The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, Volume 6

The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism

Spring 2016 Volume 6

The Madison Journal

of

Literary Criticism

is a peer-reviewed UW-Madison publication devoted to publishing outstanding essays of undergraduate literary analysis. The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism accepts unsolicited submissions analyzing any form of literary criticism in 8-20 pages. Articles will be chosen for their originality, eloquence, internal coherence, and quality of academic research. Papers must be written in English, although they can analyze the literature of another language. Any submissions or questions may be directed to mjlc@rso.wisc.edu or http://english.wisc.edu/theMJLC.

Editor’s Note The annual rotation of our editorial staff is at once a deeply sad and incredibly exciting proposition that all undergraduate journals know too well.

It seems that our editors are never with us long enough before graduation and graduate school speed them away, and each time we say goodbye, we find consolation only in the knowledge that our table will soon be graced by a new and talented pen. This year, we faced an unprecedented number of vacancies with all but two of our editors moving on to new adventures.

We started the current volume in search of seven new faces to welcome to our board, and, from equal parts luck and hardwork, we happened upon a phenomenal cohort of editors who settled into our lengthy editorial process like seasoned members of the literary scene. The task before them, and us, was the same as in years prior: to review and ultimately publish exceptional undergraduate works in literary criticism from around the globe. With more than 150 submissions this year, our review process was just as rigorous—and rewarding—as ever. Five essays emerged above the rest, and we are excited to showcase their authors in this sixth volume of our journal. We would like to thank our advisor Professor Monique Alleawart for her guidance, Karen Redfield for her assistance, and the UW-Madison English department for our undergraduate years.

We hope our volume is just as fun reading as it was compiling.

Best regards, August Glomski and Megan Wisniewski Editors-in-Chief, MJLC

Editorial Board Editors in Chief August Glomski Megan Wisniewski Associate Editors Brianna Rock Casey Varecka Curtis Ascher Eliza Weisberg Hannah Mumm Kristen Romes Kristina Shirk Faculty Advisor Monique Allewaert Layout Design August Glomski

Cover Design and Art by Vasuki Rao Vasuki wants to live in a world that has a Thai restaurant on every corner and where the most controversial argument is the best spot for lunch. A final year journalism student at San Jose State University, she is most passionate about social issues involving race and gender. Her style of photography lies in capturing people in the midst of specific moments, and she loves playing with light—both natural and artificial— to affect her shots. Almost all of her work has a story behind it.

Contents Ellen Hutter: Vampire Slayer A Feminist Comparison of Dracula and Nosferatu

By Deirdre Carney Page 9 “Wel may that be a proverbe of a shrewe!”: The Politics of Proverbial Sparring in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

By Nathan May Page 25 Take a Bow: Performativity in Lolita

By Yoon-Ji Han Page 36 Master, Master Slave: Dynamics of the Individual Struggle to Be Recognized in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

By Beth Bockes Page 47 Blazing Out and Breaking Boundaries: Empowerment of Female Authors in A Room of One’s Own and Jane Eyre

By Emma Adler Page 58

Ellen Hutter: Vampire Slayer

A Feminist Comparison of Dracula and Nosferatu Deidre Carney

In 1890s England, the “New Woman” was making her way through

Victorian society, integrating herself in everything from art to politics to literature. Twenty-five years later, in the post-World War I Weimar Republic, the “Neue Frau” was doing the same. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, Mina Harker, née Murray, admonishes the New Woman for her supposed lack of appetite and boldness in her sexuality (86-7). Both Mina and Lucy Westenra, Mina’s childhood friend and future victim of Dracula, display different aspects of the New Woman—the former in her professional ambitions (55), the latter in her wanton sexual desire—but both lose these traits by story’s end: Lucy is killed and returns to the Victorian ideal of purity (192) while the typewriter on Mina’s lap is replaced with a toddling son (326). In F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German expressionist film adaptation of Stoker’s novel Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror), Ellen Hutter—Murnau’s version of Mina—is the film’s unlikely heroine who devises a way to defeat the vampire Count Orlok entirely on her own. Though she dies in the end, it is a selfless sacrifice rather than a capital punishment. This paper will first define the Victorian “New Woman” before detailing the ways in which Stoker punishes his

two female characters for their independent behavior. It will move on to give a brief overview of the “Neue Frau” movements while arguing that Ellen Hutter is not punished for her status as both a “Neue Frau” and a “New Woman” but is instead celebrated for her independent thoughts and actions.

The term “New Woman” was coined in 1894 by Irish feminist Sarah Grand in an article for the North American Review. The phrase is not capitalized, and Grand does not linger on it, clearly not realizing what these two words would come to mean for the feminist movement in the following months and years. In Grand’s simple definition, the “new woman” is unlike those who men perceive as the domesticated “cow-woman” and the prostitute “scum-woman”; she is in-stead sitting “apart in silent contemplation…thinking and thinking,” trying to solve the problems of the “woman question” (270-1). This “new woman” would be in contrast to the Victorian myth of the “angel in the house,” who, according to theorist Nina Auerbach, would “submerg[e] herself in the family, existing only as daughter, wife, and mother” (4).

In the decades since Grand’s revolutionary paper, critics have redefined the “New Woman”1. According to Barbara Caine, “what differentiated the ‘new’ woman … was her rejection of marriage”, a rejection that stemmed from either a dislike of the institution because it was “degrading” or from a lack of “sexual or maternal desire” (136). Caine makes it clear that marriage was the emphasis in the New Woman’s attitudes towards feminism, something echoed in the last line of Grand’s paper: “The Woman Question is the Marriage Question” (276). Caine brings up other contemporary definitions of the “New Woman,” citing the magazine Woman’s Signal which initially defined “the new Womanhood” as “an arm, novel and puissant, of the forces of militant righteousness” (Caine 140). This militancy apparently lessened over time as the paper began to call any woman “engaged in education or in paid occupation…‘new women’”, extending it eventually to “even girls attending Board school cookery kitchens” (141).

The themes presented in Woman’s Signal seem to be centered 10

the madison journal around strength and independence, an encouragement to all young women that they too could be “New Women.” Caine also discusses another late Victorian magazine, Shafts, which offered similar but more aggressive definitions of “New Womanhood.” Shafts ran articles and letters that placed more of an importance on “women’s sexual autonomy within marriage,” focusing on “birth control and voluntary motherhood” as well as presenting the “free love” movement in a positive light (142). Together, these two magazines provide a general picture of what the “New Woman” contemporaries of Bram Stoker wanted women to be: independent in thought, body, and marriage.

Yet, the question remains of whether Bram Stoker intended his female characters in Dracula to stand for or against notions of “New Womanhood.” Nina Auerbach attempts to put Stoker in a seemingly positive light, writing in Woman and the Demon—her critique of Victorian portrayals of women—that “it seems more plausible to read the novel as a fin-de-siècle myth of newly empowered womanhood, whose two heroines are violently transformed from victims to instigators of their story” (24). In order to argue a reading of Stoker’s text that places emphasis upon the idea of “empowered womanhood,” she cites that the novel’s focus rests not on Dracula himself, but rather on Lucy and Mina. However, other critics would only agree to one sentiment of Auerbach’s summation: the two heroines’ violent transformations. Victorian literature critic Carol Senf continually uses the word “destroy” in reference to how the males of the novel treat female vampires. Lucy, for instance, is defined as “a vampire which must be violently destroyed” (34). Senf argues that without “Mina Harker, the reader might conclude that Stoker is a repressed Victorian man with an intense hatred of women or at least a pathological aversion to them.”

She continues by saying that it is the portrayal of Mina that saves Stoker from this hatred of women—rather, his is merely a hatred of the “New Woman.”

In defining the “New Woman” as “a professional woman who [chooses] financial independence and personal fulfillment as alterna11

Of Literary criticism tives to marriage and motherhood,” Senf claims that Mina Harker is not a “New Woman” (35). While Mina does have a job at the novel’s beginning, she works only as “an assistant schoolmistress” (Stoker 55).

The editors of the Norton Critical edition, Auerbach herself and David J. Skal, are quick to point out that this is still a “traditional” occupation for a Victorian woman. Mina also makes it clear that while she is learning shorthand, the tool of the “lady journalists” that she admires (56), she is doing it so that when she is married, she will “be useful to Jonathan” (55). Mina’s professional independence, a trademark of the “New Woman” as described in Woman’s Signal, is thus undermined by her desire to be the dutiful wife and to utilize the skills of her “New Womanhood” to further that domestic purpose. As Lisa Nystrom points out, by “remain[ing] faithful to the roles allocated to her by patriarchal rule,” Mina can be the “admirable” Victorian wife and mother instead of the anxiety-inducing “New Woman” (68). Because Mina ultimately does not choose financial independence over marriage, she is not quite a “New Woman” by that definition either.

However, Grand’s original definition of the “New Woman” as a thinker and problem-solver may still apply to Mina. For instance, Van Helsing praises her for her “man’s brain—a brain that a man should have were he much gifted” (Stoker 207), and laments its loss when they feel that they must keep Mina in the dark because she is under Dracula’s control (295). This “man’s brain” comparison may betray Stoker’s antipathy towards the “New Woman”—or at least his ignorance on the subject. Van Helsing, as Stoker’s mouthpiece, may consider his comparison with a “man’s brain” to be complimentary towards Mina, and Mina, as Stoker’s modern but traditional heroine, may take it as one. However, the feminists of the day would not see it as such. Sarah Grand, in fact, spends much of the essay in which her fledgling “new woman” is first defined explaining that women do not wish to “ape” men, as the “lord-and-master-monarch-of-all-I-survey” men such as Van Helsing might imagine (270). Nevertheless, it is true that Mina shows prodigious critical thinking capabilities and continually makes 12

the madison journal connections that the men have missed. After Van Helsing decides that the men are at their wits’ end with tracking Dracula back to Transylvania, it is Mina who ultimately derives a conclusion immediately after being granted access to all the same materials which the men had had at their disposal (Stoker 304ff). Mina is even praised for her superior reasoning when Van Helsing effuses that “Madam Mina is once more our teacher” (306).

Yet, these exceptional thinking skills are almost totally lost by the novel’s climax. While Mina is the one who relates the final battle, she does so after the fact and has actually given her voice to others during the days leading to Dracula’s destruction. Van Helsing begins writing because Mina “sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps” and thus cannot keep her journal (313). She spends the better part of the last several days being used merely as a sort of radio to Dracula, talking as if she were him2 and speaking in a “low and unreal” voice like what “one hears in a dream” at the arrival of Dracula’s three brides (317). She loses her autonomy and is no longer allowed to think for herself during the novel’s most critical points, and, although she is the one who relates the battle, she is a helpless observer until the vampire is finally killed.

In the end, Mina’s professional life and rational skill are reduced to a quiet marriage and the mothering of a young son—quite the antithesis of “New Womanhood”—at which point she is no longer independent in thought, marriage, or body.

Of course, Mina is not the only woman in Dracula; featured prominently in the first half of the novel is the character of Lucy.

Even if Mina were a true “New Woman,” the portrayal of Lucy before and after her transformation into a vampire betrays the anxiety Stoker feels towards the “New Woman” (Senf 34). Lucy’s progressive views on marriage are shown very early on in her correspondence with Mina when, after receiving three proposals in one day, she laments, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Stoker 60). Here, Lucy does not reject marriage after recognizing the institution as “degrading” or lacking in sexual desire, 13

Of Literary criticism as would Caine’s basic “New Woman,” but rather expresses an impulse to move beyond the traditional Victorian conventions of marriage.

Lucy would likely have found friends in the magazine Shafts, which was known to place importance on “sexual autonomy within marriage” and the value of “free love” (Caine 142). Lucy admits that desiring polyandry is heresy, proving to be the first of her many transgressive tendencies.

Once Lucy is a vampire, her latent desire for rebellion truly shows.

Seward describes her as a creature of “voluptuous wantonness,” as her sensuality is given free rein in her vampirism (Stoker 188). Nystrom writes that “Stoker clearly sees this unleashing of female sexuality as the main threat to the patriarchal society” in which the novel is set (65). Lucy is “passionate and powerful,” and this is what terrifies the men who used to love her. While Mina is the professional woman who entertains thoughts of independence, Lucy is a sexual being with sexual desires. In her vampiric state, she calls to her fiancé, Arthur, “My arms are hungry for you,” thus clearly displaying a desire that would theretofore have been taboo in modest Victorian society (Stoker 188).

Seward comments that in that moment he could have killed her “with savage delight,” illustrating the depth of the preconceived evil of Lucy’s passions.

