463855

University of Tulsa
The Point of "Slater's Pins": Misrecognition and the Narrative Closet Author(s): Susan Clements Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 15-26 Published by: University of Tulsa Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463855 . Accessed: 13/08/2013 23:28
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The Misrecognition
Point
of "Slater's and the
Pins": Closet
Narrative
Susan Clements Indiana University
"Chloe likedOlivia," I read. And then itstruck me how immensea change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps forthe first time in literature. Virginia Woolf,A Room ofOnes Own1 in such a way that it.. . "transforms" the indi? Ideology "acts" or "functions" viduals into subjects... by that verypreciseoperation I have called interpella? tionor hailing.... By this... he becomes a subject.Why? Because he has recognizedthat the hail was "really"addressedto him, and that "it was really himwho was hailed." Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"2 Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer. forWomen"3 Virginia Woolf,"Professions
In the early years of the twentieth century,novels like Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness were more the exception than the rule for lesbian fiction. The rule impelled such writers as Willa Cather and Henry Handel Richard? son to translate lesbian motifs into accepted heterosexual terms; The Well of Loneliness, on the other hand, graphically dramatizes the passion of women for women. Flouting the laws of social and literary convention, Hall's novel was duly banned, and so revealed the extent of state power to silence lesbian voices. And yet such silencing is not only operative on the manifest level of censorship. Long before a narrative meets the press, it encounters the obstacles of language itself. In early twentieth-century culture, the lesbian writer could find only scant traces of the vocabulary she needed to write her desire; without this vocabulary, she could easily fail not only to communi? cate but even to recognize her own sexual identity.The coding that crosses lesbian texts of this period must thus be understood in two ways: cleverly wielded, as Jane Marcus points out, it can be an empowering tool against the forces of censorship,4 but it can also serve as a medium of misrecognition, through which established social narratives invade and undo a lesbian's growing perception of her sexual self. 15
Stranded in a tradition that was only beginning to acknowledge their existence, lesbian writers of the early twentieth century had little but the established formsof heterosexual romance with which to build their works.5 For these women and their lesbian forebears, neither sexual works nor established sexual traditions could be attached to friendship between women: "accented differentlyby competing groups... the terrain of lan? guage is a terrain of power relations" from which lesbian concepts were largely pushed away.6 In "Slater's Pins Have No Points," Woolf dramatizes the cultural mechanisms through which such exclusion is accomplished: focus? ing on Fanny Wilmot's difficultyin perceiving her lesbian orientation, Woolf draws our attention to the social obstacles that limit her view of herself. The story presents us with three female characters?Phoebe King? ston, Julia Craye, and Fanny Wilmot?all of whom are unattached to men, and all of whom appear, under Woolf's hinting hand, to be lesbians. Between Phoebe and Miss Craye there exists a relationship of "special favor[s]" and "greatest admiration"?a detail whose sexual overtones gather force with the depiction of Miss Craye.7 There is, as Fanny realizes, something "odd" about her music teacher, who crushes sexually resonant flowers"voluptuously in her smooth veined hands" and whose "crush and grasp of the finger was combined with a perpetual frustration"(p. 1372). In light of her continually wry comments on the meager "use of men" (p. 1373), Miss Craye's refusal to marry also points to her lesbianism: "they're ogres," she says, "laughing grimly" about men, and she feels "immense relief" whenever she rejects the marriage proposal of a young suitor (p. 1374). In spite of all of this, however, Fanny continually misrecognizes both Phoebe's and Julia's lesbian characteristics, and it soon becomes clear that 16
destructive and ultimately self-effacing practice of misrecognition?a prac? tice built, as I shall show, on established heterosexual traditions, and one which Woolf herself seems to highlight as a key to her narrator's problems.
