to return to the tangible land of the living, and an inability to return to the land of one’s ancestors.

[19]

The ethereality of ghosts is ultimately liminal; ghosts are diminished to porous, silent,

transparent shadows, devoid of all cultural solidity, identity, purpose or teleology. Contrastingly, Lazaroo interprets the presence of ghosts as regressive interpolators into the modern Asian Australian narrative; these ‘undeclared demons’ and ‘stowaway hantus’ are the hauntings of her Singaporean ancestry, seeking to ‘take us away from ourselves’, rather than the ghosts of Western culture. The Eurasian is therefore haunted by both the ghosts of the ancestral past and of the cultural present - a double displacement. And we wonder: which ghost is following us now? DOUBLE DEFECTION: DOUBLE HAUNTING We pick up a porcelain bowl and use chopsticks to outline the paintings of golden dragons which weave their tails behind the mound of rice. See the way they tremble and writhe against the cerulean sky, unable to reach the flaming, golden pearl

[20]

, their jaws clenched as though afraid to roar! See the

way their bodies tense every time we stick our chopsticks

[21]

into the celadon bowl, stealing the

precious grains of rice which they so viciously protect! We turn the bowl around and see the likeness of

[22]

Kuan Yin

, and a drawing of the Nian

[23]

coiling away from the red lanterns etched onto the bowl. 150


The light flickers over the images of trees as they become dark shadows, their gnarled branches imitating the serpentine body of Xiangliu

[24]

.

The use of macaronic language by Asian Australian, Asian American or Eurasian authors leaves the Western reader in a liminal and intangible ghost space where meaning is obfuscated and a sense of orientation is prohibited. My poetic illustrations of the serpentine Xiangliu, the divinities of Buddhist religion, and ghoulish superstition require decoding - they require the process of cultural translation.

[25]

By incorporating

linguistic puns, cultural references and mythological allusions, meaning is hidden, tangled and made complex for those without a fluent understanding of Chinese language and culture.

[26]

By dismantling the

assumption of the “universal” reader, authors give rise to multiple interpretations of the same text according to various levels of linguistic and cultural understanding. This allows for a readerly subjectivity

[27]

and

interpretation of the text, placing the Western reader in a state of confusion and alienation, flipping the exclusionary Western gaze as perpetuated in literature and enacted in the socio-cultural marginalisation of Chinese migrants and Eurasians. By drawing from ancient Chinese parables and juxtaposing them against Western narrative tropes, authors are able to give representation to the cultural and linguistic tensions that define the liminal Eurasian identity, concretising them through literature. It is on this premise that I am drawn by the fragmented and episodic nature of Kingston and Lazaroo’s texts, as they function to dislocate the non-Chinese speaking reader. Hence the third and final meaning of the ghost concerns its applicability to the Eurasian; the literary ghost as a living, and yet alienated member of Chinese society with the innate desire to return home is mimetic of the Eurasian’s essential anthropological impulse to establish identity through their ancestral roots. The Eurasian identity is ghost-like, shadowless, incorporeal and constantly in flux. Kingston appropriates the symbol of the ghost as a visual representation of the Asian American’s displacement and ontological unease. The aposiopesis and repetition of a pejorative racial slur in, ‘Ho Chi Kuei. Leave then. Get out, you Ho Chi Kuei. Get out. I knew you were going to turn out bad. Ho Chi Kuei’ highlights the fragmented and inconclusive nature of the protagonist’s identity, and sheds light on the dilemma of assimilation into the dominant Western environment. By leaving the racial epithet, ‘Ho Chi Kuei’, untranslated throughout her entire text, whilst it can be understood to mean ‘ghost-like’, Kingston is able to signify the cultural distinctiveness and untranslatability of her hybrid identity. The derogatory term almost becomes a hypocorism due to its integral role in defining the protagonist’s identity. The intrinsic correlation between 151


identity and ancestral culture renders the Asian American as an extension of the subhuman Westerner - an ethereal, aimlessly wandering spirit, lacking any ontological human foundations due to its detachment from the rich culture of the motherland. Laaroo’s protagonist self-reflexively indicates the heuristic importance of supernatural beings in defining her identity through her frequent, imagined interactions with spirits, hantus, exorcists, bomohs and ‘Evil Genius Demons’. The requoting of a proverbial myth in, ‘some Eurasians of Malaccan origin believe that if you are shocked too much a weakness is created in your spirit that lets the hantus in. Who you really are can be lost forever’, highlights the intricate relationship between the Eurasian and the ghost, and the significance of this bond in the protagonist’s cultural consciousness. The cultural lexicon of the ghost is appropriated by Lazaroo as she adopts food (specifically, the culturally distinctive dish of chicken feet

[28]

) as a signifier of

culture, or more specifically, the rejection and renegotiation of culture. The protagonist receives the generalising declaration, ‘You Eurasians so chap cheng

[29]

, get lost so quickly’, after she attempts to

navigate her hybrid identity using the symbol of food, and due to her cultural ambivalence, she is deemed a ‘mixed breed’ - impure and adulterated.

[30]

The Eurasian protagonist initially attempts to navigate her

hybrid identity by rejecting her Chinese roots in order to assimilate into Western culture, due to her ‘desire to emerge as ‘authentic’ through mimicry.’

[31]

Her appendix, a ‘redundant organ’, becomes a metaphor for her ‘Asian disease’, which she easily discards in an attempt to camouflage into ‘true Aussie’ culture. However, when this fails, she embraces the Western trope of the exotic, hyper-sexualised, dangerous, Oriental female: ‘I had dressed to look mysterious, as if I was concealing secrets...I was as uninformed as Mata Hari in my recreation of the Orient. All I could do was feed into people’s misconceptions of Asia. I was whatever people wanted me to be.’ However, in doing so, she acknowledges the performativity of such a costume - that the cultural “other” is exoticised and produced for Western consumption. It is this metaphoric ‘masking’ which gives the stereotype both its ‘fixity and its phantasmatic quality’,

[32]

becoming an apparatus ‘inscribed in a play of power.’

[33]

Unable to be recognised or disguised as a ‘pure’ Australian, she therefore adopts a Western gaze, 152


subscribing to the fetishisation of the Asian female as a means to wield her ‘Asianness’ in a manner ‘appropriate’ to cultural stereotypes. It is only later in the novel that she reconciles her Eurasian identity as an emancipated, third, new identity

[34]

, no longer a source of tension between the binaries

[35]

of white

Australian and Asian culture. Tongue-tied We see a weathered book and pick it up, our eyes narrowing as we try to make sense of the strokes, dashes and dots that seem to form a word. Soon the ideographs rise from the page and lift their wings; they fly off, the movement of their intricate wings ruffling the pages. We open up a different book, but here the letters are rigid, exacting, moving horizontally along the page. Our eyes are caught at the words ‘returning home.’ What is home? The letters for home look nothing like a home, unlike the lines in "#. When we see the character for huí jiā, we see a house, with a square window. But when we read ‘home’, we don’t see anything. Our eyes droop. Meaning is tangled in this labyrinthine jumble of strokes, dashes and dots, a disconcerting web of ideological confusion. Language itself becomes a means of cultural navigation; the origins, connotations and visual aesthetics of a word shape its meaning, and by juxtaposing two language systems in their texts, Kingston and Lazaroo interrogate the linguistic and ideological tensions which define the hybrid identity. Both authors highlight how the symbol of the ghost has been informed by the more solitudinal and individualistic mythos of Caucasian culture, and how this interacts with the collectivist mindscape of Asian culture. Kingston illustrates this cultural conflict not only through the symbol of the ghost and its significance in literary culture, but also by presenting the alphabetical representation of the word “I”, to which the respective ideographic representation is diametrically opposed. The young narrator confronts this anthropological linguistic tension at school through the integration of Chinese cultural, literary and visual puns. ‘I could not understand "I." The Chinese "I" has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American "I," assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? … "I" is a capital and "you" is a lower-case.’ Despite her postmodern deconstruction of signifiers, the protagonist is still unable to establish cultural and linguistic ontological ground, which leads to temporary aphasia, confusion and dislocation, emphasised by 153


her use of hypophora. She attempts to put the Western “I” in her native Chinese context but in vain, thereby indicating the differences between language systems, constructions of “I” and identity, and the polarising attitudes towards individualism and collectivism, metonymically represented by the capitalised “I” and the lower-case “you”. Hence, by placing the Western reader in a situation defined by linguistic, ideological and cultural tension, the authors are able to highlight the liminal nature of their hybrid identities. Both Kingston and Lazaroo’s protagonists attempt to navigate and assert their hybrid identities by returning to their ancestral roots either physically or linguistically (through parables, songs and ghost stories) or by redefining insular and parochial Australian cultural symbols. The liminality of the Asian Australian identity can manifest itself in oral forms of communication, which Lazaroo highlights through the extended metaphor of the pragmatic particle ‘lah’. The repeated rhetorical questions, indicative of the protagonist’s sense of dislocation and confusion, in ‘Where was the singing of words to reassure? Lah, where was lah?’ indicate that this seemingly meaningless or comical trope in the eyes of the Western world has become a crucial signifier for cultural acceptance and reassurance to those feeling trapped in a hybrid identity. The incorporation of this idiosyncrasy in her text facilitates the narrator’s attempts to navigate her dualistic identity and destabilise Eurocentric linguistic tropes. Piecing together wǒ and I The ghost of the Eurasian is splintered into shards which seem incongruous and jarring, forming pieces of an impossible puzzle - never able to be fully ‘whole.’ Lazaroo’s fractured narrative form acts as a mimesis for the Asian Australian’s fractured identity, but perhaps it is this embrace of the story-telling process which allows for a reconciliation of self. In The World Waiting To Be Made, the liminality of the Eurasian identity is expressed through the intangibility of narratives concerned with Eurasian ancestry. Where Kingston’s novel shifts narrative perspective in order to give voice to the nature of the migrant Asian identity over generations, as a ‘half-ghost half invisible’, Lazaroo uses narrative form as a mimesis for the fragmented, ‘ghost-like’ splinters of identity that define her Eurasian experience. Lazaroo’s text is broken into episodes, and this temporal and structural disjunct acts as a source of narrative and cultural tension. Lazaroo also highlights how the ‘ghostliness’ of the Eurasian identity is exacerbated by the ‘ghostliness’ of ancestral narratives. ‘In-between people, we like many Eurasians, were displaced and afraid of becoming shadows without any proper way of explaining our origins. The tale of Infinitely Great Grandmother gave me a way 154