In her treatment of children, too, the vampire Lucy goes against the grain of societal expectation. Although she lures children to her in ways they seem not to mind—they nickname her the “bloofer lady” and play games about these nighttime visitations (160)—when confronted by Van Helsing and others, she flings that night’s prey from her breast in a manner as “callous as a devil,” thereby perverting traditional roles of motherhood (188). With such, Stoker displays that which he imagines a sexually free woman would do, playing on Victorian anxieties about motherhood through those ideas of “sexuality, Social Darwinism, eugenics, and national efficiency” which had been made “central in women’s contributions to racial health and prosperity” (Caine, 133-34). Significantly, it is this perversion of motherhood 14

the madison journal and sexual wantonness that ultimately gets Lucy killed. In the end, she is stripped of her “New Womanhood” and is no longer referred to as the feminine “she.” Instead, she is reduced to “the Thing,” writhing in a coffin as “the blood from the pierced heart well[s] and spurt[s] up around [her]” (Stoker 192). Her murderer, Arthur, is showered in glory for killing her. Indeed, Seward describes Arthur as “a figure of Thor,” as he drives the stake “deeper and deeper” into Lucy’s heart.

With the phallic imagery of the stake and vividness of the spurting blood, it is not difficult to read the scene as a savage and graphic rape.

Senf, for instance, describes her death as a “vicious attack against a helpless woman…[which] succeeds in destroying the New Woman and in reestablishing male supremacy” (45). This is Lucy’s punishment, a “grave warning” to any “New Woman” who would follow her example (Nystrom 70).

However, F. W. Murnau’s 1922 adaptation does not preserve this cautionary tale’s ending. Rather, Nosferatu’s Ellen Hutter—the amalgamation of Lucy and Mina—dies sacrificially and meaningfully, and is far from a “grave warning.” To understand this sacrifice, it is necessary to first examine the feminist attitudes in Germany at the time of Murnau’s film, just as this paper has examined those in Victorian England.

In 1922, the Great War was recently over, and the effects of it and the November Revolution, which brought communist and nationalist extremism to the forefront of German politics, were still reverberating through the newly created Weimar Republic. The women’s movement that had slowly been making its way into the political sphere was gaining ground, and “the ‘new women’—who voted, used contraception, obtained illegal abortions, and earned wages—were [now] more than a bohemian minority or an artistic convention” (Bridenthal, et al. 11).

Conversely, this German “New Woman, or “Neue Frau,” movement was not the easily defined, semi-united front that was its Victorian counterpart. Attitudes and reactions were varied, and, according to Shearer West, “this very pluralism denies any monolithic reading of Weimar womanhood” (5). As Bridenthal, et al. make clear in their in15

Of Literary criticism troduction to When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, this movement was far more intertwined with concepts of feminine purity, a woman’s place in politics, and the garnering of civil rights than was the “New Womanhood” of 1890s Britain. Marriage and sexuality were major players3, just as they were with the Victorian “New Woman,” but they were also underscored by pressing nationalist guilt over the events of World War I for which women, like the Jews, were “blamed … for everything” by conservatives (Bridenthal, et al. 13). Modernity in the postwar metropolis was also a large social factor in the goals of the woman’s movement and in the stereotypical perceptions thereof4. As West points out, “the reality of women’s lives in Weimar Germany was much more complex than” any simple definition could accurately describe (2).

By understanding that the “Neue Frau” in 1922 was less the model of a woman who fit type characteristics than of a flexible movement towards change, it becomes possible that Ellen Hutter be placed into this framework. Due to Murnau’s positioning of Nosferatu in the small village of Wisborg in 1838, most concerns of the average “Neue Frau” are not relevant; Ellen has no worries for modern political issues and the “degeneracy…attributed to the modern metropolis” (Lewis 204).

She does not even have the technological gadgets, such as typewriters and phonographs, gifted to her Dracula counterparts. Thus, while Ellen exists in the world of the “Neue Frau” by virtue of being created in 1920s Germany, she may be better suited as a model for the Victorian “New Woman” from which her predecessors took form. Throughout the rest of this paper, therefore, the amalgamation of both feminist models will be considered while arguing for Ellen’s place as a “new woman” of either movement’s framework.

Nietzsche studies expert Carol Diethe would argue against this estimation of Ellen’s character, however. In her essay on German Expressionist films, Diethe places Ellen into the role of a “Beauty” in a beauty and beast-type dichotomy, in which “the role of Beauty has been foisted on to woman as a consolation prize for her lack of ratio16

the madison journal nal capacity” (108). Diethe views Ellen’s actions towards Count Orlok as very sexual, conflating her more with Lucy than with Mina (112-3).

She says that “the yearning body-language with which [Ellen] draws the Count towards her invites us to speculate upon the eroticism she anticipates” (113), and that “even though [Ellen] does manage to cause the destruction of Nosferatu,” it is for this ambiguous sexuality that she must be punished with death (119). In her estimation of Weimar anxieties, Diethe is correct. According to Ingrid Sharp, “the uncontained, sexualised woman [was] seen as disruptive to the moral order and to bourgeois marriage…[so] she was a threat to German regeneration” after World War I (144-5). However, Diethe’s description of Ellen as such a sexual Beauty with a “lack of rational capacity” is not shared by other critics, and nor does it account for Ellen’s actual characterization.

Conversely, critic Gregory Waller does not see Ellen’s surrender to Count Orlok as anything close to sexual: “[Ellen] is not willingly seduced, she is violated, raped. Her corpselike passivity as the vampire feeds on her signifies acquiescence, not pleasure” (193) (cf. fig. 2).

While Ellen does seem to yearn for Count Orlok, she spends much time distressed over her feelings, at one point even gesturing, terrified, to the house across the street in which he then resides as an attempt to make Hutter understand her fear and anxiety. He brushes her off and she leaves sobbing. In this scene, the actions are not of a woman desperately desiring the vampire next door. European film studies critic Erik Butler even assumes that because Ellen can “offer herself as a pure victim…it would appear that” she is a virgin despite being married to Hutter at the film’s outset (157). While Butler may be reaching in his assumption,—the film only specifies “an innocent maiden”—the overall characterization of Ellen is one of an innocent victim who reacts to Orlok’s advances more similarly to Mina’s horror than to Lucy’s subconscious sexual desire. Thus, Ellen’s death is not a punishment for dangerous sexuality as Lucy’s execution was.

In fact, the lack of explicit sexual imagery when Ellen dies is not 17

Of Literary criticism typical for the period. In her essay on “lustmord” art created before and during World War I, Beth Lewis describes horrific paintings and drawings that characterize this style of art known as sex murder. Lustmord is “domestic violence in its extreme form,” often visceral, explicit, and in an urban setting (206). Blood, sex, and various other graphic scenes are the subjects of these gruesome paintings. Lewis presents and describes one of Otto Dix’s many pieces entitled Lustmord as a “shocking oil painting depict[ing] a meticulously detailed corpse whose throat and torso have been slit, splattering blood across the bed and the floor on one side of the neat bourgeois room. She is draped half off the bed,” her bodice slipping up enough to show one bloodied breast (223). There are many other paintings by Dix and George Grosz that are shown and described in Lewis’ paper, all of them horribly misogynistic in their celebration of the graphic murder and defilement of the female body. For a time, says Lewis, this avant-garde style was “read as part of the symbolic vocabulary of political dissent raised by left-wing artists against a corrupt society” (202). Lewis herself reads them as “an overpowering fascination with sexuality combined with an obsessive dread of woman” (226). Women in urban environments became “visible symbols for fears about the degeneration and corruption produced by industrial city life” (210), and thus this violent dismemberment was welcomed by men who shared that anxiety.

In the starkest of contrasts, Ellen’s death is nothing like these graphic displays of lustmord. Rather, her death reveals Murnau’s lack of such a tangible “dread of woman.” As shown in the following images, the shots of Orlok drinking Ellen’s blood (fig. 2) are shrouded in shadow and obscure anything explicit from view. Ellen herself is barely visible, as the light from the lamp only reflects Orlok’s bald head. In the next shot (fig. 3), after Orlok has paused at the interruption of the cock’s crow, Ellen is not much more than a dark mass of hair and a white shirt. Critically, there is nothing graphic about these scenes whatsoever. There is no blood, and Ellen barely even shows any skin. By displaying the murder of Ellen in this way, Murnau is departing from 18

the madison journal his lustmord contemporaries to create a lessened sense of the lewd; the shot is not sexual in any way, unlike the vivid imagery of Lucy’s execution by Arthur’s phallic stake. This is not a punishment, neither for Ellen’s own perceived sensuality nor for that of her entire gender.

Figure 2. Count Orlok feeds on Ellen in the dark and quiet of predawn.

Figure 3. Count Orlok hears the cock crow and looks up from drinking Ellen’s blood.

19

Of Literary criticism There is one more facet of Diethe’s argument that needs countering, that being the critic’s portrayal of Ellen as a “Beauty” incapable of rational thought. This approach discounts everything that Ellen does in the film. Ellen is the one who reads the book Of Vampyres and discovers the only method of destroying Count Orlok (Fig. 1), thereby rejecting Hutter’s admonishment not to do so. After she witnesses the long procession of plague victim-bearing coffins proceed down the village road, she decides to take action against the vampire once and for all. There is an echo of Mina’s independence of thought here, but unlike the men in Dracula, the men around Ellen can do nothing to help. Waller writes that “[Hutter] would do nothing save follow official orders, deny [Ellen] access to The Book of Vampires [sic], and bury his head in a pillow like a frustrated, frightened child” (190).

Ellen acts independently in saving herself and Wisborg from the vampire’s machinations, and there is “no wise, elderly man [to] guide her.”

Murnau’s Van Helsing character, Dr. Bulwer, is just as helpless as Hutter. Just after Ellen invites Orlok into her home, she tells Hutter to go get Dr. Bulwer, but the two don’t make it back in time. It is strikingly ambiguous as to why Ellen sends Hutter for Bulwer, but it can be seen as her honestly wanting Bulwer’s help, perhaps in the hope that he could save her from exsanguination once Orlok was dead. However, Bulwer “does not and apparently cannot do anything” (Waller 184). Alternatively, this supposed call for aid can be read as Ellen wanting to save Hutter from Orlok by sending him away so that she could defeat Orlok on her own. Such a ploy shows remarkable independence and rationality on Ellen’s part, and strongly rebukes Diethe’s description of a “Beauty” who “cannot think” (108). In any case, Ellen’s actions at the end of the film replace ideas of a helpless woman in need of male assistance with a heroine whose cunning and independence combat the forces of a complex, dangerous foe.

Returning to the varied definitions of both the Victorian “New Woman” and the Weimar “Neue Frau,” the degree to which Murnau’s

20

the madison journal heroine measures against these conceptions of womanhood remains to be explored. Ellen is still far from her modern metropolis contemporaries, but there is one thing that she manages to retain: her nationalist duty. Waller describes her sacrifice as “at once a personal and a civic action” because she allows Orlok to kill her not just to end her own torment, but also to end the supernatural epidemic sweeping her village (191). As the German conservatives were wont to blame women “for everything”, this display of civic duty sets Ellen apart from those misogynistic stereotypes to show that women could be of use to the republic (Bridenthal, et al. 13). It is this act of nationalist sacrifice that makes Ellen a “Neue Frau” more than anything else.

Ellen’s status as a “New Woman”, which brought punishment upon her predecessors in Dracula, is more challenging to decode. Ellen does not have Lucy’s wanton sexuality, despite Diethe’s claims to the contrary, and she is not employed or financially independent like Mina once was. She does not reject marriage, and at times she displays a motherly demeanor, such as her very first scene in the film during which she plays with a kitten. However, Ellen does seek intellectual and bodily autonomy first by reading the book, though her husband had forbidden it, and later by permitting Orlok to drink from her while Hutter is away. She allows these things to happen, and while Waller does classify this as a “violation,” he nevertheless agrees that Ellen is “acquiescing” for the sake of the village—an act of will and self-destination that Shafts might have applauded (Waller 193).

When contemplating Ellen’s classification as a “New Woman,” furthermore, it is important not to overlook the very first “new woman” whom Sarah Grand presented, one who sits “apart in silent contemplation … thinking and thinking” (271). Ellen, characteristic of a “New Woman,” is full of ideas—ideas which allow her to eventually solve a dire problem that vexed her entire village. In the end, she is independent in thought and body, if not marriage, and can be painted as a nationalist heroine. Ellen is not punished for these actions: she is neither executed like Lucy nor mentally stifled like Mina. Rather, 21

Of Literary criticism Ellen is allowed a quiet death in her husband’s arms, comforted with the knowledge that, resulting directly from her actions, the vampire is dead and the village is safe. Where Stoker falls short of creating an independent and progressive “New Woman” who can survive Dracula, Murnau crafts Nosferatu with Ellen as the exalted heroine, one who acts on her own agency while impotent men stand and watch.

NOTES 1. Now capitalized.

2. The best example of this may be found on page 298.

3. See Sharp, pages 144-45 4. Take, for example, the title of the collection Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum.

WORKS CITED Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Print.

Bridenthal, Renate, Atina Grossman, and Marion Kaplan. Introduc tion. When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and

Nazi Germany. Eds. Bridenthal et al. New York: Month-ly

Review. Press, 1984. 1-29. Print.

