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Feminity, narrative and psychoanalysis – Juliet Michell

Woman novelist is an hysteric? Explain.

Juliet Michell tells us that narrative form like novel begins with autobiographies written
by women in the 17th century. Through these novels, these women writers were trying to create
the concept of a woman subject within a new bourgeois (of, relating to, or characteristic of the
townsman or of the social middle class) society. With the help of their stories, they were trying
to find out – what their lives to be about, who they are, what is their domestic life, their personal
relations, personal intimacies, etc. She states, “The novel is the creation by the woman of the
woman, or by subject who is in the process of becoming woman, of woman under capitalism”.
The novel is the prime example of the way women start to create themselves as social subjects
under bourgeois capitalism – create themselves as a category: women. Though they were trying
to create woman’s subjectivity through narrative, it involves element of disruption in it too as it
there are elements of autocriticism in it. To prove her point, Michell gives Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights as an example of autocriticism.
Following the line of argument pursued by Julia Kristeva, Mitchell argues that women
novelists should be approached and studied in the context of ‘the discourse of the hysteric’. The
women novelist is hysteric. ‘Hysteria is the woman’s simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the
organization of sexuality under patriarchal capitalism.’ By being hysterical, a woman can
simultaneously be feminine and refuse femininity within patriarchal discourse. That’s what
woman novelist is doing while writing stories of their own domesticity, of there own seclusion
within the home and the possibilities and impossibilities involved in such existence. Denying that
there is such a thing as female writing or a women’s voice, Michell says that the voice of the
hysteric is the woman’s masculine language talking about feminine experience. Such a voice is
both simultaneously the woman novelist’s refusal of the woman’s world and her construction
from within a masculine world of that woman’s world. As it engages is about both refusal and
construction, it has the character of bisexuality.

Using Wuthering Heights to illustrate her views, Michell says that Emily Bronte while
writing the novel is working within the terms of a phallocentric language. By using irony, she is
questioning patriarchal organization. Emily Bronte’s manuscript was stolen from her sister,
Charlotte; and it was eventually published under a male pseudonym: Ellis Bell. The author is a
woman, writing a private novel and published as a man. This fact reveals the bisexual nature of
the situation.
Analyzing the novel, Michell tries to find out who tell the story in it. Emily employs two
narrators. The first one is a man called Lockwood, and the second is a woman called Nelly Dean,
who is a nurse. Lockwood is a parody of the romantic male lover, a fashionable man from town
who loves all the things the romantic gentleman is supposed to love such as solitude, or a heart
of gold beneath a fierce exterior. These things are criticized from within the novel, particularly
through the character of Isabella who thinks that Heathcliff is a dark, romantic Gothic hero who
will prove to be the true gentleman beneath all his cruelty.

Michell claims that the story of Catherine and Heathcliff is a story of bisexuality, the
story of the hysteric. In the novel, Catherine‘s father had gone to Liverpool by promising his
daughter that he would bring a whip for her. When he came back he brought a gypsy child with
him. The child is fatherless, someone who never has had and never will have a father’s name. He
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is given the name: Heathcliff, the name of a brother of Catherine’s who had died in infancy.
When Catherine looks in her father’s pocket, she finds the whip broken. Now instead of the whip
she gets a brother/lover, that’s, Heathcliff.
Heathcliff is what Cathy wants all the rest of her life though like a traditional woman, she
chooses to marry Edgar Linton whom she cannot be fully united. Catherine dies at the birth of
her child. But the person that Catherine wants to be ‘one’ with is Heathcliff. That’s why,
breaking the incest taboo, she says, “I am Heathcliff, he’s more myself than I am.” Heathcliff
says the same of Catherine.
Here, Michell points out that each is the bisexual possibility of the other and evolving a
notion of oneness which is the reverse side of the coin of diverse heterogeneity. This type of
‘oneness’ can only come with death. After her death, Catherine haunts Heathcliff for twenty
years. Throughout the novel Heathcliff waits to get back to Catherine and with his death he
became one with Catherine. This oneness is death.
According to Michell, the choices for the woman within the novel are either to survive by
making the hysteric’s ambiguous choice into a feminity which doesn’t work ( that’s, marrying
Edgar) or to go for oneness and unity, by suffering death (walking the room as a ghost with
Heathcliff).

With this analysis of Wuthering Heights, Michell concludes that the novel arises as the
form in which women had to construct themselves as women within social structures. Due to
this, the woman novelist is necessarily the hysteric as she desires to reject the symbolic definition
of sexual difference under patriarchal law. Woman novelist cannot easily reject the sexual
difference and the hierarchy of pallocentric world. So, their writing has to involve some degree
of madness as they try to shape their subject through stories under patriarchal social order. So
writing from within can produce two types of novels: first one is the conformist type like that
Mills and Boon romantic novels; second one is that of Wuthering Heights type which looks at
the patriarchal society critically.