of explaining myself to others...“This began as a floating story,” [my mother] would begin, “No one in your father’s family would tell it. I had to use my brains and a pole to bring it down to earth.” When we were young, we thought that the way she conducted our past to us was by standing outside at some dark hour waving her pole around to catch the stories that floated down from years gone past.’ The ephemeral, ghost-like tale of the protagonist’s ancestral matriarch was so ignored and unspoken that it both physically and symbolically existed only as a ‘floating story.’ Lazaroo reflects upon the importance of storytelling as part of her ontological quest, and in an attempt to understand and retell this narrative, the protagonist grasps fragments of history and ‘fills in the gaps’, mimetic of her attempt to make herself ‘whole.’ The narrative of Infinitely Great Grandmother is in itself a construction, as the protagonist translates a ghost-like, oral Chinese narrative into a Western literary framework. She establishes a linear narrative structure as a means to navigate her hybrid identity, possibly in an attempt to attach a sense of solidity to her intrinsically evanescent state - ‘a way of explaining’ her identity to a Western audience. However, whilst the tale of Infinitely Great Grandmother can be perceived as exacerbating the Eurasian protagonist’s disjunct of identity, due to its originally fleeting and fragmentary nature, perhaps it is the active process of translation and reconstruction that offers the Eurasian a liberating means of expressing her ghost-like identity. Whilst Lazaroo attempts to navigate and validate her liminal identity by resorting to the Western narrative trope of the linear bildungsroman, Kingston uses storytelling as a means to express, retain and hybridise her culture, drawing from traditional Chinese cultural roots. Her inclusion of a rich oral tradition characterised by her mother’s constant gynocentric ‘talk-stories’ allows those with a hybrid identity to establish cultural and ontological ground. The coining of a new taxonomical neologism in, ‘I told her I also am a story-talker. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine,’ shows the protagonist’s epiphanic realisation that it is through narrative revisionism (the reclamation of language, nomenclature and narrative form) that she is able to incorporate the previously silenced narratives of those excluded from the national mythology, and hence, unite the Asian diaspora. Kingston metafictively highlights the power of communicating one’s personal narrative in redefining the national mythos, and the transcendence that story-telling offers. Perhaps it is through acts of narrative representation that the hybrid Asian identity becomes one which is liberating - no longer a restrictive framework but a ‘complex, ongoing negotiation that seeks to authorise cultural hybridities.’

[36]

But it is also through the integration and redefinition of Australian gothic literature, a

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genre deeply rooted in colonial tradition, that the national consciousness can be reimagined as a means to assert cultural heterogeneity. Leaking clots of ink We see a bare foot - the callouses on the pads of the toes are mottled by the squelchy, ashen ground. Dark blue veins protrude from the transparent flesh, and the second toenail on the right foot is yellowed and splintered. We see rust-coloured streets breaking through crevices in the land, savagely tunnelling down to the township, leaving behind ochre-coloured arteries that are coated with a thin layer of reddish dust. We see the withered bottlebrushes, fallen from the boughs, dotting the bursts of spinifex, leaving behind blood-red tinges as their stamens drift silently down the bordering river. The body to which the foot is connected is not visible, instead, a jerry can lies beside it; a thick, viscous black liquid oozes out from a hole in the canister, as though it is bleeding from the roots of the tree that jut out from the soil; it occasionally clogs up, leaving clots that cling to the dry tubers. The landscape is a site of bloodied fractures, an unknown terrain of phantasmic terrors, a site of cultural rupture. Guided by Barbara Baynton’s ‘blear-eyed lantern’, we journey into the Gothic realm of Australian literature, where the ghosts of Oriental females lurk in the curves of the banksia trees. The Australian landscape has historically acted as a source of ostracism and gothic terror, where the Asian female is conflated with the landscape, becoming a corrupting source of fear to Western society. The dusty Australian land, so unimaginably different to the Chinese landscape, also served as a source of terror for the Asian Australian migrant. The Australian gothic landscape is a ‘site of culture rupture’,

[37]

where a nation’s

collective subconscious resurfaces from the traumatic past into the present. Cultural and ideological anxieties within the Australian mythos, particularly postcolonial tensions of ‘dark threats’ to ‘Australian whiteness’, come to haunt the present, allowing ‘themes of movement from confinement to liberation.’

[38]

Cultural symbols are redefined, national mythologies are destabilised, and the landscape becomes a space of renegotiation. Whilst both Kingston and Lazaroo use the symbol of the ghost to express their hybrid identity, Lazaroo adds an additional, alternative lens through which she interrogates the fixity of cultural trademarks. Lazaroo endows more meaning to stagnant national icons by using landscape iconography as a dominant presence in her literature in order to redefine stereotypical symbols of Australian identity and culture, and therefore reclaim the Australian landscape. The use of anaphora in, ‘All that was left to me was sand and rock... I 156


couldn’t be a cool chick, so I would be a bomoh, a secret hantus carrier, a one-woman yellow peril. I would communicate with an underworld that no one else could see...I would easily find rock and extract courage from it,’ highlights her new heuristic understanding of her own identity, metonymically represented by the word “I.” The unnamed Eurasian protagonist, an archetype for those without any solid identity, symbolised in the lack of nomenclature, ultimately depicts the beach as the locus of her transformation. The narrator, after seeing her ‘secret ink leaking out into the Australian earth’, forms a blood alliance with the Australian landscape, and unites her female, supernatural and foreign presence, with the beach becoming the source of her strength. She embraces her ghost-like identity (‘hantus’) and becomes the mystic terror which allows for a gothic renegotiation of the Australian mythos; by mixing her blood, she allows for a form of cultural hybridity. Lazaroo challenges the popularised conception of the beach as a site for “true blue Aussies’, and therefore rewrites the iconic, and yet exclusionary, social status of the surfer in Australian cultural mythology. BAGGAGE FROM A LAND LEFT BEHIND My seventeen-year-old-self no longer hears Ama’s soothing bed-time stories, however, ghosts still function in her storytelling. She most recently told me about the naughty Chinese girl who was abducted by ghosts when she snuck out to meet her boyfriend Jasper. While it may seem like the caution of an overprotective grandma, I know what she’s really saying: don’t sneak too far away from your Chinese ancestry. Perhaps next time she brings up a ghost, I might instead tell her the story of the culturally emancipated Eurasian ghost, (but only after first clearing up that Jasper is the name of my neighbour’s dog.) Perhaps I can introduce her to this liminal plane where I have been joined for a while by Kingston and Lazaroo - fellow travellers over the course of 5000 words. But now I leave Lazaroo behind to bleed into the gritty sand, and Kingston to translate and sing the songs of her ancestor, the music trembling and rising like desert wind.

[39]

Now I must journey forwards on my own, accompanied only by these haunting echoes.

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Mia Retallack: Mycotoxicosis - A Love Story Mycotoxicosis: A Love Story interrogates that parasites that leech into our life in the 21st century. Mycotoxicosis relates to the acute and often chronic disease associated with mould poisoning which can manifest physically, cognitively and emotionally. Yet, as the Covid era, has observed the transformation of interpersonal connection and selfhood as codependent with the abstract ideals of a digitised consumer culture, perhaps our parasitic relationships and obsessions with the internet, celebrity culture and ultimately ourselves within a digital echo-chamber that seeks to foster our own self delusions observes it’s own toxic qualities. Utilising the short story form, my piece follows an author’s obsession with a celebrity of the past, demonstrating the intangible representation of human experiences and ‘truth’ within commercialised political narratives. Inspired by a lifetime of living digitally, the motivic growth of mould throughout my piece symbolises the malignant proliferation of our current obsessions and subsequent delusions, engaging audiences in an uncomfortable re-evaluation of sexual politics and power in a post-truth context.

Mycotoxicosis[1]: A Love Story “A degree of culture, and assuredly a very high one, is attained when man rises above superstitions and religious notions and fears, and, for instance, no longer believes in guardian angels or in original sin, and has also ceased to talk of the salvation of his soul.” -

Nietzsche

[1]

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.

Prologue: In a Desolate Place

Virginia Woolf

[2]

[4]

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The bus was four minutes late. But the young author wasn’t worried. It would catch up for lost time. The back of her calves were damp where the black raincoat her mother bought with someone else’s money, fell short upon her knees. She held the piece of paper close to her so it didn’t get wet, her eyes fixated on the script but unable to make sense of it. NOTICE TO CEASE AND DESIST She fiddled with the corner of the sheet. Words like ‘libel’ and ‘defamation’ caught her eye. She didn’t know what they meant. She had only seen them in news articles about private schools and politicians. But it didn’t matter. They had written them for her. She was noticed.

I: The Winter of Our Discontent

[5]

Christina looks behind her shoulder, her lips full, slightly parted as if you just caught her in the act. Her hair is very long, very beautiful. The colour of honey. She probably used an expensive conditioner that smelled of coconut, or vanilla, or bergamot. Something classy, not like the cheap Impulse body spray girls she went to school with would steal from Woolworths. She’s begging for you to come closer. But you can’t. The author pushed the coins towards the cashier, avoiding eye contact before shoving the magazine in her bag. Her mother would enjoy looking at the pictures, reflecting on a time where she too would wear nice dresses and have nice hair and go to dinner with grey haired men in black sedans. They said they would help her make it big. They never did. She walked to her mother’s apartment, trying not to step on the cracks in the pavement. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Single mothers sat on plastic lawn chairs while their children played in murky water outside the houses on the highway, the rising damp assaulting the structure. The damp seemed to stick here, wet patches and leaky roofs growing into full blown infestations. The council said they would organise a method to clean up. But they never did. There was something rotten in the state of this place.

[6]

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She scrolled through her phone, holding it close to her chest to obscure it from wandering eyes. She had seen the cover on Instagram a week before, and revisited it often. There was something high voltage about Christina. Something that magazines and pruned Instagram posts could never impart. She was the It-Vamp of another era, an iconoclast for the ages that begged for a medium greater than this; to be immortalised for evermore in text. Her time was approaching. But where to begin. The origin story of Christina differed from source to source. Some insisted she was selfmade, espousing her humble origins as just a girl who wanted to make it big. Yet, it seemed far more compelling to make out her origin story as the lissome goddess in the creation myth of the filmmaker; Robert Blainey. Their union seen as a second coming of a ‘Bogart-Bacall legend’ in an age of Ray J-Kardashian collaborations.

[7]

And perhaps she was just that. There was a ten-year-old Architectural Digest write up on Forest Hall, tossed in a pile on her mother’s bedroom floor. The insides of its glossy pages were stuck together with mould, discolouring the images; but it set the scene for everything she needed for the piece. Her mother might have never cared for the BornAgain church down the street and the author might have resented her for that, wishing she could be one of the kids that snuck out during mass to smoke behind the septic tank. But this was her own sacred text. She had the pages by memory, engrained from the hours she spent poring over them as a child. It was always the centrefold she found herself drawn to, the room grandiose and grim; some grotesque abortion of euro-minimalist ‘feng shui’. In the centre of the room, Christina lounged on a chaise, the fabric of her long dress draped to the floor. But it was the portrait behind her that piqued the author’s attention. Spores had long obfuscated the image, but by the very witching time of night, she could recall stroke by stroke the outline of two figures, perhaps a bride and groom. They stood impossibly still, in a small room with a bed and a window and a mirror. She imagined him staring ahead, giving a lazy wave, his reticence likely a prophecy for the marriage. But the bride is limp and despite her downcast gaze, she shouldn’t be sad. She is wearing a lovely green dress, and an elaborate hairdo. And in obscurity, deep in the background, there’s a mirror reflecting a third figure, obscured, unknown, in the doorway.