Butler, Erik. Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film:

Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732-1933. Rochester:

Camden House, 2010. 152-177. Print.

Caine, Barbara. English Feminism 1780-1980. Oxford: Oxford UP,

1997. 131-168. Print.

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the madison journal Diethe, Carol. “Beauty and the Beast: An Investigation Into the Role

and Function of Women in German Expressionist Film.”

Visions of the Neue Frau: Women and the Visual Arts in Wei

mar Germany. Eds. Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West.

Brookfield: Ashgate Pub-lishing, 1995. 108-123. Print.

Grand, Sarah. The New Aspect of the Woman Question. The North

American Review 158.448 (1894): 270-76. JSTOR. Web. 4 May 2015.

Lewis, Beth Irwin. “Lustmord: Inside the Windows of

the Metropolis.” Women in the Metropo-lis: Gender and

Modernity in Weimar Culture. Ed. Katharina von Ankum.

Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press, 1997. Print.

Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens. Dir. F.W. Murnau. Prana, 1922. Internet Archive. Web.19 April 2015. <https://archive.

org/details/Nosferatu_most_complete_version_93_mins.> Nystrom, Lisa. “Blood, Lust, and the Fe/Male Narrative in Bram

Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and the Novel (1897).” Draculas,

Vampires, and Other Undead Forms: Essays on Gender, Race,

and Culture. Eds. John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan

(Kay) Picart. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009. 63-77. Print.

Senf, Carol A. “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman.” Vic

torian Studies: A Journal of the Humanities, Arts and Scienc es 26.1 (1982): 33-49. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 4

May 2015.

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Of Literary criticism Sharp, Ingrid. “The Disappearing Surplus: The Spinster in the Post-

War Debate in Weimar Ger-many, 1918-1920.” Aftermaths

of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923.

Eds. Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe. Leiden: Koninklijke

Brill, 2011. 135-157. Print.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Eds. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. 1897.

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Print.

Waller, Gregory A. The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s

Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 1986. Print.

West, Shearer. Introduction. Visions of the Neue Frau: Women and

the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany. Eds. Marsha Meskimmon

and Shearer West. Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing, 1995. 1-8.

Print.

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the madison journal

The Politics of Proverbial Sparring in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue Nathan May

This essay takes as its subject the use of proverbs in The Wife of Bath’s

Prologue. The 856-line work, containing some thirty-nine pithy sayings, is not alone in the Chaucerian corpus in its frequent sententiousness.

John Lydgate, in the prologue to the Story of Thebes, praised Chaucer’s “use of many proverbs, diverse and uncouth, by the rehearsing of his sugared mouth” (236). John Metham of Norwich, writing a few decades later, commended “My mastyr Chauncerys… that longe dyd endure In practyk off ryming; qwerffore proffoundely With many prouerbys, hys bokys be rymyd naturelly” (5). Indeed, proverbs appear with very high frequency across all of the author’s works: in the minor poetry, Troilus and Criseyde, as well as throughout The Canterbury Tales. As Jill Mann has argued, “Proverbs are part of a rich body of social wisdom that makes up the mental furniture of the tales and, by implication, their tellers” (xxiv). Yet the language trope occupies a particularly important place in the Wife’s Prologue. Appearing across the work’s entire progression, and often at a very high rate, sententiousness is arguably the work’s governing tone; proverbs, it could be said, permeate the monologue’s very texture.

When considering the various ways in which the supposed “nuggets of wisdom” are deployed, three major uses seem to appear: proverbs in

25

Of Literary criticism the service of the Wife’s self-defense, proverbs that she falsely accuses her former husband of uttering, and misogynistic maxims that a later husband does indeed profess. In all these cases, the speaker of the saying, whether Alisoun or her husband, is endowed with a sense of didactic, dogmatic authority: to possess a proverb is to possess power. In this sense, as a rhetorical trope, it powerfully illustrates Gorgias’s assertion that rhetoric “is both the source of freedom for humankind itself and at the same time it is for each person the source of rule over others in one’s city” (Plato, 90). The proverbial battle between Alisoun and the Prologue’s males, in other words, is also very much a struggle for power.

The facile quality of proverbs, their working in the service of deceit, and their potential overuse are raised across all three categories of usage that I have outlined. When Alisoun creatively extracts proverbs from scripture, falsely places them in her husband’s mouth, or when her fifth and last spouse draws upon antifeminist sententiousness, the sayings are put under the closest scrutiny. Exposing the unsavory, even violent potential of proverbial language, the Prologue also foregrounds its rhetorical efficacy.

With proverbs at his disposal, the rhetor can boast unmediated access to philosophical truth-value. Quintilian, as quoted by Erasmus in his Adagia, states, “popular sayings which command general assent will also be found not without value as supporting material. In a way they carry even more weight because they have not been adapted to particular cases but have been said and done by minds exempt from hatred or partiality for no reason except their evident connection with honor and truth” (Erasmus, 16).

Continuing in this vein, Erasmus himself asks, “What could be more convincing… than what is said by everyone? What is more likely to be true than what has been approved by the consensus, the unanimous vote as it were, of so many epochs and so many peoples?”

(17) Transcending the realm of the particular, and operating on a supposedly “universal” plane, he is enabled to successfully persuade.

Many of these classical concepts found their way into medieval rhetorical 26

the madison journal treatises. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, in his influential Poetria Nova, described the benefits of opening one’s composition with a maxim: “If you should wish the opening to send forth a greater light, without disturbing the natural order of the theme, let the sentiment you begin with not sink to any particular statement but rather raise its head to a general pronouncement… Let it stand above the given subject; pondering thereon but saying nothing, let it gaze with brow uplifted” (599).

Here, as in the classical antecedents, the rhetor derives power from a saying’s “universality,” its supposed transcendence of the particular and the contingent. With the proverb as one of his central tools, he constructs for himself a powerful guise of authority.

Equipped with pithy sayings, a rhetor can also buttress a biased perspective. In John of Garland’s Parsiana Poetria (ca. 1231-1235), under a sub-heading which reads “On the art of inventing proverbs,” the philologist offers a very specific set of instructions: “We should consider whether we wish to praise or blame, the character of the sender, the character of the recipient, and the matter at issue; then, by applying to each of these three the double criterion, that is, praise or blame, right or wrong, we should be able to furnish ourselves with proverbs…” (646). Advising his reader to take into account the particularities of his own circumstances, the grammarian draws attention to the way in which proverbs, rather than transcending the realm of contingency, are themselves contingent weapons. Choosing between “praise” and “blame,” as well as taking into account issues of character, the rhetor responds to a very particular set of circumstances.

In the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Alisoun stages what amounts to a proverbial battle, in which the speaker’s sententious performance confronts her husbands’ barrage of proverbs. Each striving for greater authority, over each other and in general, the characters draw on the adage’s power to persuade. Over the course of the Prologue, the thirty-nine sayings are relentlessly flung in weapon-like fashion. Any unquestioned linkage of proverbs and truth-value, in such a war-like context, is powerfully undone.

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Of Literary criticism

The Wife’s prolonged self-defense, comprising the opening 150 or so lines of her Prologue, is the first of the work’s highly proverbial sections. Proverbs, it seems, are the supreme manifestation of what Marilynn Desmond has called “the Prologue’s didactic confidence” (118). Furthermore, it has long been noted that Alisoun “is the most rhetorical of pilgrims,” and that she “embodies all the signs of a rhetor” (Wallace, 292). Her virtuosic deployment of sententious sayings is one of the primary reasons; lying behind her fierce, wifely eloquence is a formidable arsenal of maxims.

By lacing her speech with biblical proverbs and exemplars, Alisoun comes to resemble those figures who would wish to silence her. At the beginning of the monologue, the Wife derives power and authority primarily from religious texts, appropriating biblical proverbs in the service of her argument. Having insisted at the Prologue’s outset that men do not monopolize intellectual authority –

Men may devyne and glosen, up and doun

But wel I woot, expres, withoute lye

God bad us for to wexe and multiplye;

that gentil text kan I wel understonde (26-29)(emphasis added) Alisoun herself assumes the role of exegete. As Rita Copeland has argued, “Her discourse is a tissue – indeed, a compilation – of the very clerical reasoning that would exclude her from the privileged sphere of clerical reasoning…” (129). Drawing on biblical pieces of proverbial wisdom, like Paul’s “Bet is to be wedded than to brynne” (52) and “conseilling nis no comandement” (67), the Wife strikingly invokes the strategies of the medieval cleric. The character’s cleverly selective use of the Bible, amounting to a highly interested application of scripture, comes to look exactly like the practice of the privileged male interpreter. As Minnis argues, “the wife of Bath is engaging not just with male authority but with male methods of argument” (253). Just like her male counterparts, The Wife of 28

the madison journal Bath shows herself to be “an excellent twister of texts” (258).

In enacting this performance, the Wife serves to demystify male exegesis. Appropriating its practices, she shows it to be biased rather than impartial, and ideological rather than universal in its claims to knowledge. With pithy sayings as one of their most crucial tools, both the “lowly” Alisoun and the societally privileged male cleric offer decidedly partial worldviews; clerical hermeneutics is revealed to be no less biased and selective than the Wife’s interpretive mode. In such a highly rhetorical context, the untroubled alliance between proverbs and philosophical truth-value, so optimistically asserted across centuries, is vigorously undermined.

If Alisoun appropriates the proverb as a powerful tool of persuasion, she also critiques the way it is deployed by those with less rhetorical skill. Shortly after completing her opening defense, the Wife moves on to another densely proverbial segment of the prologue: the account of the sayings that she falsely put in her former husband’s mouth. Narrating her past to her fellow pilgrims, she recounts the litany of fiercely misogynistic proverbs that she accused her drunken spouse of uttering. What emerges in this lengthy section is a prolonged string of viciously misogynistic maxims. Indeed, the imagined performance powerfully illustrates the way in which “people have always couched their fears and anxieties about others in proverbial utterances” (Mieder, 7): “She may no while in chastitee abyde, / that is assailed upon ech a syde” (255-6), “…men may not defend a castle wal, / It may so longe assailled been overal” (263-4), “Ne noon so grey goos gooth there in the lake / As, seistow, wol been withoute make.” (269-270). Finally, in response to one of the sayings, she exclaims “wel may that be a proverbe of a shrewe!” (284)

Her husband’s attempt to assume a position of power and authority, as imagined by his wife, is undercut by his bungled rhetorical performance. What ultimately emerges here, as Alisoun offers this fictional portrait of her husband’s rant, is a tiresomely repetitious, seemingly endless proverbial string. Indeed, the husband’s performance 29

Of Literary criticism flies in the face of a long tradition that cautions against proverbial overuse. Erasmus, building on classical rhetorical theory, wrote in Adagia that “we should observe the same rule in making use of our adages as Aristotle elegantly recommended in his work on rhetoric with regard to the choice of epithets: that is to say, we should treat them not as food but as condiments, not to sufficiency but for delight” (Erasmus, 19). Turning to Quintilian’s Institutions, he continues, “we must not use them too often. Overcrowding prevents them from letting their light shine” (19). Finally, in a statement that rings very true in the case of Alisoun’s husband, he makes an additional point: “there is another disadvantage, that the man who sets out to use proverbs frequently is bound to bring in some that are stale or forced; choice is not possible when the aim is numbers. Finally, when anything is exaggerated or out of place, charm is lost” (20). Alisoun’s husband— as he is (falsely) represented at this point in the Prologue—treats proverbs as food rather than condiments, as sufficient matter rather than supplementary delights. As opposed to Alisoun, who wisely interlaces the sayings and draws from them potent persuasive effect, her husband, in this depiction, is nothing but a failed rhetorician.

For Jankyn, proverbs, both religious and secular, bear with them nothing less than the key to masculine power. Turning to the Prologue’s conclusion, the description of Jankyn’s misogyny provides the most explicitly critical appraisal of proverbs. It is the section, moreover, in which the maxim’s status as a rhetorical weapon is most fully displayed. Firstly, Alisoun recalls how her former husband

wolde… upon his Bible seke

That ilke proverbe of Ecclisiaste

Where he comandeth and forbedeth faste

Man shal nat suffer his wyf go roule aboute. (650-53)

Immediately after this, he continues:

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the madison journal

Thanne wolde… seye right thus, withouten doute: ‘Whoso that buildeth his hous all of walwes, And priketh his blinde hors over the falwes, And suffreth his wif to go seken halwes, Is worthy to been hanged on the galwes. (654-658) Echoing her earlier exclamation—“well may that be a proverb of a shrewe!”—Alisoun responds spitefully:

I sette noght an hawe Of his proverb n’of his olde sawe, Ne I wolde not of him corrected be.

I hate him that my vices telleth me… (599-662)

From the beginning of this description, then, one sees how Jankyn turns to proverbs to reinforce certain relations of power: drawing on religious “auctoritee” in a highly selective and biased fashion, the husband strives to shore up the patriarchal status quo. In possessing the sayings, he occupies an imagined place of superiority over his wife, boasting of a possession of religious wisdom that she herself cannot claim.

