The Effect of Gendering Nations as Female in Literature, and What That Means for the Next Generation of Female Writers

by Charlie Clark

To be a woman is not a place of neutrality. To be a woman in literature, to read of your body as a site of battles and uprisings, of famine and protest, destroys any sense of impartiality. There is a long-standing tradition of gendering the nation: the motherland, the mothership, the innate feminine sense of home. But what happens when this sense of gender becomes so deeply tied in with a sense of nation that the two have become almost inseparable?

As a woman, I can trace my body through nations since antiquity. It is inescapable in literature, particularly in poetry. We as women have always been there as a figurehead in the literary canon, voiceless figures speaking for a nation. Take the figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, for example: also known as ‘The Poor Old Woman’, she is a wandering figure without a home, who needs the help of young Irish men willing to fight and die for Ireland to rejuvenate herself and reverse her ageing to some degree. This figure became most prominent through Yeats’ treat ment of her in his play, ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’, using her as a representative of the Irish struggles under British coloni al rule, her body becoming a site of allegory and metaphor to put across the concept of nationhood. But of course, it is male writers who map this allegory onto us. Throughout history, this portrayal of nationhood as female was our only chance to be included and represented in the male-dominated literary canon, and so made little sense to alienate ourselves from one of the only acceptable feminine representations. But what does this mean now, when the amount of female writers is only expanding? This concept of woman-as-nation, I argue, does more harm than good in the creation of a sense of gendered national identity. As women, we have been placed into the role of representative without understanding the burden this creates. I feel no connection to England as a motherland, no solidarity between myself as a woman and England as a feminine creation, despite the constant connections made between the two in countless pieces of literature. It is hard to grapple with the concept of a nation which has been forced onto our gendered existence without conforming to the norm, using our bodies and identities as a transactional site in which to gain access into this elusive men’s world of metaphors and similes. To be a female writer, writing about national identity, your role is pre-defined. And to break into this world, this role will be thrust upon you without question, leaving you expected to attempt to evaluate and bring together two separate identities in one. The imposition of this national narrative onto the feminine, using and appropriating the site of the female body as a non-consensual figurehead for a nation, creates a sense of dissonance between the two identities and can often serve to further isolate female writers grappling with both concepts and their personhood as an intersection of the two. To try and enter this space in an attempt to redefine the sense of gender pre-established by someone outside of this identity is a challenge in itself. This imposition of metaphor, of woman-as-nation, has, instead of bringing the female identity closer to the poetic and literary canon, created a distance between the two, alienating women from the discourse sur- rounding the concept of national identity and nationhood within their work due to the predefined position they have been given in terms of an expression of national identity. This can only serve to make women and female writers feel as if they have no place beyond the role of figureheads within the sphere of national literature, driving a wedge between the two identities as well as refusing to acknowledge the lived experiences of women within the nation in question. To become part of this tradition, to enrol yourself within this literary canon, you must re-negotiate the idea of woman-as-nation within a narrative that is overwhelmingly patriarchal. It is a necessary act of re-evaluation, taking the two singular concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘nation’ in conjunction with each other, and what it means to step away from bearing the burden of national identity. The concept of a nation exists as a gendered entity in ways that tend to disempower real women by silencing their actual voices and obscuring their experiences, objectifying women at the expense of their flesh-and-blood subjectivity and negating the importance of their knowledge and understanding of actual experiences, material lives and agency. It is vital that female writers, grappling with the concept of identity, interrogate the disjunctions produced by the nationalisation of the feminine and the feminisation of the national, both within themselves and within the society and literary subculture. Through revising, editing and reconfiguring nationalism rather than repudiating it, there is more opportunity to create space within such narratives for the historical and material experiences of women.

The historical gendering of nations as female within literature has served to create disharmony between the two identities of gender and nationality, with their intersection in modern women’s literature a cause for a re-evaluation of the way the two separate concepts interact. It has now fallen to the female writer to take on the burden of woman-as-nation and examine that to her national identity, reclaiming space within the literary canon and overcoming the divide that the imposition of this metaphor has caused.