[8]

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Perhaps, in this way, before the green dress, and Forest Hall, her origin story, as origin stories often do, started with the mother. Women whose aspirations of glamour and fortitude, fell short upon the reliance on promises of men to give it all, quenching the wide-eyed optimism of their children. Perhaps in this way, it was all just a silent cry for help from a woman who wished for nothing but the tender company of things. She had tried direct messaging Christina a few times on Twitter to find out. Then she was blocked. So, she made another account. Adapt. Overcome

[9]

II: True beauty ‘til this night

TV was supposed to make your eyes square and brain mush. She would stare at it for hours, waiting for her mother to get home, willing her eyes to change shape. She would watch the kid’s shows until the news came on and then watch the adult shows until the sound of her mother’s keys in the door would interrupt the advertisements for after-hour phone calls. She liked the movies that played late, the ones from the 90’s, of the likes of Tarantino and Spacey, with cheap copyright, pretty blondes and tall men. If there was something she understood, it was pretty blondes. She wanted to be them, not because they were pretty, or because they got an even prettier cheque out of their gigs, but because pretty people are good people. They owed their loyal viewers that. Sometimes she imagined herself as a pretty blonde, waiting for her hero to come home. Perhaps he would, taking her in his arms the moment he came through the door and planting a kiss on her mouth. But what if he never came home? Sometimes, she would strip naked and wear her mother’s silk nightgown. And if she was really into it, she would hear an ominous knock on the door. She would look through the peephole to see the silhouette of two men in trench coats, their hats obscuring their faces. Or, what if her hero did come home, and as she fixed him a whiskey neat, she crushed a cyanide pill in it, or a drop of arsenic. He would never notice. Two hours later, she would be ready for her grand performance to the police knocking on the door. She would never be caught. But those were back in the days where her mother had places to go and men to see. Now, her mother lived for their Thursday night ritual. The author would walk to her mother’s, giving her reading material for the week and a fast-food dinner. They would sit on the bed and the author tried to forget about the smell of the dirty sheets. 161


The television had a warped, crackling quality to its sound, exaggerating the husky gravel of the hero’s voice.

“You better hurry, you’ll miss that plane.”

[10]

Diamond tears glistened down the heroine’s ivory cheeks. The hero was melancholic, but straight faced. Her mother, in fleeting moments of sentience, absentmindedly chewed on a fry, enthralled by the television. But the author was determined to hate the idle pleasures of the day.

[11]

Her mind was somewhere else in the

spring of 1995, where she would later write about Christina, at eighteen, coasting off the critical success of an otherwise commercial failure of an indie film. She bared her breasts for the curious cameras and was now the next pretty blond. She met a charming man at an industry event and the rest is history. The author opened a Word document. She knew exactly where to start. Waiters are bringing around trays of champagne and the house cocktail and before anyone recognises her, she sneaks a glass. But he recognises her. He’s wearing a charcoal Armani Prive suit that matches the sprinkling of salt and pepper that grace the waves of his hair. Lines of benevolence embrace his bloodshot but blue eyes. He takes her to the smoker’s area and gives her a cigarette. He happens to also have a hotel suite for the night, despite the fact he lives in town. He talks for forty minutes or so about a project he’s working on and thinks she should have a look at the script. She has the ‘right look for it.’ She’s heard the rumours about him but she knows she isn’t like those other girls. But rumours didn’t come out of nowhere. Was it that if she knew the truth, she would be disappointed? That any prospect of an audience would be destroyed? She checked the time: 8:20pm. She had seen the ending of the film as a kid but her mother hadn’t. The author wasn’t paying attention, rumours seemed far more attractive... A meeting is organised two days later. Agents exchange emails and official letterheads with secretaries penning it in the diary. She wore a white dress that dusted the backs of her unblemished calves. There was a certain rosiness to her cheeks, and the subtle curves of her nubile young body indicated her untarnished flesh ripe for picking. She would read the script and do a few screen tests.

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Her mother’s muffled sobs pulled her from her thoughts, and she checked the time again. 8:25pm. Magazines scattered the floor, and she dreaded the thought of cleaning it up once her mother was gone. A cover of a young Lindsay Lohan caught her eye: ‘From sweetheart to socialite!’, spores obscuring a superimposed image of her from the Parent Trap. A victim of her own success. But Christina… She’s given her a drink or two as the makeup artist jabs eyeshadow into her doe eyes. On camera, she lies on her stomach smoking a prop cigarette in chiaroscuro light, giving her best sultry smirk. The wires of a pushup bra dig into her ribs and she can’t breathe in the corset under her dress. Behind her, Robert traces his fingers down her legs, from the tips of her toes to the dimpling of cellulite on her thighs. And for everyone, it seems to make sense. Except for her.

“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship"

[12]

The plasma screen faded into black. She saved the document to revisit later. Her mother was asleep. Taking her stuff, she got up and left, not saying goodbye.

III: What time of day is it?

[13]

It was 2am when she made the decision to show the world what she had to offer. There was a website called scribpad.com where some woman had written a fanfiction about Harry Styles and got a five-book publishing deal out of it and some movies.

[14]

She knew she could do better. This was Christina’s story, not the juvenile

ramblings of some lonely spinster who still went to Disney every year. And so, under the pseudonym, @glassheart13, she published her magnum opus. She woke to the thick refrigerator air of June, leaking through the flimsy window frames. It got dark at 4:30pm now. The cold was to slow down the mould, but each day there was a new damned spot. Out, damned spot! She had given up on scrubbing, these walls would never be clean. mould and the muttering rain, waiting for it to pass.

[15]

So she laid, each day, under the

[16]

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In a haze, from the Valerian Forte she took to sleep, she ordered UberEATS. Your order is being prepared. She watched the little animation of the food being made, a Twitter notification appearing at the top of her screen. Trending right now: #glassheart13 In the 24 hours since she had published her piece, there had been 15,000 tweets posted under the hashtag, with one resounding question: Who is @glassheart13? Never mind it was coming from the pussy-hat donning, peanut-crunching crowd who were as concerned for the illusion of onscreen romance as they were for the wider discourse on the appropriate wetness of female genitalia. She was noticed. They wanted to find her. She screenshot the positive responses before another notification interrupted her moment: Your order is on the move!-- She opened the app, watching the tiny avatar advance along the map. Vincent, on a bike, was to deliver her food. Squinting at his profile picture, he looked friendly but also a Casanova, European type. Maybe he would whisper in her ear that she’s a good girl or how sexy she was when she wakes up. She imagined herself answering the door, a pretty blonde, in her silk nightdress. Vincent would lock eyes with her and would toss the food aside. He would pick her up and carry her to the sofa to take her, right there. The door would be wide open and she imagined that they were in a suburb much nicer than hers, in a house far larger. Neighbours mowing the law would stop and stare, their eyes glued to the scene. Her phone buzzed, making her jump: Your order is at the door! Get it while it’s hot! Defeated, she cracked open the door to slide an arm out to pick up the order. She sat back on her bed. Scuffing the spots off with her sleeve, she placed the contents of her order on the window sill. Vincent had proved to her, after she had replayed scenes of Christina and Robert the night before, that despite her attempts at selfdelusion, such romance was only real on screen. She opened a new Word document, shoving a handful of fries into her mouth. She was 18, untouched. She wore red lingerie and didn’t eat for days beforehand. She had to be as malleable as possible. Drowsy after a day of filming and the drinks he gave her, he took her home one night. She would lie on his couch as he sat next to her, tracing his fingers around her pale ankle. 164


She let the cloying bun and rubbery burger patty sit in her mouth as a reservoir of grease collected in the cardboard container in her lap. Turning onto her stomach, blood rushed to her core and she rubbed herself against a pillow, one hand on the keyboard, the other in the food. She knew what people liked. Men like him like it rough. He would crawl on top of her and she couldn’t move. She couldn’t protest. His stale breath made him seem like a corpse in a middle-aged body. He would push Christina’s slender ankles behind her head, and once he’d broken in, she was split into a million pieces. He tries to meet her cervix, reminding her how hard he is, because if they can both pretend so, it might be a little more bearable. He grasps for each part of her and she’s not completely sure what he’ll do next until he does it, a docile body waiting for rough hands; forced to accept their circumstance. Sometimes men like to take their work home with them and at a time when romance-dramas were an excuse for soft porn, handsy was romance. He flopped his soft chest onto her, and jammed his teeth into her mouth. There was something about his concrete sense of need that fascinated her and she waited for that pained face and animalistic burst that told her they were almost at the finish line. Itchy, the author pulled the thin string of the underwear from her crack, smelling her fingers. Nothing abnormal. She had read somewhere that the mould could get into your underwear and then into your caverns and folds, and had since kept the red lace on for protection. Rubbing her hand on the sheet, she shovelled more fries into her mouth, wiping her nose. He didn’t seem like the type to acquiesce to cuddling. Maybe he would go into the other room and take a call. He would leave her in bed, with a snail trail of semen on her stomach and as he waddled bow-legged to the bathroom, she began to weep, yearning for the tender hold of a lover. She didn’t proofread it. She knew if she did, she would probably delete it. She felt a pit in her stomach, shovelling another handful of fries into her face. She felt sick, but the taste of stale tobacco suppressed the crude feeling of saturated fats in her mouth. She couldn’t stop. Sulphur filled the air from the gas she passed, a tightness in her throat causing her to hunch over, suppressing whatever was trying to crawl its way out of her oesophagus. She went straight to scribpad.com and uploaded the document: ‘Chapter 2’. Her cheeks flushed, tiny pin pricks dancing along her arms. She dragged the cursor and clicked ‘save and publish’. Her stomach twisted 165


in an obscene knot, the taste of metal filling her mouth. She tossed aside her laptop, expelling chunks of fries and chicken in a sauce of bile on the floor, puddling around her legs; running down her chin. But she was proud of her work.

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Rose Scarlis: Sofiya’s Sonata My Extension 2 Radio Drama celebrates the multiplicitous, complex nature of the female artist who disrupts the traditional narratives which seek to confine the female to an aesthetic value. Appropriating Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, I incorporate music throughout my piece to act as an additional framing device to represent the artist’s desire to reinvent and disrupt traditional convention and form. Set within a rehearsal space, I worked with various sound elements to create a naturalistic dynamic between characters and a hyper-realistic space. This hyperrealism is extended by the actors imposing upon their performed roles to provide commentary on the script throughout. I was given the opportunity to work with three volunteer voice actors and a sound engineer whom I have to thank for bringing my work to life.