However, as the husband’s repetitive series of sayings becomes more drawn-out, Alisoun (and Chaucer) shed an increasingly critical light on proverbial language. When the Wife describes Jankyn’s obsession with tales of “wikked wyves” (685), she emphasizes the ridiculously copious nature of his sententiousness, just as she had done when lying to her previous husband. Recounting his preoccupation with classical examples, she recalls his endless list of nightmarish wives: Dalilah, Dianrye, Xantippa, Phasipha, etc. Finally, she says that “he spak more harm than herte may bithynke, / And therewithal he knew of mo proverbes / than in this world ther growen gras or herbes” (772-4). Following this is a recollection of four particularly inane misogynistic sayings.

In addition to highlighting the problem of proverbs’ overuse (as they are deployed by the rhetorically challenged Jankyn), Alisoun 31

Of Literary criticism touches upon their inherently facile quality. When the Wife says that Jankyn “knew of mo proverbes than in this world ther growen gras or herbes,” she gestures toward their eminently retrievable, essential “easiness,” as well as their organic or garden quality. In this sense, Alisoun’s fault-finding echoes that of many critics of proverbial language across time. Erasmus, in Adagia, describes these critics as those who “impatiently thrust aside this aspect of learning as too humble, perfectly easy and childish…” (9). Short, digestible, and exceedingly available, proverbs are painted here as tiresomely facile modes of discourse; when faced with a problem, they are, in the views of both Alisoun (at this particular moment) and Adagia’s hypothetical detractor, the rhetorical “easy way out.” “Stale” and “forced,” “overused” and “exaggerated,” the sayings, as deployed by the rhetorically unskilled Jankyn, actualize Erasmus’s worst fears.

Fascinatingly, as we can see from manuscript evidence, Alisoun’s proverbial oppression extends even beyond the bounds of her Prologue. Most tellingly, a male glossator, in Egerton 2864, picks up where Jankyn left off. As Marilynn Desmond points out, “a cluster of eight Latin glosses appears in the margin next to her assertion in line 661 that she will not be corrected. This dense set of glosses cites eight biblical proverbs that reiterate the value of discipline— or correction: “correction is the high road to life,” “he who loves correction loves knowledge,” and so forth” (Desmond, 136). Susan Schibanoff, examining the same manuscript, further details its contents: “when the wife launches into a celebration of her ability to outtalk her men and requite her husbands word for word, the Egerton glossator drops the calm, detached mien of scholar-bibliographer and attempts to shout the Wife down in a series of marginal remarks from scripture” (Schibanoff, 49). Responding to what for Harold Bloom is one of the Wife’s “most sublime moments of yearning and selfcelebration” (110)—her comment that “unto this day it dooth myn herte bote / That I have had my world as in my tyme (472-473)— the “Egerton glossator thunders against her with a series of somber 32

the madison journal and sobering admonitions,” including “A drunken woman is a great wrath and her reproach and shame shall not be hid” (Schibanoff, 50).

In such a manuscript, as illustrated by the work of Desmond and Schibanoff, we witness nothing less than the renewal of proverbial warfare. Assuming the role that Jankyn played in the Prologue itself, the glossator draws on misogynistic maxims to lend credence to his “pious” male perspective. As he attempts to suppress the Wife’s exuberant burst of life, the biblical proverbs are very clearly functioning as rhetorical weapons. Just as in the case of Alisoun’s husbands, the glosses betray an uneasy sense of male anxiety, a jittery proverbial copiousness that sheds on their writer a negative light. Claiming access to truthvalue with the prestige of Latin, they attempt to counter the Wife’s persuasive performance, one that was accomplished in her vernacular language. Via sententious fragments of language, the glossator—as well as the husbands of the Prologue—anxiously grasps for power.

Expressed throughout the entire length of the Wife’s Prologue, as well as its textual afterlife, proverbs appear here to be far from eternal pearls of wisdom. Erasmus’ conception of the adage as an invaluable gem, one that seems “to have fallen from heaven rather than to have come from men,” is worlds away from the Prologue’s contingent weapons. Portrayed at work in the real world rather than the humanist’s idealized circumstances, the sayings are shown to be indelibly and sometimes painfully severed from truth-value. So easily caught up in the service of partial perspectives, the seemingly wise nuggets of knowledge are co-opted by biased speakers, rhetors operating on a plane that is very much not “truthful” or universal.

For, after all, Alisoun, her husbands, and the Prologue’s fifteenthcentury glossators are anything but truth-tellers; rather, they are the creators of highly interested discourse, biased speech that nevertheless assumes the guise of truth-value. And their central tool is the proverb.

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Of Literary criticism WORKS CITED Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994. Print.

Copeland, Rita. “Chaucer and Rhetoric,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer. New Haven, London: Yale University

Press, 2007. Print.

Desmond, Marilynn. Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of

Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Print.

Erasmus, Desiderius. Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages, Ii1 To Iv100. Toronto/Buffalo/London: University of Toronto

Press, 1982. Print.

Geoffrey of Vinsauf. “Poetria Nova.” Medieval Grammar and

Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475.

Eds. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

John of Garland, “Parisiana Poetria.” Medieval Grammar and

Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300- 1475. Eds. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2009. Print.

Lydgate, John. “In Praise of Chaucer.” Early English Poems eds.

Henry S. Pancoast and John Duncan Spaeth. New York: Henry

Holt and Company, 1911. Print.

Mann, Jill. Introduction. The Canterbury Tales By Geoffrey Chaucer.

New York: Penguin Books, 2005. Print.

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the madison journal Plato. “Gorgias.” Plato on Rhetoric and Language: Four Key Dialogues. Ed. Jean Nienkamp. Mahwah, NJ: Hermagoras Press,

1999. Print.

Schibanoff, Susan. “The New Reader and Female Textuality in Two

Early Commentaries on Chaucer.” Writing After Chaucer:

Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century.

Ed. Daniel J. Pinti. New York and London: Garland Publishing,

Inc., 1998. Print.

Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and

Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1997. Print.

Whiting, Bartlett Jere. Chaucer’s Use of Proverbs. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1934. Print.

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Of Literary criticism

Take a Bow

Exposing the Layers of Performativity in Lolita Yoon-Ji Han

When Vladimir Nabokov published Lolita in 1955, readers and critics

alike were at once appalled by and drawn to the story of a middle-aged professor who lusts after his preteen stepdaughter. In Lolita, Humbert attempts to influence the reader’s perception of his actions through persuasive, and at times bombastic, language as well as through an account of events marked by irony and intentional discrepancies. Indeed, readers find themselves invited by Humbert to identify, if not empathize, with this “nympholept” (16). While Nabokov appears to give his narrator the power of self-presentation and, by extension, his readers the power of direct appeal, Nabokov subverts this power in order to reveal the truths about his narrator and the events he presents. Nabokov achieves this by exposing the tensions in the dual nature of the “performances” in his novel, indicating to the careful reader that Humbert’s attempts at persuading his audience of his innocence and love for the twelveyear old Lolita are self-serving and therefore not to be trusted.

According to the field of narratology, a tradition of literary theory, “performativity” denotes modes of presenting or evoking action, which is conveyed on two different levels (Berns). The first is that of the histoire, or story, which is the term used by French structuralists such as Claude Bremond and Tzvetan Todorov to describe actions and events in the narrative that are not mediated by a narrator (Scheffel), 36

the madison journal including direct speech, dialogue and interior monologue (Booth). To borrow a term from performance theorist Diana Taylor, the primary action presented in Lolita is the two “trauma-driven performances” of both Humbert and Lolita, which are actions staged for the purpose of exhibiting what trauma is and what it does to the victim (1675).

These two performances in the novel are ultimately filtered through Humbert’s narration and thereby “staged” to the readers. The second level of performativity is that of the narration, which describes the narrator’s self-thematizations (in other words, self-presentation), his explicit comments on the story, and his addresses to the reader (Berns). This level is especially tricky to discern in Lolita due to the contrasting motives of the different actors in the overall performance of the novel. On one layer, there is the performance of Humbert the narrator versus Nabokov the author, and on another, Humbert the narrator versus Humbert the character. By exposing the discrepancies in the dual natures of these performances, Nabokov is able to subvert Humbert’s supposedly “unlimited” power as narrator in an authorial performance of his own. In this performance, he purposefully manipulates his audience’s emotional expectations, only to undermine Humbert’s performance of both his and Lolita’s sufferings. Nabokov does this in order to alter those expectations, provoking contemplation of the blurred lines between moral judgment and universal empathy.

From the beginning of the novel, Nabokov invites readers to become aware of the constructed nature of the text in a foreword written by the fictional John Ray Jr., in which we are told that Humbert Humbert wrote Lolita as both a memoir and a manuscript while he was in jail. This marks the beginning of Nabokov’s use of performativity as he presents Humbert’s action to the reader with the intention of portraying Humbert’s suffering after the fact. Throughout the entire novel, Nabokov presents his audience with the different sufferings of Humbert and of Lolita as a way arousing moral engagement. In his paper “Lolita and the Dangers of Fiction,” Mathew Winston claims that the foreword “treats the book as a case history, as a work of art, 37

Of Literary criticism and as an ethical treatise,” setting up the multi-dimensional narrative which makes it difficult for the readers to pinpoint Humbert’s real motive (426). Indeed, Amit Marcus claims that in spite of Humbert’s contrasting motivations, “self-justification, on the one hand, and confession of his faults, on the other,” they sometimes serve the same goal—to “save his lost and desperate soul from the abyss into which it has fallen” (201). It can thus be said that Humbert’s ultimate goal, whatever his multiple agendas are, is to appeal to his audience’s emotions and gain atonement for his sins. What is even clearer is that because the memoir is written after Humbert is arrested, the events he narrates are all set in the past and filtere through his own memories and emotions, from consuming passion for the object of his supposed true love, to utter despair from his eventual abandonment. In this retrospective narration, Humbert thereby tries to gain his audience’s sympathy by aligning their emotions with his. Moreover, the foreword indicates to the reader that Humbert’s ultimate purpose is to defend his claim of innocence to his audience and present his personal view of the events that unfold, making it difficult to distinguish between what is objective and what has been altered in some way to Humbert’s liking. By presenting his reader with a first-person narrative voice, which is subjective by definition, Nabokov appears to leave it to the reader to question whether Humbert is indeed a persuasive narrator.

However, Nabokov remains the master puppeteer throughout the novel by utilizing both levels of performativity, the histoire and the narration, to subvert Humbert’s narrative power. The performative nature of the relationship between the author and the narrator come into play through Nabokov’s merging of these two levels; through the narrator’s depiction of events the author accentuates specific moral values and judgment. Such subtle finger-pointing to the disparities between the two levels of performativity is particularly prevalent in Part 2 of the novel, when Humbert finally succeeds in making Lolita his mistress. For example, Humbert describes a moment when “an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face” (140), which is considered 38

the madison journal factual and on the histoire level. However, it is when he immediately dismisses Lolita as putting on a show “for his benefit” (140) that we see the discrepancy on the narrative level of performativity, as it is clear to any reader that Lolita is far from happy. Marcus argues that texts such as Lolita constantly cause the reader to hesitate between conflicting interpretations of the narrator in his discussion of the self-deceptive and the other-deceptive narrating character. He points out Humbert’s “denial of the severe harm he caused Dolores” as one aspect of his self-deception, claiming that “even at the end of the novel Humbert does not fully realize the harm he has done” (189). While Marcus’s argument is plausible, Nabokov makes it clear that Humbert is hardly self-deceptive, and not only engenders reader sympathy for Lolita, but also reveals the blatant unhappiness that Humbert undermines by falsely portraying it as childish moodiness. To demonstrate how Nabokov exposes Humbert’s deliberate misinterpretation of Lolita, we can consider the following excerpt from the novel, in which Humbert relays the yearlong road trip he takes her on, during which he finally satisfies his overwhelming sexual desire for her:

And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had

only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful,

dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no

more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined

tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night,

every night—the moment I feigned sleep (176).

Here, Nabokov combines the histoire and the narration by allowing Humbert himself to expose the sordid nature of his and Lolita’s relationship, one that had been masked behind a façade to hide the reality of “dog-eared maps” and ceaseless, muffled “sobs in the night.” Nabokov makes it clear that, unlike what Marcus argues, Humbert is extremely aware of the harm he has caused Lolita.

Nabokov’s synthesis of the histoire and the narration is performative 39

Of Literary criticism itself, as it illustrates the performativity of narratives as opposed to the performativity in the narrative, which is what Humbert does in Lolita. By orchestrating Humbert’s narration, Nabokov actually orchestrates the readers’ thoughts and moral reactions, provoking the reader’s aversion to a man who is clearly aware of the consequences of his actions, yet still deliberately portrays them in a positive light.