In this paper, I intend to demonstrate that Virginia Woolf in 1928 was keenly aware of this process of sexual undoing and that her short story "Slater's Pins Have No Points" provides a reflection on the lesbian artist of her time. Carefully transcribed into heterosexual terms, "Slater's Pins Have No Points" makes use of socially acceptable metaphors only to resist and subvert them from within the story itself. Woolf accomplishes this subver? sion through a covert reflection on the very practice of heterosexual coding: on its conscious use as an escape from censorship and its unconscious use as an escape from self. With her creation of Fanny Wilmot?a narrator wholly unable to recognize her lesbian identity?Woolf begins to examine the social underpinnings of the lesbian writers tragic inability to come to terms with herself. Using this text as an emblematic representation of difficultiesfaced by the lesbian writer, I intend to focus attention on the
she is not quite as indifferent to their behavior as she makes herselfout to be. she Whether knows it or not, Fanny Wilmot is also a lesbian, and there exists between Miss Julia and her an erotic attachment from which Fanny as narrator continually shies away. This latent eroticism surfaces at several points in the text of Fanny's thoughts?points of obsession and repressed desire whose meaning, however opaque to Fanny herself,seems clear enough to the reader. Fantasizing about Julia'spast with men, obsessed with the fact that she never married, and displaying forher teacher a romantic fascination (p. 1375, for example), Fanny also "feels" how "voluptuously" Julia handles and crushes a Fanny-associated flowerwith her fingers. Inevitably, however,
Fanny falls just short of the realization that Julia's "perpetual frustration" stems from a sexual desire for Fanny herself: some psychological barrier prevents her from recognizing the erotic bond that links the two women. Because Fanny herself has not yet realized its presence, this psychological barrier remains an ostensible mysteryto us; but it is not hard to guess that it has something to do with fear and guilt and with Fanny's indoctrination into social structures that deny (and force her to deny) the lesbian's existence. To the reader, then, "Slater's Pins Have No Points" suggests myriad images of lesbian love?images that entirely escape the understanding of the nar? rator who lays them out. Filtered through Fanny's guarded consciousness, the lesbian themes of the story take on a surface veneer that blinds her to their true meaning, so that "Slater's Pins Have No Points" becomes a study of the forces through which lesbians come to misrecognize their sexual identity.These forces, moreover, are significantlyintertwined with the act of storytelling, for Woolf reminds us again and again that the story we receive has been edited and re-worked in the chamber of Fanny's mind. Echoing throughout the story,Fanny Wilmot's name appears in almost every para? graph, asserting her narrative presence through the actions of thinking, remembering, and feeling. Nor does Woolf insist on the verity of her narrator's thoughts and memories; far from seeking painstaking accuracy, Fanny realizes that Miss Craye's past can become virtually anything she wants it to be. "One could imagine every sort of scene in her youth" and
"make that yield what one liked" (p. 1373), Fanny reflects; casting Miss Craye in a marriage proposal scene with a nervous young suitor, Fanny realizes that "the scene could be changed; and the young man and the exact manner of it all, but one thing was constant?her refusal, and her frown, and her anger with herself afterwards, and her argument, and her relief?yes, certainly her immense relief" (p. 1374). One thing remains constant?Miss Julia'srejection of heterosexual romance?and yet Fanny consistently shirks perception of the import of this detail in her story.She does this, as we shall see, by surrounding Miss Craye with alternative stories that come straight from the heart of literary tradition: lacking a model for lesbian love, Fanny 17