Production notes: The intent for this production is to represent the trope of the female artist (musical and literary) as a multifaceted, complex individual who disrupts conventional narratives of linearity through various forms of art - music, poetry and performance art. It dismantles the aesthetic of the female ‘muse’ and instead asserts the female as an artist in her own right; intellectual, creative and unable to be contained by the patriarchy. As an appropriation, it self-consciously initiates a textual conversation with the novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, by Tolstoy, challenging binary associations whereby the female gender is conflated with Dionysian sensuality; specifically, the temptation and desire associated with a female seductress in the literary and musical canon. In this work, musical form and theme functions as a framing device/character, paralleling traditional narrative structure. The ultimate destabilising of the Sonata form and the eventual rewriting of the Sonata therefore function as a metaphor for the deconstructing of narrative structures and archetypes which confine the female

mind. SYNOPSIS:

Set amidst an ensemble who are rehearsing a modern-day radio drama that is an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, this radio drama self consciously deviates from its own misogynistic script, providing a commentary on the limitation of authorial control and the need to 167


emancipate the female artist. Within the diegetic world of the play, the actors, who are also musicians, are instructed to follow the scripting directions by the Director, however the protagonist, actor-character Rose, who plays the role of Sofiya, finds herself questioning the scripting and musical choices, blurring the lines between the theatrical world and reality and imparting her contemporary female voice onto her character in order to shake up the canon. The dynamic between the two actors, Rose and Leo, mirrors their performed counterparts, Sofiya and Pozdynshev, leading Rose to question the limiting characterisation of Sofiya’s character as well as the conventionally structured narrative arc and the musical accompaniments from Beethoven’s musical composition of the same name. As tensions escalate between the cast and director over artistic differences, one question remains unanswered: Who wrote this cliched, romanticised script? The radio drama highlights the intriguing relationship between different art forms and defines music as a vehicle of self-expression. There is an intentional blurring between theatre and the diegetic world of the play which elucidates the way the character of Rose goes off script, embodying her creative license and her attempts to re-interpret Tolstoy’s novel. In doing so she prevents the inevitable fate that awaited Sofiya, presumably death, as in accordance with Tolstoy’s original text. CHARACTERS: DIRECTOR (NIGEL): A sardonic, witty caricature of an animated artistic director. The director holding the rehearsal of this radio drama: a modern re-interpretation of Tolstoy’s novella, The Kreutzer Sonata. A male authority on music and literature who oversees the coherence/structure of the radio drama itself. He often attempts to interrupt moments of musical and literary ‘transgression’ and Sofiya’s artistic license with a tone of superiority, in an attempt to stay true to the script and authorial intent. He believes in following the structure of the script and of the music and is an authority on most things. His voice becomes overpowered by the end, when Sofiya’s musical reinvention of Beethoven’s Sonata and reinterpretation of Tolstoy’s narrative take over disrupting classical notions of form and musical significance, silencing him. LEO (who plays the character of Pozdnyshev): The actor for Pozdnyshev, who has glaring similarities to Tolstoy himself. In this script, he attempts to take on a directorial role at times with the characters of Pozdnyshev and Sofiya and resists any of Rose’s attempts to challenge the linearity of Tolstoy’s narrative or this revised, radio drama interpretation. Leo plays the violin and is eager to contribute to the musical aspect of the production and show off his skills. There is a 168


deliberate ambiguity about whether he is Tolstoy reincarnated or an avid supporter and upholder of tradition and conventional ideas about the role of women and their representation in the literary tradition. There is the underlying assumption he has written the script that is being rehearsed, however this remains up to interpretation of the audience: Is he actually Tolstoy himself reincarnate, or do his values simply just align? *Leo and Pozdnyshev are voiced by the same actor. He is Pozdnyshev when he is in character and Leo when he speaks as the actor. ROSE (who plays the character of Sofiya): A young female actress and pianist who voices the character of Sofiya. She is excited to work on what she initially perceives to be a modern reinterpretation of The Kreutzer Sonata and comes to the rehearsal with creative ideas. As she is constantly interrupted by her male counterparts, Leo and the Director, and her ideas are shut down, she becomes less obedient to their instructions and instead challenges the script, advocating for new scripting and musical ideas that more aptly encompass the challenges of the female artist. *Rose and Sofiya are voiced by the same actress. She is called Sofiya when she is in character and Rose when she speaks as the actress. POZDNYSHEV: Jealous husband of Sofiya. A male, narcissistic voice who functions as a parodic appropriation of Pozdnyshev in Tolstoy’s original text. A self-centered voice who feigns a knowledge and appreciation of the arts and undermines the musical talent and intellect of his wife. The voice of this character is to be read with an air of superiority and snobbery (as he attempts to adhere to traditional literary conventions of 16th/17th century Petrarchan love poetry). The character of Sofiya is ultimately empowered to expose the narcissistic insecurities of this character, but only through the actress, Rose’s, deferral of convention and deliberate departure from the intended role, going ‘off script’. He attempts a ‘romantic’ dialogue with his wife, Sofiya, that is ultimately rejected by the actress Rose. SOFIYA: A female multidisciplinary artist of poetry and music living within an androcentric canon where her voice is silenced by male figures of authority and her creative license is undermined. She is named after Tolstoy’s wife. Rose, the actress for this character, initiates a dialogue with Tolstoy. Sofiya is stagnant until Rose brings her to life and allows her to evade the script she has been written in to. Her tone begins as one of adherence to her narrative arc. As the drama progresses, her tone becomes increasingly more sarcastic as Rose brings her own contemporary 169


voice to her interpretation of the role, criticising Tolstoy’s projection of Sofiya’s character and undermining the authority of both Tolstoy and the Director as she fragments the structure of the traditional, coherent Sonata form as an artistic, musical manifestation of her resistance. RATIONALE FOR MUSICAL REINVENTION: The musical reinvention of Beethoven’s Sonata, heard during the final scene of the radio drama, functions as a metaphor for Rose/Sofiya’s disruption of the script and ultimately of Tolstoy’s original narrative, as well as the appropriated framing narrative of Sofiya and Pozdnyshev in my radio drama. It takes the original thematic/motivic material of The Kreutzer Sonata, a canonical musical work by Beethoven, and flips it on it’s head, employing chromaticism and augmenting it until it is almost unrecognisable in a deliberate critique of the limitations of form and convention and the need to renew and revoice female artist to give license to self-expression. The composition features a two-note musical motif (rapid, dissonant and jarring), which propels the piece forward and represents a voice of female expression that will not cease until it is heard.

170


A recording studio in Sydney, present day, where an ensemble of actors and a director begin their first rehearsal of the radio drama, “Rewriting and Voicing Woman: Sofiya’s Sonata”. A contemporary reimagining and spin off of Leo Tolstoy's novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, where the originally demonised wife character, who was nameless in Tolstoy’s novella - but is now named after his wife, Sofiya- is given artistic expression, albeit limited and conservative, in this 21st century adaptation. It is 5PM. SCENE 1 OPENING SOUND MONTAGE: A sound montage of actors entering a rehearsal space. The sound of coffee cups being stirred, actors warming up, doors opening and closing, and footsteps. We hear a series of vocal warmups and lines being rehearsed by Leo. LEO:

Excuse me.

Leo practices his lines in a Russian accent that sounds more German. You aren’t to blame them. It was your obsession with them where the problem began. More vocal warmups from Leo. SFX: Door Closes. Two sets of footsteps. LEO:

Dobroye utro284 everybody.

Leo coughs ROSE:

What’s that you’ve got there, Leo ?

DIRECTOR:

Oh, that's his violin. He calls it Orpheus285/

Rose giggles. LEO: (continuing to practice his lines as the director and Rose speak, in a melodramatic tone) Play on, invisible harps. Bring soft, sweet music/ SFX: Coffee cups being stirred with spoons. DIRECTOR: (in an amused voice) Hang on. Why are you talking like that? What’s with the funny voice? Are you unwell? SFX: Pages being turned. LEO:

284 285

(hurt) Oh, you mean the accent? You don’t like it?

Dobroye Utro: The Russian term for Good Morning. Orpheus: A legendary musician and prophet in ancient Greek religion.

171


Rose laughs. DIRECTOR:

Um, what is it supposed to be, exactly?

LEO: (slightly offended) It’s Russian! Pozdnyshev is a Russian aristocrat. I’ve been speaking like this all week so I can perfect it! Meanwhile, scalic runs and warmups are heard on the piano. DIRECTOR: (attempting to appease) Right, well, yes that’s good. I’m so glad you’re committing to the process. The Director taps a pencil against a music stand to call the actors to attention. Thank you all so much for being here. Now, this production is very complex, I mean, it absolutely captures the passionate essence of Tolstoy’s novel, it kind of borrows from the Petrarchan Sonnet in the ever-romantic exchanges between husband and wife; Pozdnyshev and Sofiya, and there’s a Joycian moment /or two. LEO: ROSE:

(interjecting) /Oh, James. He’s so wonderful! Did you know he was a big inspiration to Cixous in her early years of writing?

DIRECTOR:

(dismissively) No, I don’t read much of him.

ROSE:

Hélène /Cixous.

Leo begins to tune his violin, eagerly. DIRECTOR: (ignoring the interruption) /Right (attempting to sound diplomatic; fearing protest from the actors) And just so it sounds a little cleaner, we’ve got a professional recording that you’ll both play along /underneath LEO:

/I brought my violin all the way /here

DIRECTOR:

/I have a Decca recording of Oistrakh and Oborin286 lined up.

ROSE:

I can play it.

The Director laughs. DIRECTOR: And I’ve brought along my old record player, it’s going to sound fantastic! SFX: Pages turning ROSE:

I just thought we were going for a live sort of feel

A few notes are heard on the piano. SFX: The stirring of coffee cups DIRECTOR: (In a pompous tone, aside) The musically educated, as we all know, make up such a tiny percentage of the population. Leo murmurs in agreement. 286

David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin - Russian violinist and pianist who are widely considered world class.

172


Rose, if Leo really wants to play, maybe whilst he does, you could sit there and dabble a bit on the piano (Rose sighs in disbelief) so that Leo can sort of envisage Sofiya as his muse. Leo begins sporadic violin warm ups whilst the Director is speaking, becoming obnoxious and, at times, aggressive. ROSE:

So do you mean I just sit here?

DIRECTOR:

Yes.

ROSE:

So he can look at me?

DIRECTOR:

Exactly. No one is going to hear you so would you just pretend

to play so that Leo can see you? LEO:

(in the background, inciting a reaction) Is the piano female or male, Rose?

ROSE:

(ignoring Leo’s question, in an enthusiastic tone). I should

mention, I sort of had this idea, that I think you might like, that

we could

even do something to reinterpret it musically. Leo proceeds to tune his violin, obnoxiously. DIRECTOR:

What are you on about?

ROSE:

Like a reinvention.

DIRECTOR:

What reinvention?

SFX: Paper shuffling. ROSE:

Well, I brought along some manuscript, I’ve got some ideas for /how we might

change... LEO: (in an offended tone) /Excuse me, I’ll still be playing over the recording though? Rose sighs, playing clusters on the piano, out of annoyance. DIRECTOR: (pandering) Yes, yes of course you will Leo. How could we resist your talents? Let's go, people! (Tapping on his music stand obnoxiously, to call actors to attention). Someone cue up the recording. (in an authoritative manner) Now, 3 beats into bar one. Playing the entirety of the Adagio Sostenuto287 from the first movement. Leo, you’re going to be entering as Poz when /the piano joins at bar 5. LEO:

/Did you just call me Poz?