One of the most ambiguous and complex tactics that Humbert uses toward the end of the novel to persuade his reader is his portrayal of Lolita as a more realistic character instead of the mute “nymphet” he had portrayed her as up to that point. Previously, she was merely an aesthetic object to be adored and desired, which, as Marcus points out, blurs or even completely erases the “moral significance” of the abuser’s deeds (191). In other words, by making Lolita an artistic representation, Humbert attempts to eschew morality and condemnation. While Marcus’ argument can be applied to most of the novel, this changes in Chapter 29 of Part 3, when Humbert visits Lolita, whom he has not seen in years and is now pregnant and married to Dick, a one-armed mechanic.

In his narration of the visit, Humbert suggests that his love for Lolita is sincere and genuine, running deeper than his lust for “nymphets” and his desire for acquittal. Many literary critics see this chapter as the pivotal point in the novel, in which “he discovers, in short, that Dolores Haze is a person and not a character”, and undergoes a change into a sincere figure deserving of sympathy and atonement (Winston 425).

Although this optimistic argument does have its merits, a closer examination of Nabokov’s manipulation of literary performativity reveals that Humbert’s attempt at portraying himself as a repentant figure does not signal a change in the self-centered Humbert, but is rather a further orchestration to elicit the readers’ pity and understanding.

One of the principal ways in which Nabokov undermines Humbert’s power as a narrator, especially in this crucial chapter, is by exposing the disparity between Humbert as a narrator and Humbert as a character within the story. In other words, he distinguishes between the roles Humbert plays in the histoire level and in the narration level of the 40

the madison journal performance of the novel. In her paper on the art of persuasion in Lolita, Nomi Tamir Ghez makes a distinction between the “narrating I” of the present and the “experiencing I” of the past, claiming that the “narrating I” in Lolita is the Humbert who consciously rationalizes and defends himself, whereas the “experiencing I” is the Humbert of the events in the story as they occur (73). She further argues that “unfolding the story from the point of view of the experiencing self is more damaging for Humbert than advantageous” because there is limited room for manipulation of the “true” story (74). Why, then, does Nabokov decide to have Humbert present himself as the experiencing I? The answer to this question lies in his authorial performance to his reader, as he is able to accurately anticipate her reaction to Humbert’s professed suffering and manipulate her into reflecting on moral ambiguity. Humbert purposefully presents his experiencing self in this chapter to try to manipulate his reader and win her over, knowing full well that his experiencing self is more susceptible to receiving sympathy and understanding than his calculating narrating self. For example, the marked increase in dialogue with Lolita situates the reader in the moment of the story that the narrating Humbert is relaying. Capitalizing on this further, he begins to portray his former lover not as the coy nymphet Lolita, but as Dolores Haze, an older, faded version of her past self. An examination of the telltale signs of Humbert exploiting his experiencing self in this manner—and by extension, Nabokov exploiting the two levels of performativity—reveals Humbert’s further ploy to enhance his own position in the audience’s eyes.

Up until this point, there had been little dialogue between any of the characters in the novel—particularly between Humbert and Lolita. Although this may seem strange since the entire novel revolves around the two central characters’ relationship, Humbert had intended to gloss over any specifics about Lolita that would have harmed his advantage as a narrator. Instead, he filtered everything she had said using his own narrative. However, Lolita finally gains a voice in Chapter 29 and thus becomes a wholly subjective person 41

Of Literary criticism whose personality and thoughts are now directly discernible to the reader. Yet this increase in dialogue, which situates the reader and the characters more firmly in the present than in the past, is actually a means by which Humbert attempts to win over the reader’s sympathy.

This is demonstrated when Lolita recounts what Clare Quilty, another pedophile and Humbert’s secret enemy, made her do at Camp Q:

“Oh, weird, filthy, fancy things. I mean, he had two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures.”

“What things exactly?”

“Oh, things…Oh, I—really I”—she uttered the ‘I’ as a subdued cry while she listened to the source of the ache, and for lack of words spread the five fingers of her angularly up-and-down- moving hand. No, she gave it up, she refused to go into particulars with that baby inside her (315).

Through the dialogue, Humbert intentionally conveys the horrors that Lolita went through because of Quilty, scarring to the point that she refuses to speak about it. He attempts to show his reader that his actions were not as sordid and treacherous as Quilty’s, and that he does truly care about Lolita’s feelings. Gerard Genette would describe this tactic as the “illusion of mimesis”, as direct speech does not represent speech at all, but rather repeats speech or directly constitutes it (1983). Genette’s tactic can be applied to Lolita, since even though Lolita supposedly gains a voice through dialogue, it is ultimately Humbert who is deciding what effect her speech has on his audience.

Nabokov reminds his reader through this suspiciously sudden change in voice that Humbert’s “narrating I” is still at work here, despite the temporary disappearance of his purposefully ornate language.

Another way in which Humbert attempts to win over his reader 42

the madison journal is by portraying Lolita as a real person, referring to Lolita as Dolly.

In finally referring to her by her real name, Humbert tries to evoke reader’s sympathy through his depictions of his sorrow and feelings of betrayal since she has shed her identity as Lolita, the coy girl whom he had doted on. According to Winston, the name ascribed to the girl is an attempt by Humbert to change perceptions of Lolita (425); instead of a simple schoolgirl called Dolly, his love interest is the romantic, fiery Lolita, with “tender and tanned” skin, “silky shimmer above her temple grading into bright brown hair,” the “loveliest nymphet greenred-blue Priap himself could think up” (44-45). Dolly, however, is a “frankly and hugely pregnant” seventeen-year old with “adult, ropeveined hands” and “unkempt armpits” (316). Instead of the alluring, spirited young nymphet, both Humbert and the reader see a disheveled teenaged girl who has lost her charm. Yet, Humbert says, “I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else,” claiming that his feelings for her run deeper than lust driven by aesthetic appreciation (316). Humbert aims to convince his reader of his sincerity and near repentance, and, through this, engender their empathy for a man broken by unrequited love.

The reader of Lolita is now presented with a dilemma: should she allow herself to empathize with this pitiable man, or would she become complicit in his ultimate sin of destroying a young girl’s childhood? Tamir Ghez argues that Humbert’s sincerity “at last wins us over, as the author intends him to,” yet a careful examination of both Humbert and Nabokov’s performances reveal otherwise (82). Through his presentation of Humbert’s supposedly sincere performance of suffering, Nabokov, in his own performance to his reader, allows her—in fact, invites her—to feel sympathy toward Humbert in his weakest moment, yet steers her away from complete forgiveness. He achieves this by reminding the reader of how Humbert has ruined Lolita’s life: she lives in a “clapboard shack” located in a “dismal district, all dump and ditch, and wormy vegetable gardens” 43

Of Literary criticism with a one-armed mechanic named Dick (306). Such a description of the former nymphets ramshackle life, which contrasts with those of her childhood enthusiasm and desire for a glamouros Hollywood lifestyle, serves to remind the reader of Humbert’s ultimate destruction of a young girl’s autonomy, dreams, and inevitably, her future.

Nabokov’s structural and moral reconciliation of the two levels of performativity in the chapters that follow again leads the reader to suspect that Humbert has not really changed at all, preventing her from giving Humbert the atonement he so desperately seeks. The way in which Nabokov’s performance pierces a subtle, but undeniably present, hole in Humbert’s performance is exemplified when Humbert finally recalls a moment when he glimpses “from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face…that look I cannot exactly describe…an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration—and every limit presupposes something beyond it— hence the neutral illumination” (283). How ironic and convenient that Humbert, the master of rhetoric and ornate descriptions, cannot seem to describe Lolita’s abject sorrow—but betrays himself and says this in the very process of doing so. It is also ironic that it is only now, after we have seen how Dolly’s life has been ruined by Humbert, that “other smothered memories” unfold themselves into “limbless monsters of pain” (284). Nabokov reminds his reader of Humbert’s agenda of gaining forgiveness from his audience, and that Humbert will take full advantage of his powers as the novel’s sole narrator to do so.

Like an artful puppeteer, Nabokov subtly undermines Humbert by exposing his lack of humanity, his self-serving interpretations of Dolores’s emotions, and his final, desperate attempt to gain sympathy by giving her a voice. By bringing together the two levels of dual-natured performativity in Lolita, Nabokov not only exposes Humbert’s performance of his and Lolita’s sufferings, but also engages his reader in a performance of his own in which he intentionally 44

the madison journal baffles to evoke judgment on Humbert. It is this ultimate flourish of the wand, the tug of the puppet’s strings, through which Nabokov enchants his reader in his performance of Humbert’s tragic love story.

WORKS CITED Berns, Ute. “Performativity.” The Living Handbook of Narratology.

University of Hamburg, 18 Feb. 2013. Web. 16 Nov. 2013.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Reprint ed. Chicago: U of

Chicago P, 1983. Print.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Reprint ed.

N.p.: Cornell UP, 1983. Print.

Marcus, Amit. “The Self-Deceptive and the Other-Deceptive

Narrating Character: The Case of Lolita.” Style 39.2 (2005):

187-205. Print.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 2nd ed. New York City: Vintage

International, 1997. Print.

Scheffel, Michael. “Narrative Constitution.” The Living Handbook

of Narratology. University of Hamburg, 20 May 2010. Web. 25

Nov. 2013.

Tamir-Ghez, Nomi. “The Art of Persuasion in Nabokov’s Lolita.”

Poetics Today 1.1/2 (1979): 65-83. JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov. 2013.

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Taylor, Diana. “Trauma and Performance: Lessons from Latin America.” PMLA 121.5 (2006): 1674-77. JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov.

2013.

Winston, Mathew. “Lolita and the Dangers of Fiction.” Twentieth

Century Literature 21.4 (1975): 421-27. JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov.

2013.

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Master, Master, Slave Dynamics of the Individual Struggle to Be Recognized in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Beth Bockes

“Non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are

shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition,” while “the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight [and] peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men,” asserts “The Two Cultures” lecturer C. P. Snow (170). To the scientist, Snow’s claim makes perfect sense. But a close reading of Shelley’s Frankenstein suggests that if the scientists of the world are unaware of man’s condition, they are still less aware of their own condition, for Shelley’s scientist, Frankenstein, fails to recognize in himself what to Snow’s literary intellectual would be obvious. That is, the scientist’s cultural preoccupation with the glory society confers on those who discover the secrets of nature, in the name of humanity, muddies his view. For it is human nature, the soul of our being, the soul of his creature, indeed his soul, that hungers for attention—beyond the purview of natural science. There, through the complex lens of the psyche, Shelley skillfully brings the smoldering tension of man’s essential-existential struggle for recognition to the fore. With a stunning command that recalls 18th century

47

Of Literary criticism philosopher Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, Frankenstein’s indignant creature proclaims, “Slave …You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!” (120).

The creature’s powerful statement signals a pivotal moment in Shelley’s portrait of the complicated, dynamic world of the individual within the collective world, but what meaning does Shelley advance with this provocative claim? For one, if Frankenstein plays God, as many have inferred, she calls into question both God’s word and compassion. Consider, for instance, how, in nullifying his promise to grant the creature an Eve, Frankenstein in effect nullifies the creature by denying his innate need for intimacy and belonging, in other words, a place in the community of man. Next—Frankenstein signifying the creature’s father—the creature’s claim becomes the self-rescuing cry of the wounded, abandoned child. For what, in the sea of humanity, is a lost child, if not invisible? And to Frankenstein the scientist, the creature voices the humanist’s desperate plea, to be heeded on behalf of the future of mankind. In no way, on the other hand, does the creature’s indignant demand represent his “last chance of self-appreciation,” as Frankenstein critic Naomi Hetherington suggests (26). For it is not self-appreciation, but the appreciation of others—recognition— that the human soul craves. Indeed, in every sense, the creature stakes his claim to dignity, recognition, and place in the world.

A reading through the lens of Hegel’s master/slave paradox reveals a deeper significance that explains—beyond purposes of revenge, moral redemption, or social protection—the power-dynamic Shelley ignites. According to Hegel, self-consciousness “is mediated with itself through an other consciousness” (φ 190), meaning that, for Frankenstein and creature alike, recognition is reflected back to each through the other. Interestingly, though, because Hegel’s master derives his reason for being from the idea of master, he is beholden to the slave to recognize him as such. In essence, Hegel’s slave controls the master’s identity, his reality, indeed his very existence. Therein lies the creature’s demand, however confounded by Frankenstein’s mas48

the madison journal terly self-love, to be recognized by Frankenstein, his maker and thus his reason for being, in a sense, as his master. And where the idea of creation was once Frankenstein’s impassioned reason for being, the creature himself becomes its antithesis.