dullness to question the force and satisfaction potential of male lovers?to state, in effect,that contrary to popular belief, there is not really much point to a penis. "Transfixed" at first by these words, which "gave her an extraordi? nary shock" (p. 1371), Fanny begins her narrative version of Miss Craye's life by picking up on the teacher's own suggestive sexual imagery: Did she stand at the counterwaitinglike anybody else, and was she givena bill withcopperswrappedin it,and did she slip theminto her purseand then,an hour later,stand by her dressingtable and take out the pins? What need had she ofpins?For she was not so much dressedas cased, like a beetle compactly in its sheath, blue in winter, green in summer, (p. 1371) In this emerging story,Fanny begins to visualize, in metaphorical terms, the possibilities of Miss Julia's sex life. The pins going into and out of the purse resonate with sexual imagery?but it is heterosexual imagery,which fails, somehow, to accord with Miss Julia's being. Thus arises the question "What need had she of pins?" and the subsequent observation that as far as pins are concerned, Miss Julia is completely closed?sheathed like a battleready (and phallic) knife?against penetration. For Fanny,however, who has grown up in a tradition where chivalry is male and romance a thing between men and women, there can be nothing heroic about Miss Julia's resisting stance towards heterosexual intercourse. Invaded by social standards, the "sheath" degrades, in Fanny's mind, into the case of a beetle?a repulsive image that sends her flyingfrom the emerging face of Miss Julia's lesbian orientation. Immediately, then, as for relief, she turns to a more acceptable reason forher surprise at Miss Julia'sneed of pins: she "lived, it seemed, in the cool glassy world of Bach fugues, playing to herself what she liked, and only consenting to take one or two pupils at the Archer Street College of Music" (p. 1371). Here, the potential lesbian narrative begins to turn into a meditation on social class, for which English literature provides manifold examples; soon reverting to the story about "tomboy" Miss Kingston's relationship to the wealthy Craye family (p. 1371), Fanny succeeds, at least 18
teacher poses at the beginning of the story: "Slater's pins have no points? don't you always find that?" (p. 1370). Decoding these words, we find that Miss Julia begins the story with a question about Fanny's sexual orientation. Linked by word-sound and physical shape to "penis" and sanctified by a patronymic corporate name, the association-rich pins are being used in their
codes her experiences into other pre-existing narrative forms. In her creative capacity, Fanny can be seen as a storytellerwho through the muteness of her own tradition and the sway of another is forced to "overcode" the events of her tale with a socially acceptable veneer.8 The firstof Fanny's reconstructed stories is set off by the question her
for a moment, at obscuring her interest in Miss Julia's sex life. Thus she concentrates on the "lovely things" (p. 1371) of the Craye household?things like Roman glasses, vases, and urns, which can stand in imagistically for Miss Craye's sexuality without forcing Fanny to confront, on a conscious level, the teacher's desire. For Fanny, it is easier to construct a fairy tale of spells and glassy surfaces (p. 1372) than to face the lesbian reality that lurks
acceptable narrative, forFanny consistently directs her sexual curiosity away from Miss Julia and towards the teacher's brother. Endowed not only with similar names, but with similar traits, the characters of Julia and Juliusallow for easy interchanging; and at firstFanny centers her erotic fascination on the figure of the brother. Only about Julius can it be a "seductive thought; there was something odd about Julius Craye" (p. 1372), and it is Julius, not Julia, whose sexual past Fanny at firstreconstructs. The two siblings, we know, share the same kind of "lingering, driving look" (p. 1371) and are
unconsciously beneath her narrative. If, however, Fanny wraps her interest in Miss Julia's sexuality with fairy tales of upper-class life, she cannot keep it completely quiet: like the return of the repressed, it surfaces intermittently to haunt the tales she invents. Here again, however, the heart of the matter recodes itself into a socially
Julius's heterosexual desire for the little Polly,9 and so averts her gaze from Julia's own desiring look. On the face of Julius, then, and correctly directed to a member of the opposite sex, this look is allowed to speak with romantic eloquence: on the frost "Stars,sun, moon," it seemed to say,"the daisy in the grass,fires, window pane, my heart goes out to you. But," it alwaysseemed to add, "you of both it coveredthe intensity break,you pass, you go." And simultaneously, these states of mind with "I can't reach you?I can't get at you," spoken And the starsfaded, and the child went."(p. 1372) frustratedly. wistfully, With its terms of frustrationand inaccessibility, this description could easily apply to Miss Julia's lesbian desire; indeed, Fanny's reconstruction of the dead and unseen brother must stem at least in part from the repressed ardor she senses in her teacher. But stories of poetically frustratedlove have been written forcouples like Petrarch and Laura?certainly not forlesbian pairs? so that even if Miss Julia shares her brother's passionate look, it must on her be coded in differentterms. When, then, as we have seen, Fanny transfers the look to Miss Julia's face, it speaks out in social terms, buying out of the