DIRECTOR: I’ll give you a signal.(Rose laughs.) Now, piano, remember I want you on the quiet side - don’t overpower the Violin’s sweet melodic line. 3 beats in, someone line it up. 1, 2, and... 287

Adagio Sostenuto: A musical term for ‘slow and sustained’

173


SFX: The vinyl crackle of a recording is heard. (Music plays in the background of dialogue: both live musicians, Rose and Leo, and the Director’s recording of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata no. 9: Op. 47 in A Major) LEO [AS POZDNYSHEV]:

Strings in the earth and air

Make music sweet; The flourish of a perfectly balanced tune Where lovers meet Phrases flowing and cascading Leo stutters and practices “cascading” with different emphasis then gets out of time with the recording; Rose continues live on the piano. LEO:

Phrases all softly, tunefully playing

Her head inclines this way Wrists rising and falling Shoulders remaining perfectly still She begins to /sway The Director interrupts the live violin and piano who finish playing the first beat of bar 13 before stopping. SFX: The needle is removed abruptly from the old vinyl record. The Director taps rapidly against his music stand to call actors to attention. DIRECTOR: /Leo, this section needs to be very beautiful- we need to hear the structure of the poetry, the blazon288- the mirroring of this ethereal world to her goddess-like aesthetic. Leo grunts and does a series of vocal warmups. Every pause needs to be timed to perfection! Maybe you can try to tone down the accent a bit. Now, let’s take it back a bit to bar 13. (signaling for Leo and the recording to start) And... SFX: A vinyl crackle as the recording starts again. LEO [AS POZDNYSHEV]:

An aura of bliss as the old piano plays an air

She looks not at her hands; Only forward SFX: The needle is removed abruptly from the old vinyl record.

288

A literary blazon, cataloguing the physical attributes of a subject, usually female, in an objectifying manner.

174


DIRECTOR: (interrupting Leo, abruptly. The piano and violin finish the second beat of bar 14 before ceasing.) Leo, try that last line again. A light tinker at the piano. You really need to feel it in your core. LEO:

(sighs) Ugh, okay.

DIRECTOR: We’ll go without music so you can practice it. He’s ravished and delighted by his own words, don’t you see? Remember, core. Meanwhile, a scalic passage followed by a cluster chord on the piano is played by Rose to show her impatience. LEO:

(under his breath) Okay, here we go.

DIRECTOR:

Okay, back in from the beginning at bar 13, tutti289. And it needs to

breathe more, I think. He’s the archetypal romantic and she is

his

muse. SFX: Sounds of pages turning as actors flip through script ROSE:

(in disbelief) Ugh, honestly.

DIRECTOR: Tolstoy, of course, would have wanted it to sound more sensual, you see, through this blazon he praises his woman and asserts his greater power through the creation of poetry to affect her submission to his will. Meanwhile, broken chords are heard on the piano, played by Rose. LEO:

Yes, I agree.

DIRECTOR:

Ever heard of Stanislavski?

LEO:

(scoffs) Of course!/

DIRECTOR:

/You need to embody your character.

LEO:

Oh, for heaven’s /sake

Leo aggressively turns his page, dropping a pencil onto a music stand in frustration. DIRECTOR: (slightly taken aback) Leo, could you just let me guide you? (Leo mutters in reluctant agreeance) I do know what I’m /doing LEO:

/Yes, fine!

DIRECTOR:

1, 2, and (breathing in dramatically, indicating for Leo to begin)

SFX: A vinyl crackle as the recording starts again.

289

Musical term: all instruments playing together

175


Music plays in the background of dialogue: both live musicians, Rose and Leo, and the Director’s recording. LEO [AS POZDNYSHEV]:

A sound reminiscent of amethyst und290 dark blue

LEO:

Sorry about the und there. Sorry, sorry.

(the recording continues despite Leo’s error, Leo stops playing the violin momentarily) LEO [AS POZDNYSHEV]: And dark blue When all is silent, do you wake to hear Sounds of sweet melodies Played by invisible harps? Do you answer in antiphon?291 SFX: The needle is removed from the old vinyl record. DIRECTOR:

Bravo, Leo! A wonderful reading. (Cutting the musicians off at bar 19)

Now, proceeding directly to the Presto292/ at bar 19 from the key change/ ROSE:

/Presto feels too energetic for this section- aren’t we supposed to be lured slowly

into her monologue? LEO: ROSE:

Rose, you’re missing the point. Can’t we do Presto when she finally breaks free of the blazon? The shift from her

suppression to expression? The Director sighs. LEO: (in frustration) This is a discussion between lovers, not a forum for your character to interrupt the flow and to show off how she breaks free of whatever she thinks was so constricting in her marriage. Rose scoffs By the way, I think she got the better end of the deal. Leo giggles at his own joke. SFX: The stirring of coffee. ROSE:

(in an angry and irritated tone) How can you call this a “reinterpretation”? He’s

disassembling her, Astrophil and Stella293 style. A disgusted grunt from the Director.

290

The german for ‘and’ A Christian ritual sung or recited before a psalm or canticle 292 A musical term for in a quick tempo 293 Astrophil and Stella (1591) by Philip Sidney, has parallels to Sofiya in the limiting representation of Stella 291

176


LEO: ROSE:

Can’t you process the significance of his poetic tone? The adored female body, like a shattered mirror, broken into brightly polished

fragments, reflecting back to the male his own act of self-creation as master-poet, deforming her body to demonstrate his control of language. LEO: ROSE:

He adores his wife. /I mean, come on, you’ve brought out the most intolerable / parts of Pozdnyschev’s

character/ SFX: Pages turning LEO:

/Intolerable?! She is his muse.

DIRECTOR: Listen!/(Director sighs, followed by tapping on his music stand, loudly) We’re going to be here for days if you two don’t stop. We’ll keep it in order. If it was good enough for Beethoven, hm? From bar 19, Presto, I’ll give you two beats in. Line up the recording, please. Remember: big energy here. The Director begins to hum the opening of the Presto section of the Kreutzer Sonata attempting to imitate articulatory factors such as a staccato sound. SFX: The noisy sound of pages turning as the actors prepare for the second scene. A vinyl crackle as the recording starts again. SCENE 2 Music plays in the background of dialogue from bar 19: both live musicians, Rose and Leo, and the Director’s recording. ROSE [AS SOFIYA]:

I attract with music,

I attract with my curly hair - objects to seduce men To possess them Rose scoffs and pauses before continuing with the next line. The musicians continue playing. (dripping with sarcasm) Attracting the greatest number of men- that is the ideal of my life SFX: The needle is removed from the old vinyl record. DIRECTOR: /A good section, Rose. Could be a little bit more careful with toneLEO:

(condescendingly) Want a hand, /Rosie? 177


DIRECTOR:

/ it really needs to sing out!

ROSE:

Oh, perhaps like a nightingale?

DIRECTOR:

/Yes, like a nightingale!

ROSE:

Tunefully dismissing the confining nature of his /ego

DIRECTOR: (dismissing Rose’s comment)/Let's take it up from the upbeat to bar 37. I need a little bit more energy from you, piano, but keep it soft and staccato.294 (director imitates a staccato sound). SFX: A vinyl crackle as the recording starts again. Music plays in the background of dialogue from bar 37: both live musicians, Rose and Leo, and the Director’s recording. ROSE [AS SOFIYA]:

But oh was I unprepared for my maturity.

ROSE:

(interjecting) Who even wrote this?!

SFX: The needle is removed abruptly from the old vinyl record. This script is unbelievably misogynistic/ DIRECTOR: /Alright enough. Let’s just take it from bar 61, moving into section B. And try to stay on script, people. It’s our job to implement the authorial choices. There’s no interpretation here...or if there is, it’s mine. SFX: A vinyl crackle as the recording starts again. And 1, 2 (counting the piano and violin into bar 61) Music plays in the background of dialogue from bar 61: both live musicians, Rose and Leo, and the Director’s recording. ROSE [AS SOFIYA]:

(in an earnest reading)

All my years of schooling, of learning to play the piano I have no interest, no passion for these accomplishments They are simply tools to attract men I have no desire to live my own life All I long for is to be completely dependant upon the male sex ROSE:

(interrupting, abruptly stopping the music- the musicians falter and stop at

bar 92) Isn’t this supposed to be a modern interpretation? SFX: The needle is removed from the old vinyl record. DIRECTOR: 294

(in an irritated tone) Off script, Sofiya!

A musical articulatory term for short and detached

178


ROSE:

Surely she would be rejecting stereotypes, challenging Tolstoy’s conventional

writing form? DIRECTOR:

Again!

ROSE:

Challenging his complex- his Madonna-whore complex in fact!/

Leo sighs. DIRECTOR: ROSE:

/Where were we? I mean, at first he describes her so fondly, but as soon as she shows an interest in

anything other than him, she’s a whore! She’s having an affair!/ DIRECTOR:

Let’s take it back from the beginning of dolce, bar 91. SFX: A vinyl crackle as the recording starts again. 1 and (counting musicians in)

Music plays in the background of dialogue from bar 91: both live musicians, Rose and Leo, and the Director’s recording. ROSE [AS SOFIYA]:

I just get so excited when I see a man walk in the room

And that is not in the presence of a certain man, rather it is in the presence of any man I can't help myself! My sensual energy, animal instincts they just take over. DIRECTOR:

Stop! (cutting the musicians off at bar 106)

SFX: The needle is removed from the old vinyl. Leo, re-tune, perhaps. Rose, in this next section, would you sit by the piano? So that Leo can envisage his muse, I really need him to experience this vividly. To capture the very essence of his emotion. Meanwhile, Leo re-tunes his violin. ROSE:

(scoffs) You seriously want me to be a prop? You need to reconsider what

message you’re trying to send /here DIRECTOR: ROSE:

/Do you have to make everything /so /Why is she still written in this manner years later? Here we are recording a

reinterpretation, yet you’ve made her out to be shallow and spiteful. LEO: ROSE:

(interjecting) That’s just who she is. Her husband spends so much time watching her at the piano as his ‘muse’. Yet,

does he admire her talent? No! LEO:

(insistently) Those are her interests. 179


ROSE:

(scoffs) Honestly.

LEO: (in a defensive tone) We aren’t imposing anything on her character. DIRECTOR:

Alright, back to work, people!

LEO: Her character is very simple, as it reads. No layers. She is nothing but an unfaithful, selfabsorbed woman! The Director coughs. DIRECTOR: (tapping lightly against his stand) Can we pick the recording up from bar 105? Rose, Leo, you won’t play in this section, it's going to be too/ messy with your dialogue and page turns. LEO:

Come on, let’s get this right.