So understood, the antithetical relationship between Frankenstein’s idea and the stark, material reality of his creature is a fascinating convolution of Hegel’s dialectic, as it reveals itself in Frankenstein, and which only rights itself with the creature’s demand for Frankenstein’s obedience. In Hegel’s construct, where the master is not the slave’s reason for being, the slave is not dependent on the master for his identity in the same way that the master depends on the slave’s recognition. For, unlike Frankenstein’s notion that “many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to [him]” (33), the slave’s reality is not an idea but a material reality in which he, in spite of the master’s oppression, is free to think, to express himself, that is, through his work. Therefore, Frankenstein is, in an unexpected sense, freed by the creature’s command to obey, his pursuit of the creature, in effect his material reality, effacing the frantic pursuit of his idea.

Further, a Hegelian master/slave paradox perspective explains why Frankenstein pursues but does not kill the daemon, and why the daemon spares him alone. For although in one sense, the slave effectively controls the master’s existence by validating the master’s idea of himself, in effect, the master, dominant, controls the existence of both.

Hence, a paradox arises: not only does the master’s existence depend as much on his power as the slave’s life does, but without the slave, the master’s existence is negated, no less than if the slave were to kill the master. Thus, to save himself, the creature must spare Frankenstein. In contrast, the slave, “a self-consciousness in the broad sense”—unlike the master’s consciousness “that exists for itself ” (Hegel φ 190), for his power, that is—struggles, in his own essential-existential anguish, to nullify the master’s power. For as long as the creature lives, Frankenstein is free to make of his material reality what he wills. But for all his will and effort, the powerless slave “cannot … get so far as to an49

Of Literary criticism nihilate it outright and be done with it” (Hegel φ 190). Thus enslaved, Frankenstein pursues but never reaches the daemon.

When Shelley recasts the creator as slave and creature as master, it comes as a sudden blow, but according to Frankenstein critic David Shishido’s “Apotheosis Now: A Hegelian Dialectical Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Shelley sets Frankenstein up as a slave long before the creature executes his dramatic coup. That Shishido traces it to Frankenstein’s early “secretive obsession” (113) with the mystery and power of science only magnifies the significance of Frankenstein’s self-involved delusion that “[a] new species would bless [him] as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to [him]” (33). His conceit rings at once of the obsession Shishido cites—hubris masquerading as optimism—and a tragically flawed master figure, destined to fall. Shishido further notes that Frankenstein subtly “regresses” into bondage as the creature experiences “progressive freedom” (114). Might not that imply, though, that in effect, the creator/creature eclipse of power is less indicative of a coup than an evolution set in motion by the dynamics of the collective of interdependent individuals, each craving recognition? On the contrary, for the creature’s reversal of power comes in response to Frankenstein’s abject reversal/refusal to create his Eve, in essence an inciting incident, and thus it operates as a coup in terms of plot and the creator/creature relationship alike.

French philosopher and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre’s discourse on the dynamic culture of revolution as the ultimate existential response to relentless, dehumanizing oppression only strengthens the creature’s maneuver as a coup. Within this Sartrean context, Frankenstein’s will to create—or not—a mate for the creature becomes a powerful form of oppression, which he boldly wields by destroying the Eve he had promised, and along with her, the creature’s last hope of recognition as a sentient being. But having destroyed the creature’s last hope, Frankenstein can exploit the creature no further, so “the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads [to the oppressor’s demise]” 50

the madison journal (Sartre), upholding the creature’s reversal of power as a coup. In Sartre’s view, “we only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us” (Sartre). Accordingly then, the creature only becomes the vengeful, violent master “by the radical and deep-seated refusal” (Sartre) of Frankenstein’s negation— as creator, father, and symbol of the collective—of him. Understood as a revolution of one, the creature’s strike back becomes a Sartrean, existential affirmation of life and self, taken to the extreme, in the face of existential suffering—a most violent and purposeful response to man’s inhumanity to man.

In his Hegelian interpretation of Frankenstein, Shishido overlooks one especially intriguing and formative feature of Shelley’s construction of Frankenstein as slave: the grip of Frankenstein’s embattled mind, divided against itself. When Frankenstein announces, “I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret” (31–32), he conveys an unmistakable unnatural sense of ecstasy. After a divine fashion, he would alter nature’s immutable boundary between life and death; after Prometheus, he would be the one to grace humanity’s darkness with light. Yet this glory-seeking mutates into something quite different—Promethean in the chained sense, neither altruistic nor divine. An aberrant force of the psyche, it consumes Frankenstein. Sleep-deprived and restless beyond description, he pales for lack of light, wastes for lack of food, barely breathes. Suggesting delusions of grandeur in a quite literal sense, Shelley’s protagonist passionately recalls, “I pursued nature to her hiding places” (33).

Frankenstein’s delusions emerge as a classic example of what psychologist Robert Leahy attributes to the manic side of the bipolar mind: “Manic individuals believe that they can predict the future accurately—and that it will be filled with boundless rewards for them, believ[ing] that they have the genius that others lack” (Leahy). Within this context, Frankenstein’s account of how his “imagination was too 51

Of Literary criticism much exalted … to permit [him] to doubt of [his] ability to give life … [or to] consider the magnitude and complexity of [his] plan as any argument of its impracticability” (32–33) virtually envelops him in an air of mania. Supporting his addiction to the impassioned, if miscalculated, belief that whatever being he might create would be eternally indebted and ingratiated to his genius and power becomes Frankenstein’s work, his material reality.

Moreover, Leahy’s assertion that “[m]ost manias crash into depressive episodes” attests to the psychological significance of Frankenstein’s “the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!” (37).

With Frankenstein’s fall from the summit of his manic ascent after infusing the creature with life, the cyclic machinations of his psyche take hold, a kind of rehearsal of the master/slave dynamics of his relationship with his progeny. He becomes slave to his mind, which Shelley’s portrait of Frankenstein, as the plot unfolds, bears out. The oppressive forces of depression negate his joy, his reward, his anticipated glory. They torment his imagination, deceive his eyes, clutch his neck, rob him of his senses, isolate him, bleed his spirit. Rendered slave to mania and depression alike, he is master of neither. “[A] real insanity possessed me” (137), Frankenstein reflects. Here, what editors George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher describe in their preface to The Endurance of Frankenstein as the “awkward instability and miraculous power of Frankenstein” (xiv)—Frankenstein’s reality—pits the Hegelian idea of the master against the material reality of the slave, confounding freedom and recognition alike.

When Shelley scholar Levine identifies Shelley’s work as a “modern metaphor [that] implies a conception of the divided self, the creator and his work at odds,” schizophrenia, rather than mania, becomes the oppressive vehicle (15). However closely Frankenstein’s divided mind fits the manic-depressive profile psychologist Leahy lays out or to what degree the psychoses of schizophrenia might be read into the text, both disorders distort the individual’s perceptions of reality and self-consciousness. As psychologist and author Kay Jamison attests in 52

the madison journal An Unquiet Mind, “There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness…It will never end, for madness carves its own reality” (67). And in the end, from a Hegelian perspective, given the unstable psychological interdependence of the master and slave—not unlike the fetters of manic depression or schizophrenia—only death can truly set Frankenstein free.

Juxtaposing the creature’s “Slave … You are my creator, but I am your master;—obey!” (120) against Frankenstein’s narcissistic “[a] new species would bless [him] as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to [him]” (33) celebrates the conviction with which Shelley deposes the scientist, implodes the scientist’s manic vision and exposes his culture. Indeed, at once recalling the non-scientist’s criticism of the glory seeking scientist and attesting to Shelley’s accord, the creature’s inversion of power makes a mockery of Frankenstein’s presumptuous notion of blessing, denying him glory in proportion to the validation Frankenstein denies the creature.

Shishido’s work grounds the irony here in the Hegelian understanding that “without recognition of the slave by the master, the master himself … cannot achieve freedom” (116). Further, that the creature fails to validate Frankenstein—whether creator, father, or scientist—suggests that he likewise fails to validate the powerful, dominant whole of the many that Frankenstein represents.

Yet, consider how Shelley redeems the transgressive persona of science, dignifies and humanizes it—through Walton. That Walton discerns at first sight Frankenstein’s emotions in the tone of his voice, for instance, and perceives his divided, enslaved mind through the expressions of his face (14–15) reveals an almost reverent human sensibility, as does feeling the “suffocation” of the horrifying creature’s voice (158). In sensing others’ despair, Walton affirms man’s condition as his own. Thus reaching from his heart into the being of humanity through Frankenstein and his creature, Walton ministers to the soul of man, speaks its language, hears its plea—master and slave alike. As Walton works to put a human face to the essential-existential struggle 53

Of Literary criticism of mankind, its tormented minds, spent souls, inherent contradictions, and social dynamics, Shelley reveals the secrets of nature, the human nature of the soul, that science can neither recognize nor replicate.

What, for lack of humility, Frankenstein could not see, Walton validates and interprets for Shelley’s reader.

If Walton fails to fulfill his own mission to “ascertai[n] the secret of the magnet” (8), he represents Shelley’s vision of how Snow’s two cultures, science and poetry, or reason and imagination, can be reconciled. For he is more than a scientist: Frankenstein’s Walton is a poet.

And “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” whose art it is to apprehend and express man’s invisible nature, and to create of its contradictions—its “double face”—a sense of order (P. Shelley). Hence, Walton’s desire to “discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle” (M. Shelley 7) becomes a metaphor for the destiny of Percy Shelley’s poet, who “discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered,” in essence, a universal morality, “eternal truth” (P. Shelley). Understood as Frankenstein’s poet, Walton emerges as the instrument of resolution, Percy Shelley’s “legislator,” in the Hegelian paradox of master and slave involving Frankenstein and his daemon. The fact that Walton alone grants each, in turn, the recognition he lived and died for, that neither the many nor one could offer the other, discloses a visceral—or, in a Percy Shelley context, poetic—understanding of human nature that “makes beautiful that which is distorted” (P. Shelley).

When Shelley reveals to her reader, through Walton’s eyes, the distraught creature standing over the coffin of his lifeless creator, it not only clears the way for Frankenstein’s denouement but also finally brings master and slave face-to-face. The creature speaks: “Oh, Frankenstein! generous and self-devoted being! what does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst.” The moment is crucial, first, for what it is—the creature’s gesture of recognition of his creator, not as master or slave, but as one fallible, vulnerable, human being, and second, for what it 54

the madison journal is not, for his recognition is never consummated: “Alas! He is cold; he may not answer me” (158), the creature grieves. Indeed, it is too late, for Frankenstein can neither receive the recognition his soul hungered for nor answer, in return, the creature’s burning need. Instead, Walton, as witness, becomes a medium through which recognition is signified.

When Hetherington, in her analysis of the last moments of the creature’s life, asserts the creature’s death as “his only means of …absolution” (19), she complicates the question of guilt in Shelley’s text.

As she uses it, absolution assigns the creature guilt. Yet, the creature’s parting language—as in “I was the slave, not the master of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey” (159)—works to color him as the victim. Is it not protection, justice—to be recognized as wronged—and not absolution, that victims seek, that the creature lacks? Nor in terms of Hegel’s master/slave paradox does death represent absolution, for the consequences of oppression are indelible.

Indeed, there is no more absolving a merciless master through death than a slave.

Yet the convoluted tension—internal, external, individual, and collective—of Frankenstein is resolved by death and only by death, artfully completing the paradox of Hegel’s dialectic. Frankenstein’s vain pursuit, both egoistic and futile, proves powerless to overcome the daemon; pursuit overcomes the slave, negating the master; and the creature, mourning himself as he mourns Frankenstein, self-immolates. The struggling soul of humanity that Shelley’s Frankenstein and his creature represent, for lack of recognition in the here and now, withers. And along with the creature, Frankenstein, and “the madness [that] carves its own reality” (Jamison 67), Frankenstein’s master/slave paradox is laid to rest.

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Of Literary criticism WORKS CITED Hegel, G. W. F. “Independence and Dependence of Self-Conscious

ness: Lordship and Bondage” (Abridged). The Phenomenolo-

gy of Spirit. Arizona State University Online. PHI 304. Web. 18

Mar. 2014.

Hetherington, Naomi. “Creator and Created in Mary Shelley’s Fran kenstein.” Keats-Shelley Review 11 (1997): 1–39. Web. 1 Nov. 2015.

Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Google Book Search. Web. 1 Nov. 2015.

Leahy, Robert. “Inside the Manic Mind.” The Huffington Post (U.S.

Edition). 9 Mar. 2011. Web. 1 Nov. 2015.

Levine, George. “The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein.” The

Endurance of Frankenstein. Ed. George Levine and U. DC .

Knoepflmacher. Berkeley: The University of California Press,

1979. 3–30. Print.

Levine, George, and U. DC . Knoepflmacher, eds. Preface. The En-

durance of Frankenstein. Berkeley: The University of California

Press, 1979. Print.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Preface. The Wretched of the Earth. By Frantz

Fanon. Arizona State University Online. PHI 304. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

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the madison journal Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 2nd ed. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W.

W. Norton, 2012. Print.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” 1821. Poetry Foundation.

2009. Web. 1 Nov. 2015.

Shishido, David. “Apotheosis Now: A Hegelian Dialectical Analysis

of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Berkeley Undergraduate Jour- nal 24.3 (2011): 111–126. Web. 1 Nov. 2015.