enclosed in the same wistful and frustratedsexual spell (p. 1372), but Fanny sculpts her visualization of these things primarily on the brother's face. Instead, then, of concentrating on the admiring and possibly lesbian rela? tionship between Miss Kingston and Julia, Fanny turns her attention to
19
This tendency to flee reality into imaginative fields of thought is nowhere so clear as at the end of the story,when Miss Julia begins to transform,before Fanny's eyes, into a kind of superhuman figureof passionate intensity."Julia Craye, sitting hunched and compact holding her flower,seemed to emerge out of the London night, seemed to flingit like a cloak behind her, it seemed, in its bareness and intensity,the effluence of her spirit, something she had made which surrounded her" (p. 1375). Surprising Miss Julia "in a moment of ecstasy" (p. 1375), Fanny stares, and once again approaches the realization of her teacher's phallic properties. In suggestive imagery,Fanny sees "the very fountain of [Miss Craye's] being spurting its pure silver drops" (p. 1375); clearly too much for her, however, the vision sends Fanny fleeing once again?only this time in pell-mell fashion?to the security of Miss Julia's reconstructed social past. In one long breathless sentence, Fanny draws the images of Miss Julia's life protectively before her gaze, and so shields herself for a moment against the electric intensity in the room (pp. 1375-76). In this, as in Fanny's other narratives, sexual perceptions lurk just beneath the
her ready-made narratives serve to shield her from the truth. If Miss Julia has never married, it is not because of lesbianism but because of the admirable political cause of independence: Miss Craye "was so thankful that she had not sacrificed her right to go and look at things when they are at their best. . .. She had not sacrificed her independence" (p. 1374). Enlisted in this self-protectingstoryis also the mythology of the archetypal old maid, for Fanny envisions heterosexual marriage not as a threat to her teacher's sexual orientation, but as a danger to her habits. "Yes, Fanny Wilmot smiled, Julia had not endangered her habits. They remained safe; and her habits would have sufferedif she had married" (p. 1374). What is significant here is not merely Fanny's invocation of Miss Julia'shabits, but her use of them as a way to avoid a painful and startling truth. In all likelihood, Miss Craye really is dogged by unshakable habits?but by enlisting them as one of Miss Craye's primary reasons for remaining single, Fanny betrays her nervousness about exploring the factors that are really at stake. Thus turning to various reconstructions of Miss Julia'spast, Fanny avoids the meaning of what is going on between the two women in the present.
For a while, then, Fanny succeeds at averting her gaze from Miss Julia's lesbianism by concentrating on Julius'spast; but stories about someone dead and never even encountered have a way of running thin, and soon enough Fanny finds herself in the middle of a narrative about the teacher's own life. Here, it should be clear, Fanny stands on dangerous ground, but once again
heterosexual narrative of romance (which cannot fita lesbian pair) and into the widely perpetrated terms of democratic social leveling: "Miss Craye wanted [to show]... that she, too, knew, like other people, about pins. Slater's pins had no points" (p. 1372).
20
surface: the traditional mythology of penny-counting spinsterhood serves to envelop the true sexual identity of the lesbian teacher. Thus Fanny sees Miss Julia "cleaving her way ever more definitely as her will stiffenedtowards her
solitary goal; travelling frugally; counting the cost and measuring out of her tight shut purse the sum needed for this journey or for that old mirror" (pp. 1375-76); but the sexual significance of the stiffeningwill and "tight shut purse" does not register in her mind. Once again, Fanny succeeds at closeting her erotic relationship to Miss Julia within the walls of socially profferedcoding. As a young girl confronting her lesbian desires for what is most likely the firsttime, Fanny is certainly bound to denial by the fear of "coming out" in a society that relentlessly ties "social stigma and self-contempt"10 to the admission of lesbianism. And yet Woolf's story concentrates surprisingly little on such fear?what seems more at stake is the story itselfand the very possibility of framing it in lesbian terms. Fanny is hindered from seeing and