Music plays in the background of dialogue: without live musicians, only the Director’s recording. LEO [AS POZDNYSHEV]: (in a melodramatic reading) The children were a torture All of your happiness depended upon them You were seldom available as a wife To meet my needs The Director’s recording continues to play throughout this section, despite Rose’s interjection. ROSE:

Hm, do correct me if I am wrong, but just like Tolstoy’s original text, there is a

jealousy he feels towards his children; a narcissistic syndrome of sorts. How pathetic to feign love for your children while feeling envious of them. How fragile your ego must be, it's suffocating how much you depend on her. She doesn’t even exist as her own person, she exists for you and to fulfil your needs. SFX: The needle is removed abruptly from the old vinyl record. DIRECTOR: (coughs and taps against his stand to get attention) Enough! Taking the recording back to b156 sforzando (read with gusto, attempting an Italian accent) SFX: A vinyl crackle as the recording starts again. Music plays in the background of dialogue: without live musicians, only the Director’s recording. SCENE 3 ROSE [AS SOFIYA]:

I’ve begun to crave some other tenderness, some other love

I’m devoting myself completely to the piano - in order, once again, to attract men Nothing more

180


ROSE:

(in an irritated manner) This is ridiculous.

SFX: The needle is removed abruptly from the old vinyl record. If you wanted a re-imagining, these structured, masculine writing forms do get boring and repetitive. And the music, it's so exact, to the bar. So, shall we try a reframing of sorts, a restructuring? DIRECTOR:

(in desperation) No, no!

ROSE:

Let me improvise/

DIRECTOR:

We will continue on in order.

LEO: Yes, I agree. The character was simply written that way - go back and read Tolstoy’s original text if you want to know more about her. ROSE:

Oh, yes, I’ve read the text, but I can’t find any true reflection of her character

amongst the nonsense that she has had an affair with the violinist! Leo sighs in frustration. I mean it’s pathetic that he just assumes. It’s a duet! She can’t play it by /herself. DIRECTOR: (carefully) / I don’t really want to get stuck in the feminist argument right now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a massive advocate, but you people just don’t stop talking. As much as I would love to discuss the implications of Tolstoy’s dismissal of any musical significance, we have a rehearsal to finish. Okay, coming together again at bar 190, people. Someone, wind that back, will you? SFX: A vinyl crackle as the recording starts again. Music plays in the background of dialogue: without live musicians, only the Director’s recording. SCENE 4 ROSE [AS SOFIYA]:

(sarcastically) One would be a fool to think that I have any interest in the music

No, not the cascading feel of a descending scale Not the unripe taste of a chromatic harmony Music is an object with which to seduce only the most educated of men DIRECTOR:

All right, pause! (cutting the recording off at bar 218)

SFX: The needle is removed from the old vinyl record. Tone down the sarcasm, Rose/

181


ROSE:

Oh, the tone here is purposeful and necessary. (The director makes a sound of

disgust) You perpetuate an attitude which allows for no middle term in the representation of female sexuality; if she does not desire him, then surely, because of her voracious appetite, she must desire numerous men indiscriminately. DIRECTOR: (tapping against his music stand, rapidly, in desperation). Enough, please! Let us end on a stable note with, at last, a perfect cadence.295 LEO:

And with the conclusion of my /script.

ROSE:

(interrupting)/ You have tried to contain her. Yet, in your framing of her narrative, I

cannot look past the irony. You (to director) so mistakenly expose your own narcissistic tendencies and you (to Leo) could almost be Tolstoy himself! You haven’t given Sofiya an artistic voice by any means. Leo and the Director both scoff at this remark. And then, you kill her. (a moment) I have wanted to commit a murder myself. Let me improvise, at the piano, something she would have liked. Something that isn’t bound by classical rules. We need to experiment with new forms. DIRECTOR:

You’ve made this impossible. I hope you know that.

SFX: The aggressive sound of a script being thrown down. SFX: The sound of a door opening and closing with a bang. ROSE:

Whether you aim to trap her within a literary or musical context, you have failed.

And she will have her ending. ROSE:

Don’t forget Orpheus, Leo!

LEO:

(under SFX:

More

footsteps

his as

Leo

breath) returns

to

For collect

his

God’s violin,

followed

sake. by

the

slam of a door. SFX: The sound of a piano stool being adjusted as Rose prepares to play.

295

Perfect Cadence is the cadence formed by the “V – I” progression (Dominant – Tonic)- it is the strongest cadence and signifies finality, conclusion and stability within a musical context.

182


SCENE 5 Throughout this scene, Rose plays the opening theme of the Kreutzer Sonata by Beethoven and improvises a reinvention and reworking of this theme in a modern, avante-garde style. This section is read in an ad-lib style to indicate Rose’s abandonment of the script. ROSE:

Dying is an art And while I am a master of many arts, This too, you have made me a master in. You have swallowed me in your ego, And drowned out my song You have placed me in your painting Like a helpless bird And these hands of mine, Are not yours to muse. And you define, so certainly, my character Without having known me at all; without knowing Woman296 Your fond description of my disassembled body Does not amuse me. So now, You will listen to my work, To a restructuring that you have overlooked. And now, to begin again, a proper reframing.

296

Reference to Cixous’ The Laugh of Medusa.

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Erika Skelin: The “President” of Misrule Inspired by a post-truth context and the socio-political sphere of American elections, my fictocritical response seeks to playfully interrogate Trump as a contemporary carnivalesque “Lord of Misrule”. Through satirically analysing Trump as a text, I reveal how multifaceted subjectivities within the 21st Century have led to the deconstruction of singular discourses and objective truths, revealing how his “Joker" presidency represents the new world as his own “carnival”. Informed by the fictional and theoretical works of Bhaktin and Rabelais, my major work explores the role of language and media in providing a platform for the cult-like “Trumpets” to release their suppressed inhibitions under the umbrella of “freedom of speech”, navigating the narrative of the Trump presidential campaign through the carnivalesque lens of a post-modern “Feast of Fools" within an age of mass information and deconstruction of dualistic thinking. The “President” of Misrule I. Introduction The drones of raging crowds proudly waving red, white and blue flags while chanting, screaming, laughing, cheering, echoes among the carnival. Gluttony and drunkenness - a Feast of Fools. Masked and mocking, battles and pageants, sweat and pride. Glory to the Joker, releasing roars from the rushing adrenaline of the people as he flings dung at revelers! Drawing his sword, elated screams of glee and angst penetrate the air. Louder, and louder, and louder they all cry in unison. And with a smile, the Joker leaves the stage, with only the vibrations of the stadium to linger. However, it’s all “laughs and games” until you come to the cataclysmic realisation that the Joker is not just some hyper-manic lunatic with a raging sense of humour and his wits all about. He also has a multi-billion dollar net worth and a social status among the stars (his inner circle being some of the wealthiest globally), hidden under his incredibly orange tinge that seems to mask his not-sohumorous intent. With a crown upon the joker’s head he laughs as he reeks of havoc without a care in the world. It’s all “giggles” until you also realise it’s not the carnival he leads, rather the largest economy in the world. Despite our awareness of antagonistic politics, the 2016 United 184


States election provided insight into the more sinister example of a society now only seeming to further conversation from progress and change because of an inability to see eye to eye. Within a post-truth context epitomised by inversion of order and multifaceted subjectivities, destabilisation of fixed systems of political truth and rejection of an objective correlative provide a stage for an endless capacity of carnivalesque dissembling. It is this platform that the “lord of misrule” flourishes - within the liminal space of tension between institutionalised conservatism and newfound shifting progressivism. Binary dualisms therefore become destabilised as transcendence becomes celebrated. Of course, if there’s one figure who defines the chasm entirely on his own, it’s the carnivalesque figure of Donald J. Trump. With his careening diatribes, his bathroom jokes, his schoolyard taunts, and his phallic fixation, Trump is nothing if not a trickster figure, a jester in king’s robes - or at least performing as such. His delight in offending one on a global “stage” and

[1] His great,

all is matched only by his desperation for approval - the hallmarks of a clown.

Rabelaisian ambition seems to be to ride into Washington and “piss” on everything - which his smooth exit from office entirely embodies. II. A brief interlude - Bakhtin, Rabelais and a Flood of Piss Where there are many theories that attempt to explain the ‘blue-collar billionaire’s’ success, it is a Russian analytical paradigm that I choose to frame my analysis of Trump as text. Even though his work has been applied to international relations theory, Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnival culture is a fruitful avenue to analyse the success of the ‘populist Zeitgeist’, ‘Transgression of cultural norms and values by subaltern groups, [is] the ideal critical

[2] It is this literary route that can

tool for approaching all kinds of social and material interactions’.

capture and deconstruct the very essence of the chaos that has permeated the global media for over four years. Diving into the works of the early modern writer François Rabelais, ‘Carnivalization is not an external and immobile schema… rather, an extraordinarily flexible form of artistic visualisation, a peculiar sort of heuristic principle making possible the discovery of new and as yet unseen thing,’ Bakhtin’s theory on the Renaissance writer’s gargantuan heroes grabbed the traditional hierarchies of social privilege and power by their feet, and, with a mighty shake, suspended them upside down. Rabelais’ world was revealed in the razing of established authorities

185


and ritual pieties; through the exercise of excess, it underscored all that was wrong with a world deemed to be right. Nevertheless, despite Rabelais contextually responding to shifting renaissance humanism and

[3]

Bakhtin’s criticism of cultural semiology within WWII

, the same emerging paradigm remains.

Carnivalesque energies endure and prevail within similar conditions, and it is in this contemporary context of shifting epistemological frameworks that Trump disdains the notion of truth itself. As the lord of misrule, Trump’s ability to manipulate multiple discourses and therefore multiple subjectivities highlights the nefarious and deluded qualities of individuals who foster a culture of fear, xenophobia, and paranoia to legitimise their own authority. Trump’s Rabelaisian underpinnings showed him to be a gargantuan “monster” himself, whereby his rhetoric evoked his ability to subordinate the collective due to extreme paradoxes between objective truth and manipulated perception - namely, saying what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted, under his own umbrella of personal “truth”. Blurring the boundaries of morality and objectivity became a carnivalesque tool in the cultural arsenal that allowed Trump and his cult-like fan-base, Trumpets, to remain a stranglehold on power. It is therefore Trump’s cunning falsifications and immoral expressions within his political discourse that illuminates that he was not running America as a “business”, rather a carnival whereby he maneuvered his Trumpet “puppets” as chess pieces in a game against Gargantuan giants such as the media and left-wing organisations. III. Crowning of the King - Carnival Rallies

[4]. Like ours, his was a time

Like us, Rabelais occupied a society that was anxious for rebaptisms

of ambiguities and multiple subjectivities, whereby the preconceived foundations of human dignity found themselves battered by unfamiliar tides. In short, his world, paralleling the contemporary 21st Century, was ruled by men who dealt in abstractions. So too, then, does Trump align with the same transgressive behaviours that outdated modes of intellectualism and truth, such as the Catholic Church, feared most. What troubled the Church most about Rabelais was that the torrent of oaths, puns, dirty jokes, tall tales, and general anarchy that filled his pages had a potent natural wellspring. Just as the medieval French clergymen rode in dung-carts flinging feces at the revelers, one could almost marvel at Trump’s own ‘Feast of Fools’ - his rallies: “Following Trump’s lead, they embraced le monde à l’envers - an alternative reality where truths were lies, immigrants were 186


rapists, masks were useless, science was elitist, fine people were on both sides in Charlottesville