Snow, C. P. “The Two Cultures.” Leonardo Vol. 23.2/3 (1990): 169–

173. Arizona State University Online. ENG 469. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.

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Blazing Out and Breaking Boundaries

Empowerment of Female Authors in A Room of One’s Own and Jane Eyre Emma Adler

In “The Queen’s Looking Glass,” Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

suggest that female writers who “create themselves as characters”— that is, proffer honest depictions of women and womanhood in their texts—seize “the power to reach toward the woman trapped on the other side of the mirror/text and help her climb out” (16). Gilbert and Gubar’s “her” is fictive: woman, as she is portrayed in books by men. But in Jane Eyre and A Room of One’s Own, respectively, Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf, apply this prophesy to living women, urging their female readers to defy an orthodoxy “central to Victorian culture,” which held that “male sexuality…[was] not just analogically but actually the essence of literary power” (4), and become authoresses in their own right. This is perhaps a surprising consonance, in light of Woolf ’s criticisms of Bronte. In AROO, Woolf depicts Bronte as a failed genius who, crippled by “rancour” and “frustration” born of her gender, could not express her gift “whole and entire” (69). But Bronte was cannier than Woolf would credit her. In fact, over the course of Jane Eyre and AROO, Bronte and Woolf execute analogous schemes of incitement-to-authorship—first placing their readers in situations that prompt them to recognize their potential to author texts, and then, by explicitly violating the literary conventions thought to govern these texts, daring them to flout societal conventions and take up the pen.

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Woolf does not veil the fact that a goal of A Room of One’s Own is to inspire its readers to become writers themselves. Throughout the essay, Woolf punctuates her prose with asides, in which she suggests, pseudocasually, that topics she mentions in passing might form the basis for future texts to be authored by her readers. Confronted with the absence of “a mass of information” about Elizabethan women, she asks “why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?” (45). Having declared that “the effect of discouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured,” she suggests that “the psychologists on Newnham and Girton” are the ones to do it (52). By propounding a spate of hypothetical texts that caters to a diverse array of academic interests, Woolf not only makes obvious her intent of inspiring authorship, but also implies that no stripe of scholar is excused for her authorial responsibility—that for every field of scholarship, there exist unwritten texts for women to pen.

Bronte, writing as Jane Eyre, makes no such overt proposals. But barefaced calls to produce texts are not the only way in which Woolf endeavors to transform her readers into writers, and it is with regard to her subtler strategies that she and Bronte find common ground.

Over the course of AROO and Jane Eyre, both writers quietly prod their audiences toward authorship, by crafting textual scenarios which prompt their readers to recognize that they possess the imaginative and rational capabilities necessary to author texts.

One of Woolf ’s most effective calls to imagination occurs in chapter one of AROO. In this section of the essay, Woolf describes two meals: a spectacular meal at a men’s college, and an uninspiring one at a women’s college. Whereas the “plain gravy soup” served at the women’s college provides “nothing to stir the fancy” (17), the partridges served at the men’s college, “with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent” cause “the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse” to alight in those eating it (10). The explicit function of this compari59

Of Literary criticism son is to explain why women have mostly failed to produce works of literary genius; by asking her readers to ponder “what food […] we feed women as artists on,” Woolf intimates that a historical dearth of great female writers can be accounted for by women’s inability to nourish their minds sufficiently, and by the fact that women who do feed their minds “must turn to men for nurture […] [because] literary mothers have been too disempowered […] to be of much help” (85).

But this is not the only effect of Woolf ’s comparison. Even as it elucidates a bleak state of affairs for female writers, Woolf ’s description of the men’s meal, by virtue of its sensory lushness, prompts her readers to engage in an authorial activity: the conjuring up of a detailed image, the partridges in all their glory.

This is something Woolf wants her readers to realize they are doing. She does not merely provide a sensorily provocative image— common enough practice in literary prose—but also intersperses her description with admonitions to the reader that call their attention to the fact that they are authoring an image. Of the partridges, she warns, “if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken” (10). After describing the dessert—a “confection which rose all sugar from the waves”—she cautions her readers not to lump it together with inferior sweets: “To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca,” she avers, “would be an insult” (11). At first glance, these admonitions might seem to hinder a reader’s imagination rather than affirm it. But implicit in Woolf ’s allusions to flawed images potentially burgeoning in her readers’ brains is an admission that she cannot regulate how her readers interpret her words—that the partridges and confections visualized by the ladies of Newnham and Girton are beyond her control. Woolf might be the one telling the story, but ultimately, it is her readers who are responsible for the images projected on their minds’ eyes. Thus, by alluding to her readers’ imagined partridges, partridges that are might differ significantly from the one Woolf has in mind, Woolf prompts her readers to equate imagination with authorship—to recognize that, in visualizing an author’s words, they have 60

the madison journal become creators of images in their own right.

Bronte, too, explicitly calls on her reader to imagine the scene before them. In chapter XI of Jane Eyre, Bronte—writing as Jane—asks her reader to envision the middle point in her journey from Lowood to Thornfield: “Reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured papering on the walls as inn rooms have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints, including a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales” (117). Like Woolf, Bronte veils her call to imagination behind a show of authoritarianism. She seems to assert control over her audience—tells them they “must” imagine this room and these things in it. But by openly acknowledging that she cannot plant an image of the room in their mind, but must beg them to summon it up for themselves, Bronte acknowledges her dependence on the reader, and causes the reader to acknowledge it too.

Whereas Woolf spurs her readers’ imaginations by bombarding them with lush images, Bronte takes the tack of withholding information, yet demanding visualization, in order to compel her readers to construct the scene themselves, from the bottom up. The reader is not given specific information about the items in the room, but only a barrage of general terms—“ornaments,” “prints,” “figured papering”—that forces them to rely on their own “fancy” to fill in the details. As Professor Deborah Gettelman has noted, Bronte “repeatedly writes about the experience of having a reverie while concealing its content” (563). In chapter VI, for example, Jane describes “her friend Helen Burns’ lapsing into reverie”: “I saw by her look she wished no longer to talk with me, but rather to converse with her own thoughts” (557). For Gettelman, this motif expresses a belief of Bronte’s that attempts at “controlling or articulating another person’s consciousness ultimately [prove] ineffectual” (570). It is a belief, Gettelman argues, which speaks to Bronte’s conviction of her readers’ autonomy: “By depicting reverie itself as unreadable,” she states, “Bronte […] insists on the separate and free nature of her readers’ acts of imagining” (570).

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Of Literary criticism Bronte’s account of the George Inn can also be read as insisting on this: by eschewing details, Bronte both expresses respect for her readers’ imaginative capabilities, and impels them to make use of them.

Woolf and Bronte further affirm the imaginative autonomy of their listeners by assuming that they must fight to keep the readers’ attention. In chapter XXV of Jane Eyre, Bronte/Jane begs the reader not to abandon her as she awaits Rochester’s return to Thornfield: “Stay till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share the confidence” (356). Chapter two of AROO begins with a similar imploration: “The scene, if I may ask you to follow me, was now changed…. I must ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people’s hats…and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper on which was written in large letters WOMEN AND FICTION, but no more” (25). Here Woolf employs a different breed of “must” than Bronte does when she tells her reader they must picture the George Inn. It is a “must” which underlines the apology of the first sentence: Woolf does not demand that the reader “follow her” to the British Museum, does not assume that they are inclined to “follow her,” but rather entreats them: please, stick with me.1

The second component of Woolf and Bronte’s strategy for nudging their audiences toward authorship is reminding them of their rational—in addition to imaginative—autonomy. Throughout AROO and Jane Eyre, Woolf and Bronte take for granted that their audiences are composed of critical readers who are sensitive to the internal logic of their tales and likely reach conclusions about them. Woolf begins her description of her sojourn to the fictitious women’s college, Fernham, by deferring to her readers’ presumed alertness: “As I have already said that it was an October day, I dare not forfeit your respect and imperil the fair name of fiction by changing the season and describing lilacs hanging over garden walls” (16). By assuming (or rather, appearing to assume) that the reader expects Woolf ’s narrative to conform to an internal logic, Woolf pushes her audience to be the ideal readers she envisions them as—to engage in the kind of critical thinking that 62

the madison journal would be requisite to pen any one of the rigorous hypothetical texts Woolf continually alludes to.2

Bronte also defers to the presumed rationality of her reader.

When, in chapter IX, she describes spending leisure hours with Mary Ann Wilson, rather than the extraordinary and previously befriended Helen Burns, Jane preempts the reader’s presumed incredulousness: “Why did I not spend these sweet days of liberty with [Helen]? […]

Surely the Mary Ann Wilson I have mentioned was inferior to my first acquaintance…. True, reader; and I knew and felt this.... But Helen was ill at present: for some weeks she had been removed from my sight to I knew not what room upstairs” (96). In chapter XXXV, Jane affirms that it is the prerogative of the reader to decide for themselves whether she truly did hear the disembodied voice of Rochester calling for her to return to him: “I was excited more than I had ever been; and whether what followed was the effect of excitement the reader shall judge” (546). By anticipating the reactions of an alert reader, Bronte “insists” that her readers are capable not only of conjuring the George Inn, but also of detecting potential logical rifts, and of coming to their own conclusions about events that defy belief.

Bronte’s affirmations of her readers’ rational autonomy also take the form of antagonistic asides. In chapter XXXIII, just before St. John reveals that Jane is his cousin, Jane casts doubt on the reader’s prescience: “I knew, by instinct, how the matter stood […] but I cannot expect the reader to have the same intuitive perception, so I must repeat his explanation” (500). In chapter XXXIV, before recounting her return to Rochester Jane imagines—and shuts down—a judgmental interlocutor: “Perhaps you think I had forgotten Mr. Rochester, reader, amidst these changes of place and fortune. Not for a moment.”

It is significant that these critical asides fall toward the end of the novel. Having unfolded the better part of her life’s story to the reader, it seems, Jane has become comfortable teasing them. Just as Woolf ’s instructions to her reader (imagine this kind of pheasant, etc.) actually affirm their imaginative independence, Bronte’s dismissals of her 63

Of Literary criticism readers in fact acknowledge their status as critical readers—ones who might well be wondering when Jane is going to satisfy their curiosity about the fate of Mr. Rochester.

The final, crucial component of Bronte and Woolf ’s authors’ induction of their readers into a league of female authors is flouting the conventions of their chosen literary forms. Both authors begin their texts by—deliberately and explicitly—delineating the formal boundaries that will govern their tales. And both authors proceed—deliberately and explicitly—to violate these boundaries, transgressing the very limits they have gone out of their way to elucidate. In so doing, both authors impress upon their readers that the act of transgression is not to be feared, but embraced, and that the limitations of literary form— and in turn, those imposed on women in a patriarchal society—are not sacrosanct, but arbitrary and violable.

On page four of AROO—before the introduction of Woolf ’s avatar, “Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or…any other name you please” (5), and the start of the narrative proper—Woolf proclaims her modus operandi: “I propose, making use of all of the liberties and licenses of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here. Lies will flow from my lips but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and decide whether any part of it is worth keeping” (4).

In other words, AROO is self-consciously fictive. From the outset, Woolf knows that her listeners know that she is telling them a story, the ideas of which might ring true but the content of which is pure invention. There is an internal logic that proceeds from this scenario: If Woolf had not confessed that her tale was made up, her listeners would have paid the usual price of admission for hearing a fictional tale, and accepted the premise that the narrator does not know that what they are stating is false.3 By acknowledging the fictitiousness of her tale, Woolf eliminates this price of admission; she knows that the readers knows she is telling a fictional story, a story of her own creation, and consequently, relinquishes the right to claim that elements 64

the madison journal of it are beyond their control. However, throughout AROO, Woolf ignores this logical impediment, addressing the reader as if she had not copped to the fact that she is telling a fictional story.4

Arguably the first time that Woolf does this is on page seven.

Woolf—rather, Woolf/Mary—is “strolling through the colleges” at Oxbridge, when, “[a]s chance would have it…some stray memory brought Charles Lamb to mind.” Here, the phrase of interest is “As chance would have it.” Because it is understood by Woolf ’s readers that Woolf knows her tale is fictive, statements that imply that Woolf is not in control of the story come across as patent lies. Nothing in this tale occurs “as chance would have it.” Woolf knows it. The reader knows it. She knows the reader knows it. Of course, it is also untrue that Mary was “strolling through the colleges” to begin with. But while the author of a self-conscious work of fiction is understood to be in control of her fictive universe, and can thus state that she goes for an understood-to-be-fictional stroll with impunity, she cannot claim to have remembered Charles Lamb by “chance,” without this claim presenting itself to the reader as an obvious falsehood.