telling the truth not only by the fear of its consequences but by the dearth of narrative models forlaying it out. If, afterall, as Woolf herselfpoints out, the life of a heterosexual woman "has an anonymous character which is baffling and puzzling in the extreme" and which has "run underground" in the history written by men,11 the experiences of lesbians are even more obscure, having been even less expressed and illustrated in the history of literature. For lesbians, it will be even more difficultto find a voice, for they have fewer models to follow?and in Woolf's eyes, the need for a model is paramount. "If you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Bronte, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence because women have come to to establish a have the habit of writing naturally."12How much more difficult voice for the lesbian writer,who has so little to go on, and whose tradition, where it exists (as in the case of Sappho), is obscured by a culture all too ready
to deny its sexual overtones. This lack of tradition tells visibly on Fanny and Miss Julia, in both of whom Woolf evinces the damaging effects of socially enforced brands of coding. Though she necessarily casts it in nonsexual terms, even Fanny realizes that Miss Craye has lived her life on a battlefield between desire and its fulfillment; "always engaged in outwitting the enemy" (p. 1374), Miss Julia sufferssevere consequences for her journeys to love and passion. The teacher's enemy, it seems, is none other than the social code that seeks to
confine her: leaving her house for journeys into passion, Miss Craye escapes the spinsterly closet in which tradition seeks to engulf her lesbian identity. Such forays into self-awareness, however, cannot go unpunished, and the Miss Julia with "terrible headaches" (p. 1374) that fatigue of the battle afflicts internalize guilt and reproach foracknowledging and seeking out the objects
21
of her desire. When, then, she kisses Fanny, Miss Julia ascends to a moment of full self-awareness, but the rising sun of her sexual identity is scarred into "a dead white star" (p. 1376) by the weary ravages of her past. To the very end, Woolf points our attention to the difficultiesof the lesbian's struggle out of the closet. In spite of all this, however, it is clear that Miss Julia has achieved a level of self-knowledge never attained by her pupil. "Obstinately adhering, whatever people might say,in choosing her pleasures forherself" (p. 1376), Miss Craye attempts in vain to pass her wisdom on to Fanny,who persists in misrecognizing both her own and Miss Craye's sexual orientation. Unlike Miss Julia, who often departs from the arbitrary but socially acceptable category of spin? sterhood, Fanny remains blinded by the language and traditions of her culture. For this reason, she consistently fails to grasp the meaning of Miss Craye's words: translating them into acceptable paradigms, she completely misconstrues the sexual messages that her teacher sends her. Such miscommunication echoes tirelessly throughout the story,as Fanny meditates on
Miss Craye's opening statement. "Slater's pins have no points," says Miss Craye, implying, as we have seen, that she has no need for the pointlessly phallic objects; and Fanny responds obtusely by seeking the reason that her teacher does need them: "What need had she of pins?" (p. 1371). Attempting to find the answer to this question, Fanny hypothesizes that Miss Julia wants to show that she "[knows], like other people, about pins" (p. 1372), when in
from other people by fact Miss Julia is making an assertion of difference declaring that penises have no point. Time and time again, such socially acceptable translations shield Fanny from knowledge of both herself and Miss Craye?obtusely but consistently, Fanny responds to her teacher's
lesbian overtures by searching for the phallic pin. Faced with this evidence of misrecognition, the next step is naturally to ask how normative social narratives achieve such sway that they can actually alter one's perception of self. Borrowed from the work of Louis Althusser, the term "misrecognition" suggests the function by which individuals are in? serted into an ideology that obscures "their real conditions of existence"? a function that appears under the deceiving guise of recognition and so works to naturalize the acquisition of pre-established social roles.13 According to Althusser, the (mis)recognition that guarantees the survival of the status quo operates by appealing to the individual's need to feel herself as a subject: in such a waythatit. . . "transforms" the individ? Ideology"acts"or "functions" uals into subjects... by that verypreciseoperation I have called interpellation or hailing. ... By this. . .he becomes a subject.Why? Because he has recog? nized thatthe hail was "really" addressedto him,and that"itwas really him who was hailed." (p. 174)