[5] Amongst a social milieu mimicking the gluttony and

and, yes, Jews waved bags of money.”

drunkenness of the Saturnalia festival, Trump’s carnival emulates a trajectory nothing of the typical politically conservative sorts, rather could perhaps align more with frat party culture. Trump’s Rabelaisian characterisation, thus, epitomises the subversive energies within a modern context that culminates in the creation of new “truths”. The carnival ethos stood in opposition to the ‘official’ and ‘serious’ church sanctioned and feudal culture, by bringing out folklore and different forms of folk laughter that Bakhtin calls carnival. This type of Rabelaisian culture challenges the official buttoned-up discourse and is characterised by coarseness and vulgarity, distinguished by anti-ideology and anti-authority themes - In other words, anti-establishment. Despite Donald Trump, as a white, straight, wealthy self-proclaimed

[6] male, hardly being aligned with a subaltern voice, he nevertheless managed to

“traditionalist”

galvanise a substantial amount of support among the American population that perceived themselves as subaltern, in marketing himself as an anti-establishment figure by using elements of the carnival culture. Styling himself as a Washington ‘outsider’, a ‘blue-collar billionaire’, someone who would ‘drain the swamp’ of corruption in Washington DC, the age of misinformation presented Trump with a unique opportunity to leverage the power of social networks to his advantage. Even though the role of mass media in populist ascent to power was underlined a great deal ahead of Facebook or Twitter, multidirectional discourse, a hallmark of carnival culture that does not necessarily distinguish between fact, opinion or feelings, created an atmosphere where carnival replaced normal politics. The Trump campaign benefitted from the social networks’

[7] marketing campaign, based on a

propensity to spread misinformation through his “Big-Seed”

foundation as Michael Humphrey analyses, “Taken together over time, this formed an overall story structure that I summarise this way: “The establishment is stopping me from protecting you against invaders.”

[8] Given that social networks are conducive to the spread of conspiracy theories, fake

photos, and rumors about cough-preventing machines, misinformation blossomed on the internet, which provided the platform for Trump to assert his own self-assurance of his “legitimacy”. By employing a continuous lexical field of “honour”, Trump as a Bakhtinian Carnival King transfers, or rather “performs”, his liberties with the truth in his rallies. It is in this space that his Rabelaisian 187


ambition seems to flourish - Drawing the masses into the chaos and subversive energies of carnival culture, by legitimising their self-expression, despite the xenephobic, sexist or overall “problematic nature”, to assert his own populist support. Trump’s own dialogue, “I’m honest. And I just, again, I want to thank you. It’s just a great honor to… be before you and hundreds of thousands of American patriots who are committed to the honesty of our elections and the integrity of our glorious republic,” provides insight into his ability to manipulate his support base, Trumpets, by feigning “honesty”, “honour” and “integrity” as the premise of his campaign. Trump’s facade therefore entirely plays into what contemporary 21st Century has facilitated, namely, the instability of ontological systems of meaning and stable frameworks of objectivity becoming a space for Trump to redefine “truth”. By further antagonising left-wing parties and media within his rallies, Trump additionally develops a moral code through the binary of “good” and “evil” as objectively detrimental to the Trumpet fantasy of “truth”: “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media... We will

[9] Trump’s

never give up, we will never concede... You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”

repeated war-like stance of “we will never give up, we will never concede”, legitimised by sanctioning “theft” as enemy to the Republican cause, provides the foundation for surges in hatecrime and broadening the dichotomy between political stances within the US. As of October 15, 2020, Trump is reported to have promoted QAnon accounts to his 87.2 million followers at least 258 times from around 150 individual accounts, failing to denounce radical white supremacist

[10]. Twitter and rallies therefore become

groups ‘secretly fighting a "deep state" satanic pedophile’

[11], where

the entire premise for spreading, what Bakhtin coins, “culture as counterculture”

carnivalesque laughter and grotesque realism represent a “safety-valve” institution, which serve a structural-functionalist role to temporarily release “stresses” in the contemporary social system that being, to right-wing organisations within a post-truth context, the ability to use “self-expression” to legitimise hate-speech, violence, rampant discriminiation and bigotry, under the umbrella of “honesty”. Carnival laughter represents more than “humour”, where Trump’s undermining of democratic foundations in his rally “performance”, “You know, I say, sometimes jokingly, but there’s no joke about it: I’ve been in two elections. I won them both and the second one, I won much bigger than the first. OK. Almost 75 million people voted for our campaign, the most of any incumbent president by far in the history of our country, 12 million more people than four years ago…. We 188


[12]

didn’t lose…. It's a disgrace. It’s a disgrace,”

symbolises his ability to use high modal rhetoric

of “I won” and “We didn’t lose”, despite no evidence to support his claims, as “honesty”. The audience’s repeated chanting, “Fight for Trump,” in response to his assertion “it’s a disgrace”,

[13]. However, this too

supports what Trump himself deemed “my rhetoric brings people together”

represents the cause of counties that hosted one of Trump’s 275 presidential campaigns in 2016

[14]

seeing a 226% increase in hate crimes.

Inciting violence and hate towards immigrants, Trump’s

message from the start can be underlined in his racist claims, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you.... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing

[15] “Building the wall”[16] can

crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

therefore become symbolically linked to more than just a physical obstacle, rather illuminating how Trump himself becomes the “text” to “block” opposition. Consequently, Trump’s carnivalesque discourse in his rallies underline his ability to spread false claims, misconstrued truths and redefine “self-expression” as a means to celebrate Trumpet radicalism. IV. Crowning of the King; Part 2 - An opposition of conservative, “empty promises” Moreover, social networks, with its ability to bring closer people around the world, e.g., to tweet directly at politicians and journalists, created the illusion of the carnival town square and its closeness, leveling the playfield with familiarity. At the same time, Trump’s name calling of his

[17], was particularly emblematic of

opponents, i.e. ‘little Marco,’ ‘lyin’ Ted’ or ‘crooked Hillary’

carnival: it is the time when ‘Ivan Ivanovich' turns into Vanya or Van’ka’. Donald Trump’s insistence to constantly call Secretary Clinton by her first name, Hillary also displayed the carnivalesque intimacy. Social networks played into the ‘multidirectional discourse’ environment that is supposed to ‘debase, renew, reveal, hide, sell and entertain’. Trump himself used the hashtag #DrainTheSwamp repeatedly, referring to the eradication of Washington DC’s establishment. This framing speaks to anti-ideology and anti-authority features of carnival. Subversion of hierarchy was also visible when Trump boasted that politicians used to come to him for donations, which was useful for him as a businessman. By presenting himself as not part of the elite, but rather a capitalist philanthropist, Trump tapped into the essence of populism and appealed to the sense of 189


disenfranchisement among certain groups of voters in the US, which could be conceived as giving voice to the part of the population that perceived itself as subaltern in the American context. Donald Trump has been a pioneer of the subaltern trend - he’s boasted of grabbing women ‘by the pussy’ (what he calls ‘locker-room talk’), accused journalist Megyn Kelly of asking him tough questions because she had ‘blood coming out of her wherever’, and at one point reduced a US

[18]

election debate to a discussion about the “size of his penis”

(to which he claims no one has

ever been disappointed). This politically incorrect, ‘earthy’ humor is a way for politicians to show off how ‘anti-establishment’ they are: their ‘anti-elitist’ politics are branded via a rejection of established moral and linguistic norms. On a deeper level, they are disassociating themselves from the ‘elite’ head of the ‘body politic’, and aligning with the more ‘common’ activities of the lower strata. They thus tap into the folk tradition of carnival, the medieval and renaissance Saturnalia where all the usual hierarchies and rules were thrown out to be replaced with a drunken anarchy, where ordinary people would dress up in grotesque parodies of clergy and royalty, where licentiousness was legitimized and social nobodies were made swearing, farting and puking Lords of Misrule for a day. As for Hillary Clinton (or perhaps “Crooked Hillary”) with her labyrinthine establishment connections, her calculated, unspontaneous style, and her intermittent tendency to dissemble and condescend, she lends herself all too well as an avatar of everything the average Trumpet distrusts. Trump’s retweet of calling the first female nominee of either major political party in the US “a

[19], is merely deemed a transparency of his “truthful” persona. The endless harping on her

skank”

[20],

dress, her voice, her manner, the endless exaggeration and fabrication of her transgressions

undermining her political capability based on private relationships, "If Hillary Clinton can't satisfy

[21]" — all of this is brutally sexist,

her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?

[22] That is to say, she’s

but it also emanates from the belief that she is fundamentally artificial.

been shaped so thoroughly by “inhuman” forces - Ivy League intellectualism, corporate opportunism, party-politics machinations - that her human influences, and therefore her legitimacy in speaking to and for the rest of Americans, have been forfeited. Characteristically, Rabelais coined a new word for people, whose greatest sin in his view was forgetting how to laugh. To the 190


[23]

Trumpet, Clinton is a Rabelaisian agélaste

- a humorless, soulless abstraction, hence Trump’s

[24]. Foregrounding this helps explain the double standard that

coining of Clinton as “the devil”

frustrates and bewilders liberals. Summarised by Matt Smith, when Trump misspeaks, when he offends, when he tells half-truths or quarter-truths, (or really no truth at all), it’s a refreshing proof of a vital, fallible humanity. When Clinton does the same, it’s an uncanny glimpse at the machinery behind the curtain. When Trump takes a stance, however inconsistently or outrageously, it’s seen as emerging from a human brain. When Clinton takes a stance, it’s seen as the final click of a vast,

[25]

incomprehensible system of cogs.

