November 1st LT Readings

The three readings in our literary theory texts center on questions of individual identity in literature, the nature of history and ideological point of views, and Marxist criticism and its various revisions.  In Culler’s “Identity, Identification, and the Subject” chapter, he outlines four strands of modern thought regarding individual identity, delineating the self as either something that is given or something that is made.  He notes that modern literary tradition treats the self either as a given/individual who expresses his or her uniqueness through word and deed or as a given/social self shaped by one’s origins and social attributes. Theory contests this given view of the self and instead sees self as either a made/individual that becomes what it is through acts or as a made/social self formed solely by outside forces. In my view, the psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, and Queer Theory models ask the question “What am I?” because they regard the individual as a “product” of culture, a “subject” of social construction while the traditional literary model offers an answer to the question “Who am I?” because it see the self as a unique and largely autonomous being with the ability to develop personal qualities in response to life’s difficulties.  Culler cites an example of this ethic in the American western novel where the notion of the essential self emerges from the struggles which bring one’s character into relief, where identity is both the basis and result of individual actions.  Culler also discusses how literature makes identity a central theme and can provide readers with models of how others struggle with inner psychological forces (like Hamlet) and how others can overcome constraining external social forces (like Jane Eyre.)  It seems to me that fairy tales also serve this purpose for children and adults as they identify with a hero or heroine’s quest for love, social acceptance, and individual achievement.

Nealon and Giroux present the nature of history as one that is always subject to interpretation in Theory Toolbox, explaining that history is a narrative told from a particular, ideological point of view.  From this they deduce that history is therefore a constructed vision of the past rather than a reconstruction of it.  They discuss how an author’s point of view reflects deep, ideological presuppositions and that these produce context rather than discover it.  I find it ironic that Nealon and Giroux advocate an engagement with “multiple historical narratives” while branding the American ideology of “Manifest Destiny” as “bunk,” despite the significant place it occupies among historical perspectives.  Shouldn’t a reader of history be able to access and consider all views?

In our third reading, Barry describes Marxist criticism and the changes it has experienced through the decades as it transitioned from Marxist to Leninist to Engelsian and then to the most recent New Criticism model.  As envisioned by Marx and Engels, communism is a materialist philosophy which explains society in terms of the natural world only, a closed system which does not allow for the existence of a supernatural world.  The Marxist model of society is based on state-owned means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods and atop this base sits the superstructure of cultural ideas, law, art, and even religion, all determined by the nature of the economic base.  Leninist Marxist criticism initially encouraged modern forms of art, but soon exerted direct control over literature and the arts, outlawing liberal views and imposing a “socialist realism” framework which supported party philosophy.  Barry explains that René Welleck and Roman Jakobson then imported a revised form of Engelsian Marxist criticism known as Russian Formalism to America and some western European countries.  Louis Althusser was also a proponent of the Marxist “New Criticism” movement which promotes a more subtle view of how society works than traditional Marxism provides.  In this revision of Marxist criticism, the concession of a “relative autonomy” of the arts” avoids the more rigid “economics as central” argument of Leninist criticism.  I found it striking that Althusser accuses capitalism of thriving on the “trick” of interpellation by making us feel as though we’re making choices when there actually are no choices available (political parties, for instance,) while in Marxist societies the possibility of political choice is, without question, non-existent.   

October 25 LT Readings

The October 25 readings were thought-provoking as they discussed the power of language to shape our assumptions and ways of thinking about culture and identity.  Culler details how literary utterance and specifically “performative” language can bring into being characters and their actions and also bring into being the ideas it deploys.  Literature can be an act of speaking things into existence and although this can support the idea of man or woman as a creator, Culler contends that the performative act “breaks the link between meaning and the intention of the speaker” because the act one performs with words is “determined” by social convention. (p. 97) Culler cites Derrida’s view that performatives only work if they are socially recognized and repeatable (iterable) phrases such as “I do” or “I promise.”  Judith Butler then applies the performative act of language to gender, asserting that even gender is created by acts, that one “becomes a man or a woman by repeated acts that depend on social convention.”  Both Culler and Barry discuss the implications of using the performative concept as a model or “stake” for thinking about social processes, such as the nature of identity and how it is formed, particularly sexual identity.  Barry quotes the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader’s claim that “lesbian/gay studies does for sex and sexuality what women’s studies does for gender” by making sexual orientation “a fundamental category of analysis and understanding.”  Ironically, Barry ties the understanding of identity within lesbian/gay studies with that of postmodernism, a view that identity is “a constant switching … of roles and positions,”  and he points out that such “anti-essentialism” undermines the foundation on which “identity politics” depends, that is, discrimination based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. (p. 140)