22
What I add to Althusser's view of this process is an emphasis on the function of pre-established social narratives?narratives that call on the individuals
in a given culture to accept (and enjoy) their sexual place. Broadly speaking, all women are "hailed" by the category of heterosexual femininity; ironically, it is in exchange for "recognizing" themselves in this role that they gain the socially accepted place that guarantees their status as "free" subjects.14 If, then, the lesbian resists the call to (mis)recognition and stands outside of her culturally constructed role, she will find herself deprived of any concrete form of social identity; without an identity,in turn, it is difficult(Althusser would say impossible)15 to feel herself as a subject. Many lesbians, it is true, doff the roles that constrict them, even maintaining a sense of subjective agency; in doing so, however, they have surmounted incredible forces. Invariably there will be others who cannot succeed at the task and forwhom subjectivity, based on a reciprocal exchange of (mis)recognition between themselves and society, will be achieved at a very damaging price. Here, perhaps, lies the key to Fanny's problems, for standing, as she does, on the dangerous precipice between an established heterosexuality and a socially negated lesbianism, she seems to have trouble asserting a subjective
space as her own. Thus she tells her story not from the point of view of firstperson subjectivity but from an often confusing third-person stance, and so comes close to the brink of losing herself among the other characters she describes. Throwing light on the problem of maintaining subjectivity from within a socially invisible identity, Fanny's loss-of-selfbecomes most pro? nounced when she approaches recognition of her lesbianism: "But whenever she spoke of Julius, or heard him mentioned, that was the firstthing that came to mind; and it was a seductive thought; there was something odd about Julius Craye" (p. 1372). Here, as we have seen, Fanny approaches recognition of Miss Julia's"oddness" through the medium of her brother,but the third-person narrative bars us fromcertainty that it is really Fanny who is making this discovery. As if to distance herself as far as possible from
dawning suspicions, Fanny here casts herself and Miss Kingston into such pronominal confusion that we cannot tell who the "she" she speaks of really is. Nor is the action itself any more lucid, for at the crucial moment of lesbian desire we are not sure onto whose breast?Miss Craye's or her own? Fanny is pinning the flower.If, then, the coding of "Slater's Pins Have No Points" is meant, as Jane Marcus interprets that of A Room of Ones Own, to show the lesbian writer "how to avoid both the censor and lugubrious selfpity at the same time,"16 it is also meant to show the tragedy of such socially constructed coding, which can force itself on the lesbian and hide her identity from self and censor alike. Thus it is that in the final climax of the story,Fanny herself, the narrator, the lesbian, disappears, and we see only Julia blazing and kindling, possessing through a passionate kiss and embrace 23
the abstract "it" to which Fanny reduces herself (p. 1376). Enveloped in heterosexual traditions of discourse, Fanny misrecognizes and drowns both her identity and that of her teacher; when she finally achieves a single kissing moment of self-awareness, she pays for it with the price of her subjectivity. To the end, as we have seen, Fanny is dogged by the long-established narratives that work to filter the image of the "aberrant" from literature; providing her with ready-made romantic narratives, society has protected itself against the threat of her self-understanding. And yet it is just this selfunderstanding that forms for Woolf the basis of art: locked into old nar? ratives and old ideals, the writer stands no chance for survival. "Had I not killed her," Woolf writes of the Angel in the House mythology,"she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing."17 Failing in the Herculean task of beating such mythologies back, the lesbian writer is too often ensconced in a stiflingnarrative closet, which filtersher words into acceptable paradigms and so bars her perception of her sexual self.