V. Crowned and tweeting - A carnival huckster and his great pleasure-rod With 145 million daily active Twitter users, Trump’s appeal to the mass propaganda machine allows his carnival regime to flourish under his, as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank referred to, “belligerent rhetoric and liberties with the truth”. According to the New York Times, Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on baseless conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions, including his renowned Tweet, “If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it... We’re saving the world”. In redefining rhetoric through proliferation of social media and platforms that have provided meaningless political discourse, Trump’s supporters are able to feel engaged with the route of their country and therefore access to power. Trump’s tweets are classic fool behavior - they are raw, ridiculous and frequently selfdestructive. The point is not the message of the Tweet: It’s to symbolically upend hierarchy - to be oppositional. Anybody who writes for a living knows how to manipulate an outraged response, and Trump is a fool puppet master. With their conniption fits, Trumpets feed into the dynamic he needs. Trump’s Tweets contribute to carnival culture - his bawdy behaviour culminating in phallic overtones is seemingly legitimised by the Trumpet as (carnivalesque) banter. In the works of Rabelais, humour, the bawdier the better, served as purifier, fertiliser, regenerator: “Then smiling, he unfastened his noble codpiece and lugging out his great pleasure-rod, he so fiercely bepissed them that he drowned two hundred and sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen… By sheer fleetness of foot, a certain number escaped this mighty

191


pissflood, and reaching the top of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève... they began to swear and curse, some in anger, others in jest.” Just as when Gargantua unleashes his “pissflood”, he also unwittingly unleashes a flood of profanity from the startled Parisians, the oaths of the Trumpet seem to pour from their mouths

[26]

uncontrollably

- micro-transgressions of the established code of conduct. The mixture of

“anger” and “jest” that Rabelais describes must be familiar to anyone who’s watched the outpouring of vulgarity at a Trump rally. These are people whose power, they feel, has been slowly sucked away from them for decades. To regain that power, however fleetingly, is intoxicating. Thus the content of what they utter is not the important thing, and they’ll often walk it back, or qualify it, in a less heady context. The slur, the taunt, the threat — these are just ventings. Therefore, as long as a “smiling” Trump remains “unfastening his noble codpiece” and releasing his “great pleasure-rod” to an audience of “two hundred and sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen”, “piss”-thirsty Twitter users, so too will Trumpets “swear and curse” at his “mighty pissblood”. Trump’s political persona as Carnival King and anti-hero ridicules and scorns the normative order claimed to be represented and defended by the bureaucratic and administrative state. Hans Bakker observed, “Trump himself is a kind of neo-patrimonial figure and there seem to be elements of prebendalism in his selection of members of his inner circle”. (Bakker, 2017: 119). As the “heel”, he exposes and humiliates the “good guys” of the Washington DC establishment, cultural elites, and the liberals, thereby channeling the resentment of, especially, lower-middle-class whites who

[27]. This can be evaluated during the Republican

feel left behind both economically and culturally

primary campaign in 2015, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.” (Fang, 2015). Trump as “heel” is both the carnivalesque challenge to the dominant order who inverts its codes and a figure of power who fundamentally embodies the dominant order. In this light, Donald Trump is a self-subverting figure who undermines his credibility with transparently gross lies that paradoxically establish his authenticity as a subversive rebel outsider who will “tell it like it is and

[28]. The preposterous distortions and grossly transparent lies that

shake things up from the inside”

Trump has peddled, underlined by his ironic statement, "The line of 'Make America great again,' the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody's using it, they are all loving it. I don't know, I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted 192


[29]

it."

highlights the entire pretense of rejecting an objective correlative by reappropriating Ronald

Reagan’s most well-known campaign slogans and crediting it to his own name. Collective amnesia in a post-truth world thus allows and gives space for lies or manipulated truths to infiltrate political discourse. Trump’s ability to use figures beyond hyperbole more than any other major candidate, illuminates his characterisation as “a brilliant master of rhetoric” who has “plundered the figures of classical rhetoric”. Trump repeatedly employs the rhetorical device of phony “reluctance” to utter a word or phrase: “She just said a terrible thing. You know what she said? Shout it out because I don’t want to say… She said he’s a pussy…. That’s terrible! Terrible.” This figure, apophasis (from the Greek word for “to deny”), emphasises a point by pretending to deny it. A favorite of Cicero’s — “I will not even mention the fact that you betrayed us in the Roman people by aiding Catiline” (63 BC) — it’s also called paralipsis (from the Greek word for “omission”). Trump, however, is more Ciceronian than Cicero himself: ● “I was going to say ‘dummy’ Bush; I won’t say it. I won’t say it,” ● “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct,” ● “Unlike others, I never attacked dopey Jon Stewart for his phony last name. Would never do that!” ● "While @BetteMidler is an extremely unattractive woman, I refuse to say that because

[30]

I always insist on being politically correct."

● “I promised I would not say that she [Carly Fiornia] ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, that she laid off tens of thousands of people and she got viciously fired. I said I will not say it, so I will not say it.” The ironic term “I will not say it” therefore alludes to how Trump’s rhetoric is in itself carnival. Trump’s consistent use of paralipsis and apophasis therefore speaks to the power of his campaign’s propaganda machine, whereby manipulating multiple discourses and systems of ontological meaning mediates the Trumpet consciousness with polluted facts under the false pretense of political correctness. VI. Crowned and freedom of (hate) speech

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The laughing culture of carnival can be epitomised in the likes of Trump's rhetoric - The fusion of toilet humor, violence, populism and power. As Lord of Misrule, he has managed to hack into the energy once associated with democratic movements and turned it into an instrument of oppression. Trump has adopted the banner of ‘freedom of speech’ and used it to spread hate and lies, and to make any sort of public discourse impossible. Despite traditional mass media not taking Donald Trump “seriously”, they were still reporting about him. This was especially true for late night shows that have become a staple part of the American political landscape, to which Jon Stewart remarked,

[31]

"Trump is the part of your brain that, at 3 a.m., is like, 'Let’s go take a [expletive] in a mailbox.'"

It is therefore the notion of Trump as a “punchline” rather than a respected politician that asserts the Rabelaisian carnival culture manifested within his presidency. As head of carnival, it is Trump’s crowning that provided the ultimate platform for spewing Rabelaisian seeds of “rejuvenation” through transparent lies. Donald Trump is a master of classical

[32] In his own published

rhetoric  -  what Plato called “the art of winning the soul by discourse.” work The Art of the Deal, Trump states:

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies… That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of

[33]

exaggeration - and a very effective form of promotion.”

This effective form of lying through a facade of a “little hyperbole” or “innocent... exaggeration” plays into carnival subversive, excusing and rationalising lies. “Truthful hyperbole” is a “euphemism,” and since hyperbole is by definition untruthful exaggeration, Trump’s phrase is an “oxymoron,” which is also a figure of speech. As a Falstaffian Lord of Misrule he acquired the legitimacy during his campaign to unmask the pretenses, for example, of “political correctness” among Washington insiders, the mainstream media and university intellectuals. In deeming the

[34], Trump played right into old racist

COVID-19 pandemic ”Chinese virus” or the “Kung Flu”

tropes, fuelling a more dangerous pandemic of conservatism raiding within the socio-political

[35], culminating

foundations of Republican America. Trump’s displeasure towards “these THUGS”

[36], glorifies the white saviour in

in his viral phrase, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”

194


stimulating passionate distaste towards social change, such as anti-racism-protest during the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Trump’s racially-motivated discourse honours the passionate resentment of all things not-white, male and straight, furthered in his belligerent rhetoric playing on the “othering” of social groups. The Trumpet carnival, therefore, flourishes on the grounds of hate, perhaps as a means to make America white again. The general levity with which Trump’s campaign was reported and his antics, presented as a carnival fool’s performance, sustained the atmosphere of carnival and failed to warn the public of Trump’s non-existent qualifications, serial lying, and rampant xenophobia. His rejection of the entire notion of scientific objective can be illuminated by his ignorant claim, ”Well, I think climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax... I know much about climate change. I’d be —  received environmental awards. And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China.” Trump asserts his xenephobic claims as a joke, despite immediately repeating, “Obviously, I joke. But this

[37] The point of “truthful hyperbole” then is to allow Trump to

is done for the benefit of China.”

spout lies but speak them as emotional truths that, when caught, allow him to claim that he “obviously” doesn’t actually believe  -  even as he repeats the lie again. “Mostly false” then becomes a more apt phrase for “truthful hyperbole,” a gratuitous, unhinged depravity servicing a vital social function in the likes of carnival culture, purging objectivity. Acting as checks on the abuse of power, keeping uppity humans and institutions from drifting too far from their shared humanity, Trump pisses on the roots of society, acting as a fertiliser for rejuvenation, allowing buds both new and old to flourish and prosper: “Brazenly, Trump disdains even the idea that moral or ethical norms shape his conduct or define the nation he leads. He rejects distinctions between right and wrong for an ethos of explicit self-interest that Americans have never before seen from the White House.”

[38]

Taking this long view of President “Joker” helps us reconcile how Trump could be so clumsy, so craven, so treacherous, so viscerally repulsive to his enemies, and yet commanded such

[39]. It is rather convincing that Trumpets, by and large, are not driven by

fascination and hope

ignorance or meanness; they simply gave up on the notion of a President improving their quality of life or “making America great again”, a President seeing their suffering, or giving them a voice. And so, what is one to do when the chance of salvation appears so futile? Vote instead for a Lord of Misrule - of course! 195


VII. Uncrowning... It took a PANDEMIC Trump's disorientation of an already ignorant population through language and conspiracy becomes evident in his ability to define what is real or fake, even to the extent of undermining reputable news agencies and political or medical experts. Margaret Sullvian, a media columnist for the Washington Post stressed that Trump's ability to question the integrity of journalists by a single Tweet, and therefore discredit the media as what Trump describes to be “Fake, phony, fake”, “turns us against journalism as one of the pillars of our democracy”. Trump’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic particularly exposes his stance of anti-democrat sentiment as opposed to pro-American advocacy. His denial of medical advice, “The Fake News Media... is doing everything... to inflame the CoronaVirus situation… We’re prepared, and... It will go away,” expresses his lack of morality equating to social superiority, where an objective truth does not exist. Trump’s rejection of a distinction between right and wrong for an ethos of self-interest, exposes how those on top of the vertical hierarchy manipulate and redefine political discourse in order to legitimise authority as a populace leader. Hence the destruction and reconstruction of dominant discourse becomes evident in Trump’s Twitter propaganda machine, in speaking to the linguistic manipulation of arbiters of truth as a means of acquisition of power. Trump’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic particularly exposes his stance of antidemocrat sentiment as opposed to pro-American advocacy. His denial of medical advice, “The Fake News Media... is doing everything... to inflame the CoronaVirus situation… We’re prepared, and... It will go away,” expresses his lack of morality equating to social superiority, where an objective truth does not exist. Trump’s rejection of a distinction between right and wrong for an ethos of self-interest, exposes how those on top of the vertical hierarchy manipulate and redefine political discourse in order to legitimise authority as a populace leader. Hence the destruction and reconstruction of a pillar of carnival subversion, becomes evident in Trump’s Twitter propaganda machine, in speaking to the linguistic manipulation of arbiters of truth as a means of acquisition of power. The lies, the outrageous boasts, the disorder, and the rants, all the things that made President Donald Trump the ringmaster of the American political carnival, at last compelled a majority of voters to drive him out. Trump mocked the virus as a media conspiracy. “Fake News Media is going 196


full on Covid, Covid, Covid,” he tweeted on Oct. 27. “We are rounding the turn.” However, in the end, the Trump presidency ended much as it began: “with a thin margin in key states separating two candidates in an anxious nation, and Trump appealing to America’s demons over its better

[40]

angels, hurling baseless claims that he’d been robbed.”

Banned from social media, Trump’s

platform diminished under the weight of the pandemic, and his four years as “president” of misrule became merely a laughable skit on late night shows. VIII. Post-script - Storming the capitol Under siege. The carnival couldn’t end! Two hundred and sixty thousand four hundred and eighteen climbed the top of the Montagne Sainte Geneviève to revive their noble king. Lugging out their great swords, the mob swore and spat as they waved their flags and clawed towards their Joker. Blood and gore, a sacrifice of their great cause. The Jester thrashed his noble cod-piece with all his might, but to no avail. And into thin air he vanished, and so too, did the carnival fantasy.

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