I found Nealon’s and Giroux’s discussion of ideology interesting. They begin their chapter by stating “Ideology is a tough thing to get at” because it is the study of ideas which are immaterial in nature, a study which attempts to show “the way things are” and to create a general social agreement or consensus about meaning and purpose.  They describe ideologies as “stakes of ideas” engaged in the production of knowledge in the fields of science (the physical world,) philosophy (the metaphysical world,) politics (the social world,) and religion (the supernatural world.)  The authors argue that a society’s ideology or “common sense … can’t be examined or challenged or rearranged,” but, on the contrary, it seems to me that each successive generation engages in an active discourse which challenges its older generation’s scientific, philosophical, political, and religious ideologies, and then attempts to retain that which it considers valuable and correct or discard that which it deems no longer credible.  I do think the authors’ question asking “What unarticulated premises stand behind our knowledge?” is a good one, and I believe that one of the most important services literature performs in society is that it prompts readers to examine commonly-held ideas too often unexamined and taken for granted in their individual and social lives.

Variations on Snow White

Of the four readings of the Snow White tale, three are narratives reflecting traditional cultural views and one is a poem presenting the modern feminist view.  The traditional tale of The Young Slave (1634) reflects a theological cultural context as Lilla, the unmarried sister of an Italian baron, becomes pregnant by something akin to Immaculate Conception.  Unfortunately, a fairy inadvertently curses her daughter Lisa and she dies at seven years of age.  Although Lilla supernaturally preserves Lisa’s body in seven caskets of crystal, she dies of grief a year later and entrusts the key to the room holding Lisa’s casket to her brother for safekeeping.  It is the baron’s wife, “impelled by jealousy, consumed by curiosity” who ironically frees Lisa from death and then makes her a slave.  When the Baron overhears Lisa revealing her true identity to a doll he has given her, and hears her threat to kill herself, the Baron knocks down the door and rescues her from suicide, an irreparable sin in Catholicism.  He then orders a great banquet to welcome her home (reminiscent of the biblical parable of the prodigal son) and as his guests listen to her story they weep at the cruelty of his wife and rejoice when the Baron drives her out of the household.

There is vivid cultural imagery and symbolism threaded throughout the second traditional version, Snow White (1812) by the Grimm Brothers.  In the initial scene, a queen sits looking out from an ebony-framed window at the snow and wishes for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window frame.”  The cultural meaning of color in this scene is thought-provoking; white for purity, red for blood or danger, and black for mourning or death.  The queen gives birth to Snow White shortly after the wish scene and then she dies, her daughter then governed by a beautiful, vain stepmother who turns “green with envy” (which the Disney version uses to great effect) when Snow White’s beauty exceeds her own, according to the Magic Mirror. Snow White finds refuge when she happens upon the home of her surrogate family, the seven dwarfs, but because she fails to heed their warning not to let anyone in the house while they’re away, she falls prey to the devices of her stepmother disguised as an old peddler woman.  As in The Slave Girl version, Snow White’s body does not decay in death and this allows the possibility for the love of the dwarfs and a prince to free her from death.  Again, the stepmother/queen is publicly humiliated but in Grimms’ version, she also dies a grotesque, painful death as a result of her cruel vanity.

The longest of the traditional tales, Lasair Gheug, the King of Ireland’s Daughter (1891) introduces a cultural stock villain of Scottish lore, the eachrais urlair, an evil old woman who, together with stepmother/queen, plots to kill the king’s daughter out of greed.  There are many twists and turns in the story, but in the end, Lasair Gheug devises a way to reveal how the eachrais urlair and stepmother/queen have framed her and she publicly exposes her stepmother as a “monster” who is then “burnt in fire,” a type of hellish punishment similar to the Grimm Brothers’ red-hot iron shoes.  These traditional narratives fulfill Aristotle’s definition of an effective narrative, discussed by Culler on pages 84-85 of Literary Theory, by providing “an end relating back to the beginning … an end that indicates what has happed to the desire that led to the events the story narrates.”

In contrast, Anne Sexton’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a modern feminist critique, parodies the cultural contexts of the traditional versions.  As Barry points out in his chapter on feminist criticism, feminists seek to expose the “mechanisms of patriarchy” in the cultural representations of women in literature and call into question those symbols they believe associated with authority, fathers, and repression.  Sexton views Snow White as a “lovely number,” a virginal china doll, and likens her whiteness to “a bonefish,” something stiff and dead.  In her poem she paints the proud stepmother/queen as a victim of a patriarchal society’s demand for the prize of physical beauty; a demand that transforms her into a ghoul “lapping her slim white fingers” as she chews what she believes is Snow White’s heart “like a cube steak.”  In other modern cultural references that disrupt the reader’s traditional images of the tale, she substitutes an Ace Bandage for the Grimms’ corset laces and red-hot roller skates for their red-hot iron shoes.  The feminist moral to Sexton’s tale appears to be that both Snow White and her stepmother are captive to the patriarchal voice of the mirror, a cultural script in which feminist critics Susan Gilbert and Susan Gubar view “women (as) enmeshed in a discourse connecting beauty, death, and femininity,” on page 77 of Classic Fairy Tales.