Recovering Indigenous Viewpoints: to what extent can we recover indigenous reactions to European colonisation in Brazil?

by Alvaro Novais Freire

When Pêro Vaz de Caminha arrived in Brazil on the 22nd of April 1500 aboard Pedro Alvares Cabral’s voyage of ‘discovery’, he was awestruck. The letter he wrote to the Portuguese King Manuel I is in stark contrast to those written by other explorers of the period. Caminha admired the innocence of the natives who were unashamed of their nakedness. He does not portray the natives as barbaric but, rather, as noble savages. He calls them “handsome” and even says of one woman, “she was so well-shaped and so rounded, and her private parts so graceful that many women of our land… would feel embarrassed for not having theirs look like hers”.

Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s letter is celebrated in Brazil as the country’s birth certificate and yet, the text highlights a key challenge in the retelling of Brazil’s colonial history. There are a plethora of European accounts of this history, but the viewpoints of the natives, who lacked literacy, are difficult to recover. Many of the European accounts dehumanised the natives, portraying them as noble savages, sensationalising the practice of cannibalism amongst them as Michel de Montaigne did in his essay “Of Cannibals” from 1580 and Hans Staden did in his account True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil from 1557. This is not to say these accounts are not valuable, they serve an important role in the retelling of the history of colonialism in Brazil, but they tell a one-sided history without indigenous voices balancing them out. The question of identity in Brazil is a complicated subject. Miscegenation of Brazil’s multiracial society means that Brazilians are mostly of mixed heritage. Miscegenation of the natives by the Europeans became commonplace soon after European ‘discovery’, assimilating many natives and acculturating them. The usage of the Nheengatu and Tupi Austral, indigenous languages that acted as lingua francas in Brazil for much of the colonial period, were widespread, and both languages were spoken by natives and Europeans alike. Nevertheless, the literature remained dominated by the Europeans who used the language as an additional means of deculturating the natives as many natives became monolinguistic, losing their native languages and part of their identity. However, contemporary indigenous retellings of Brazil’s colonial history aid in the recovery of indigenous viewpoints. Indigenous authors such as Kaka Werá Jecupé and Daniel Munduruku have written books attempting to reclaim their side of history and are contributing to the literary body of Brazil’s colonial past in an invaluable manner. However, recovering the native viewpoint of Brazil’s past remains difficult with the deculturation of the natives through miscegenation and language and the dominance of European perspectives in the colonial period.

Frida Kahlo: Creating a Vision of People with Disabilities

by Debra Schaefer

Frida Kahlo was a resilient lady. She had plans to become a doctor, a politician, and an artist, yet such plans were tarnished in 1925. Following being impaled by an iron handrail whilst riding on a bus, Kahlo became a patient. However, during her years of recovery, Kahlo created art which exhibited the perspectives of a woman with disabilities.

As a result of the bus collision, Frida sustained injuries to her pelvis, spine, collarbone, and legs. Particularly relevant to her gender identity was the puncturing of her abdomen and uterus. She was placed into a full-body cast and was prescribed rest. Her future seemed bleak, yet prior to her accident, her husband described her as having a ‘strange fire in her eyes’, and despite the many dark days she endured, her fire certainly kept burning.

Frida had to lie flat for a long period of time. She spent hours staring at the ceiling until her parents encouraged her to paint as they believed there was more to Frida than her injuries. Her mother attached a specially made easel to her bed and fastened a mirror atop its four posters, allowing Frida to view herself as a muse. Her paintings illustrate her experiences of this period, and particularly interesting is Without Hope (1945), in which Kahlo depicted herself under bed covers, buried by an easel. Her close friend and fellow activist, Andrés Henestrosa (19062008), explained that Frida ‘lived dying,’, and this mindset was evidenced by her art. A Few Small Nips (1935), Thinking About Death (1943), and The Broken Column (1944), all envisaged the damage her body could not overcome, confirming

Frida was a realist toward the difficulties of being both a woman and disabled. She did not portray herself as having conquered the impediments of her physical form. Instead, she presented herself as living and suffering not only amidst physical disabilities but also amidst her position as a Mexican woman.

In a letter to her husband, she saw herself as ‘a maimed woman,’. She saw herself as incomplete, yet her talent was never contained by the plaster corsets or prosthetic leg she wore until her death. Deeply entrenched by thoughts of her pain and limitations, she was still a revolutionary, a leader, and a catalyst. By her example, she created a vision of what being disabled could mean.