NOTES Virginia Woolf,A RoomofOnes Own (New York:HarcourtBrace Jovanovich, 1929), p. 142. 2 Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards in Leninand Philosophy an Investigation)," (New York:MonthlyReviewPress, 1971), p. 174. 3 Woolf, "Professionsfor Women," in The Norton Anthology of Literature by in English, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (New York: Women:The Tradition W. W. Norton and Company,1985), p. 1385. 4 See JaneMarcus, and "Sapphistory:The Woolf and the Well," in LesbianTexts Contexts:RadicalRevisions, ed. Karla Jayand JoanneGlasgow (New York:New York Press, 1990), pp. 164-79. University 5 Until the end ofthe nineteenth as severalrecentstudieshave pointed century, out, there existed neither the words nor the established traditionsto provide a forlesbian love. "Beforethe end of the nineteenthcentury," conceptual framework writesCatharine R. Stimpson, in "Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in 8, No. 2 (1981), "homosexuality English,"Critical Inquiry, mighthave been subsumed undersuch a termas 'masturbation'" (p. 365); in medical lexicon, George Chauncey, Jr., points out, "sexual inversion,the termused most commonlyin the nineteenth did not denote the same conceptual phenomenon as homosexuality," in century, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality:Medicine and the Changing Concep? tualizationof Female Deviance," Salmagundi, 58-59 (Fall 1982-Winter 1983), 116. See also EstherNewton,"The MythicMannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New 24 1
Woman," in The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs, ed. Estelle Freedman, et al. of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 7-25. (Chicago: University 6 Hazel V Carby, Womanhood: The Emergence oftheAfro-American Reconstructing WomanNovelist (New York:OxfordUniversity Press, 1987), p. 17.1 do not mean here to implythat lesbians and women of color experience the same specificformsof againstall oppression,but onlyto underlinethe degreeto which languagefunctions, of as an instrument exclusion. oppressedgroups, 7 Woolf,"Slater'sPins Have No Points,"in The Norton by Anthology ofLiterature in the to this storywill appear parenthetically references Women, p. 1371. Further text. 8 In "Slater'sPins Have No Points,"such misrecognition of takesthe blatantform of into terms. But subtler forms translation lesbian heterosexual Fanny's experiences most certainlyexist and probably predominate in "real life." One could ask, for Hall's insertionof lesbian love into the heterosexual example, whetherRadclyffe is not merely anotherexample ofsuch relationships paradigmof"mannish"-womanly misrecognition.For Hall, there were few other paradigmsto follow.See Newton, p. 18: "Hall's creation, Stephen Gordon, is a double symbol,standingforthe New and political and social categories,and Woman'spainfulpositionbetweentraditional to defineand assertan identity." forthe lesbian struggle 9 In this storythereare clearlynuances of both child-molestation and incest? nuances on which my argument need not dwell. I would, however,suggest an interesting paradox: while Fannyseems drawnto admirableparadigmsoftraditional models (or at least the way she constructs her realheterosexuallove, her "real-life" life models) have nothing admirable about them at all. 10 Stimpson,p. 364. 11 Woolf,"Womenand Fiction,"in The Feminist ed. Critique ofLanguage:A Reader, Deborah Cameron (New York:Routledge, 1990), p. 38. 12 Woolf,A Room ofOnes Own, p. 190. 13Althusser, is discussed the processofmisrecognition p. 162. In Althusser's essay, withinthe Marxistcontextofeconomic and religiouscontrolofthe working largely shouldnot extend to sexual ideologies as class, but I see no reasonwhythe argument us in thisdirectionwithhis discussionofthe well. Indeed, Althusserhimself gestures child's acquisition of sexuality: a subject, appointed as Beforeits birth,the child is therefore always-already in which it is familiar a subject in and bythe specific ideological configuration "expected" once it has been conceived. I hardlyneed add that this familiar and that it is is, in itsuniqueness,highlystructured, ideological configuration thatthe former in thisimplacable and moreor less "pathological". . . structure "its"place, i.e. "become" the sexual subject subject-to-bewill have to "find" (boy or girl)which it alreadyis in advance, (p. 176) 14The irony "the individualis interpellated is best expressed byAlthusserhimself, to the commandmentsof the as a (free)subject in order that he shall submitfreely accept his subjection, i.e. in orderthat he Subject, i.e. in orderthat he shall (freely) shall make the gesturesand actions of his subjection 'all by himself" (p. 182). 25
15 Here with Althusser'smodel: namely,his asser? appears one of the difficulties tion that"thereis no practiceexcept by and in an ideology"(p. 170). If"ideologyhas no outside"(p. 175), how have lesbians evermovedbeyondthe closet at all? And yet I need not accept thisdisturbing in commissioning forthispartofmyessay, Althusser in is whyso manylesbian subjectsneverdo make itout premise.What I am interested and usefulmodel. of the closet, and forthis Althusserprovidesan intriguing 16 Marcus, 168. p. 17 Woolf,"Professions forWomen,"p. 1385.
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of "Slater's and the

Susan Clements Indiana University

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