Woolf/Mary’s claims of lack of control can be divided up into three subcategories: claims of randomness (as above), claims of doubt, and claims of coercion. Claims of doubt surface in chapters one and five. Having arrived at the entrance of a library, Woolf/Mary avers, “I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued…a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman” (8). Describing the fake novel Life’s Adventure, she notes: “Chloe liked Olivia…although one of them was married and had—I think I am right in stating—two small children” (83). Here, the blatant lies are those that insinuate uncertainty on the part of Woolf/Mary: “I must have opened it” and “I think I am right in stating.” While a narrator who has confessed that they are telling a fictional story can say they went to a library, they cannot claim to have doubts about whether they opened the door. The tale can have no secrets from them; the number of children had by Olivia is entirely in Woolf ’s control.

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Claims of coercion arise in chapters one and two. After the notion of “people humming…things…under their breath at luncheon parties before the war” causes her to “burst out laughing,” Woolf/Mary “[has] to explain [her] laughter by pointing at the Manx cat” she has spotted through a window (13). At the end of this chapter, Woolf implies that she is forced, against her will, to proceed from one erudite venue to another: “The inevitable sequel to lunching and dining at Oxbridge seemed, unfortunately, to be a visit to the British Museum” (25). Like doubt and randomness, the idea of the author of a tale being forced to do something within that tale is impossible. This is Woolf/Mary’s world, and no one can force her to do anything.

Throughout AROO, Woolf prompts her readers to take note of these logical red flags by reiterating that this is, indeed, a self-conscious fiction—that she is aware that everything she claims is invented. Prior to describing her meal at Oxbridge, she states, “It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings […] however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention” (10). By thus reminding her readers of the meal’s fictitiousness, Woolf primes them to prick up their ears when she claims to lack control of it. On the same page as Woolf/Mary claims to be forced to “explain her laughter,” she claims that a fact of the world she has authored has slipped her mind: “After the avenue one comes out upon a road—I forget its name—which leads you […] along to Fernham” (13). By concluding this sentence with an allusion to Fernham—a made up locale—Woolf reminds the reader that she cannot possibly have forgotten the name of the road that leads there. She invented Fernham and the road.

Thus, by the end of AROO, Woolf ’s early refusal to “imperil” her story’s internal logic by altering the season had been shown to be tongue-in-check. Woolf has no qualms about ignoring the limitations of her chosen form, and wants her readers to notice that she is doing so. Susan Friedman speculates that this aspect of Woolf ’s style—her “experimentalism”—teaches her readers “to become…not dutiful daughters of the masculine Word, not passive recipients of High Art… 66

the madison journal but rather active, engaged readers…encouraged to interrogate prevailing orthodoxies of representation” (105). This is a crucial component of Woolf ’s project. By “[violating] the boundaries of expectation as they have been erected by literary tradition and orthodoxy,” Woolf impresses upon her readers not only that it is permissible to violate such boundaries, but also that such boundaries are arbitrary—byproducts not of a fundamentally right world order, but rather, of “tradition” (104). The same literary tradition that, in Gilbert and Gubar’s view, vests each man with “the ability, […] to talk back to other men by generating alternative fictions of his own,” while women participate only as “characters […] in male texts […] generated solely […] by male expectations and designs” (12). Thus, in AROO, Woolf does not stop at inspiring authorship, but goes a step further; by rejecting the formal limits that might have constrained her tale, Woolf implicitly empowers her readers to reject the social mores that might deter them from authorship.

Bronte also violates the implicit “rules” of her chosen form. In Woolf ’s view, these transgressions are errors, plain and simple—involuntary slips resulting from Bronte’s inability to control her “rancour.”

However, applying the same theoretical framework to Jane Eyre as to AROO suggests a more charitable view of Bronte’s transgressions. I would argue that Bronte’s divergences from the formal straight-andnarrow are not regrettable missteps, but rather, intentional disruptions of the traditional boundaries of the first-person novel—disruptions which serve, as in AROO, to un-dermine convention in general, and to persuade readers to sally forth with their capable brains, and become authors themselves.

Like Woolf, Bronte makes her formal transgressions obvious by initially emphasizing the traditional parameters of her chosen form.

Jane Eyre bills itself, on its title page, as an “autobiog-raphy” (i). Our narrator, Jane, acknowledges the text as such, explicitly referring to the fact that she is writing a memoir.5 Thus, when one begins reading Jane Eyre, one accept the follow-ing premises: A) so far, as Jane is 67

Of Literary criticism concerned, this is her autobiography, and Bronte does not exist, and B) the events of Jane Eyre unfolded in the past. Throughout the novel, however, Bronte un-dermines these premise.

Sometimes she does this in quiet ways that Woolf would approve of. In chapter XIII, for example, Rochester examines the paintings that Jane has completed whilst in his employ. Bron-te/Jane states: “He spread the pictures before him, and again surveyed them alternately. While he is so occupied, I will tell you, reader, what they are” (159). With the phrase, “while he is so occu-pied,” Jane implies that the events of her life are unspooling as she writes them—that Jane Eyre is not a reflective autobiography, but a live-action tale. In chapter XVII, having described, in some detail, a party at Thornfield, Jane states: “You are not to suppose, reader, that Adèle has all this time been sitting motionless on the stool at my feet: no; when the ladies entered, she rose…[and] made a stately reverence.” Here, Jane mocks the idea that her readers might think of Adèle as an agentless character, who cannot move without being twitched by the author’s puppet strings, the irony being that this is, in fact, the case. The reader knows it and knows that Bronte knows it. By thus quietly undermining the temporal and character-related premises understood to attend to a memoir, Bronte, like Woolf, suggests that it is permissible, even productive, to flout convention.

But the marked fracture occurs in chapter XII when, out of the blue, Jane ceases to be a memoirist, and launches into a general defense of Woman:

I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle; but I be-lieved in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I be-lieved in I wished to behold.

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Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain some-times…. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot…. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fel-low-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than cus-tom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

This is precisely the passage cited by Woolf when she dismisses Bronte in AROO. For Woolf, it is moments like this mar Bronte’s genius: “She will write in a rage where she should write calmly […] She will write of herself where she should write of her characters,” and result-antly her novels, while imbued with flashes of brilliance, are “deformed and twisted” (69). And admittedly, the passage does contain an abrupt narrative break—a moment when it becomes clear to the reader that, as Woolf puts it, Bronte is “writing of herself.” It is an obvious because sud-den intrusion; in one sentence, Jane swerves from the specific (her discontentedness with Adèle and Mrs. Fairfax) to the general (her discontentedness with the whole of society), offering a lengthy and ardent opinion that is clearly Bronte’s own. And in just one more sentence, the novel veers back on course: “When thus alone, I not infrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh.” Woolf singles out this sentence for scrutiny. “That is an awkward break,” she states. “It is upsetting to come upon Grace Poole all of a sudden. The continuity is disturbed 69

Of Literary criticism […] [and] if one reads [these pages] over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that [Bronte] will never get her genius expressed whole and entire” (69).

This is where Woolf errs. I would argue that this sentence, far from emblematizing Bron-te’s failure, proves that her intrusion into the text is intentionally obvious—an instance of delib-erate boundary-breaking, akin to Woolf claiming that she has forgotten the name of the road to Fernham. Bronte’s intrusion into Jane’s consciousness is cut off by the intrusion of Grace Poole’s laugh. It is an intrusion of content that echoes the formal intrusion we have just witnessed: Poole interrupts Bronte’s impassioned speech, just as Bronte interrupted the flow Jane’s narrative. This parallelism suggests that Bronte wants her reader to notice her presence—is not barging in unwit-tingly, but rather, making a calculated decision to insert herself into the narrative.

This is precisely what Woolf does, in AROO, when she claims not to be in control of an aspect of the narrative: Woolf ’s professions of randomness, doubt, or coercion, like Bronte’s marked intrusions, serve as a formal red flags that force her listeners to recall the existence of the author. In short, both au-thors use formal alarm bells to brazenly rear their heads, deliberately cracking the façades of their fictions, and asserting their presence as authors.

Recognizing the like nature of Bronte and Woolf ’s intrusions elucidates a final piece of the puzzle in their scheme to transform female readers into writers. Ultimately, the personal na-ture of Bronte and Woolf ’s intrusions—the fact that these are formal breaks predicated on the author revealing her presence—allows them to act not only as avowals of transgression, in gen-eral, but also as avowals of female authorship. By thus breaking their texts, Bronte and Woolf express a willingness to make themselves known—to “blaze out,” as Woolf might have it (49), from a fictive landscape, declaring themselves as female writers, and empowering their female readers to do the same.

Happily, the landscape of literary fiction is greatly changed since Bronte and Woolf sought to convince their female readers that it was 70

the madison journal in their power to author texts. In 2016, six of the thirteen texts to make the Man Booker longlist were women; over the last decade the prize has gone to a woman five times. And yet, the road toward female authorship remains tortuous, with female writers regularly falling victim to a literary history that has bequeathed to us an idea of what makes good writing molded almost exclusively by men, and to a literary culture in which the pejoration of so-called “women’s writing” is an enduring reality. In the current environment, one hopes, “literary mothers” like Woolf and Bronte, disempowered though Woolf may have felt them to be, can live on as ensigns in the ongoing battle for literary equity—still extending a hand toward potential women writers, still imploring them to shatter the proverbial looking glasses that fetter female expression.

NOTES 1. With the final phrase of this passage, Woolf offers yet another reminder to her readers of their imaginative autonomy. “But no more” can be read in two ways: as modifying “WOMEN AND FICTION (the sheet read WOMEN AND FICTION, “but no more”) or as modifying the scene as a whole: “imagine a room” with all of these things in it, “but no more.” Interpreted in the latter sense, the phrase constitutes yet another instance of surveillance of the reader’s imagination which is simultaneously a reminder to the reader that they, and not Woolf, are the ones responsible for the image in their head. The ambiguousness of the phrase only bol-sters its efficacy as a tool for the cultivation of the reader’s imagination. By compelling her reader to go through the mental gymnas-tics of recognizing and assessing the phrase’s discrete meanings, Woolf forces them to be still more cognizant of their engagement in the act of imagination.

2. Note that Woolf ’s flattery of her audience also enables her to have her cake and eat it too: despite her protestations, the lilacs make it in after all.

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Of Literary criticism 3. In Jane Eyre, for example, we take for granted that Jane does not know she is a character in a novel.

4. Woolf ’s violation of the internal logic of the meta-fiction is grounded, in part, in the soupiness of the narrator’s identity. Woolf purports to tell her story as someone other than herself, but never forsakes her identity utterly. Instead, AROO is characterized by “fragmentation and communalization of narrative authority” (Friedman 103): Mary is a fluid persona, which Woolf alters to suit the purposes of her tale, and is thus always Woolf/Mary. And while Mary—a character that doesn’t know she is made up—could claim to remember Charles Lamb by chance, Woolf/Mary cannot.

5. See chapter X (“This is not to be a regular autobiography. I am only bound to invoke Memory where I know her responses will possess some degree of interest.”) and more than thirty addresses to the “reader.”

WORKS CITED Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Minneapolis: First Avenue Addi

tions, 2014.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Virginia Woolf ’s Pedagogical Scenes of

Reading: The Voyage Out, The Common Reader, and Her ‘Com

mon Readers.’” Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 Volume 38: 101-125 Gettelman, Deborah. “Making Out Jane Eyre.” English Literary History

74.3 (2007): 557-581.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. “The Queen’s Looking Glass” in Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Cen-

tury Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale Universi-

ty Press, 2000.

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Moran, Patricia. “Virginia Woolf and the Scene of Writing.” Modern

Fiction Studies 38.1 (1992): 81-100.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Orlando: Harcourt, 1989.

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Featured Authors DEIRDRE CARNEY is a rising junior at Harvard University where she studies English with focuses in Creative Writing and Medieval Literature.

Her other main interests are queer theory and feminist criticism, especially in Gothic and Romantic literature, but also within society as a whole.

NATHAN MAY is entering his fourth year at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies English and Classical Studies. His academic interests include Renaissance drama, queer theory, and classical reception studies. When not in school, Nathan likes to read, sing, and attend the theatre.

YOON-JI HAN is entering her final year at Columbia University, where she is majoring in English and minoring in Business Management. Her main academic interests include heteroglossia and performativity in the novel, exploring the relationships created both within the text between characters and through the text between author and reader.

BETH BOCKES is a recent graduate of Arizona State University, where she majored in English with a focus in literary studies. Understanding literature as both the expression and study of humanity in all its dimensions, she finds the power of language fascinating, and she loves to write. Of special interest are poetry, for its layered richness, and African American literature, for its soulfulness.

EMMA ADLER graduated from Harvard in 2016 with a degree in English.

This year she will be studying playwriting at the Lir, the dramatic academy of Trinity College in Dublin. Her research interests include cognitive literary theory, twentieth century American literature, the nineteenth century novel, and food studies.

Featuring

Deirdre Carney | Harvard University Nathan May | University of Pennsylvania Yoon-Ji Han | Columbia University Beth Bockes | Arizona State University Emma Adler | Harvard University

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