Writing-and Reading-the Body: Female Sexuality and Recent Feminist Fiction Author(s): Molly Hite Reviewed work(s): Source:

Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 120-142 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178007 . Accessed: 02/04/2012 11:35
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

WRITING- AND READING- THE BODY: FEMALESEXUALITY AND RECENT FEMINISTFICTION

MOLLYHITE The female body is traditionallya subject about which male authors have written with eloquence, fervor, and a certain proprietaryconfidence. With the emergenceof widespreadfeminist consciousness, a number of female authors have set out to apthis propriate body for theirown purposes,writingespeciallyfrom the standpointof the woman who experiencesherself as sexual, ratherthan from the standpointof the outsiderwho experiences the sexed woman as an objectof desire.Judgingfrom their reception by mainstream reviewers, the works produced by such For authorsare flagrantly transgressive. example,in a 1982 essay Scrutoncomplainedabouta recentspateof "gynaecological novels" characterized "anobsessionwith the biologicalfact of womanby hood"and concluded acerbically,"Theresult leads one to think that it was not only shame that led the female novelists of the and goldenage to pass over these matters."' Despitethe familiarity of even the predictability this sort of objection,however, it is not After all, obsession altogetherclear what has been transgressed. with the biologicalfact of womanhood is a common feature of literature by men, and even the existence of an unspecified of "golden age" female novelistswho kept silent aboutbodily matters is not by itself an argumentfor continuedsilence. Scrutonadmits,2and indeed the "bodi"The issue is ideological," him do so at least in partbecausethey violate that ly tracts" enrage a central tenet of the prevailingsex-gendersystem in Western societies. Such works are transgressive inasmuch as they are aggressive,assertingfemaledesirein a culturewhere femalesexualiFeminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988). ? 1988 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 121

appearing in the Times (London) Literary Supplement, Roger

r'

cC

Ewa Kuryluk, Erotic, from the Installation, Membranesof Memory, Center of Art and Communication, Buenos Aires, 1986. "My work is about images which memory projects onto fabric and which the fabric's folding transforms. It is also about photography: about the ephemeral as it is shot by the camera and imprinted on paper."
- Ewa Kuryluk

122

Molly Hite

ty is viewed as so inextricably conjoinedwith passivitythat, until feminist theoristsin the Anglo-American traditionhave recently, been reluctantto deal with the subjectat all.3To insist on woman as body within this cultureis potentiallydangerous alsopotenbut tially liberating,in that it attemptsto co-opt the identificationof women with materialityand to evade the pitfallsof an inherited dualismthat succeedsonly in reifyingmind as well as body ('You is just love me for my body!" a traditional chargeurgingthat mind and body be consideredequallyobjects desire).Impliedin this of of strategyis the old paradox the speakingstatue,the createdthing that magicallybegins to create, for when a woman writes-selfconsciouslyfrom her muted position as a woman and not as an honoraryman-about female desire,female sexuality,female sensuous experiencegenerally,her performance the effect of givhas voice to pure corporeality, turninga productof the domiof ing nant meaning-systeminto a producerof meanings.4A woman, conventionallyidentifiedwith her body, writes about that identification,and, as a consequence,femininity-silent and inert by as definition-erupts into patriarchy an impossiblediscourse. In this respect,imaginativewritingabout the female body has affinitieswith the "writing body"advocatedby such French the feminists as Luce Irigarayand H6lne Cixous, both of whom define a specifically"feminine in writing" terms of violationand transgression."Womenmust write through their bodies,"proclaims Cixousin her celebratedessay "TheLaughof the Medusa," "theymust invent the impregnable languagethat will wreck partiand tions, classes and rhetorics,regulations codes, they must subcut through,get beyondthe ultimatereserve-discourse. ," merge, .. words, somewhat mad similarly,Irigaraycalls for "contradictory from the standpointof reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-madegrids, with a fully elaboratedcode in hand."5Although both writers ultimately seem to make the subversive "feminine," product of an excessive, pluralistic the practiceof writing ratherthan the producerof such a practice,6 both invoke excess and pluralismby drawing metaphorsfrom female anatomy. Irigaray's most strikingdepiction of "feminine makes it the speech produced by the two lips of the writing" vulva.7Cixousdescribesher work as the inscriptionof menstrual ink" lactation.8 of blood, amnioticfluid, or the "white Thus, insofar
as both theorists are also exemplary practitioners of the icriture

Molly Hite

123

they call for, much of the disruptiveforce of their work derives from their bringinginto linguisticplay conventionallyrepressed aspects of woman'ssexuality. If some of the subversivepower of the Frenchfeminists' "writing the body"stems from the fact that it is writing aboutthe body, writing that takes the female body as somethingto be examined and interpreted,the subversionoccurs because examinationand interpretation imply a concomitantdecomposition.In this sense, to write the body involves acknowledging that female sexualityas in both high and low cultureis an inventionof patriarrepresented chy, resultingfrom a process of making meanings that excludes women themselves. The female body thus becomes a text that must be read in order to be dismantledand reassembledby an emergentfemaleaesthetic,and a readingof the body disclosesthat women'sexperiencesmust exceed, even when they are not completely in conflictwith, the culturalconstruction.Sexualityis not the same as being sexy, desire is not the same as being desirable, and what women want is not entirelyreducibleto what men want in women. In dealingwith the femalebody froma feministperspective,fiction writers can also read this body as a social construct and thereforeneed not presumean appealto a "real" basisof femaleexperience prior to and unsullied by discursive practice.9Instead, such writers are in a position to emphasize the contradictions within the construct,contradictions acute that they may well so make it impossiblefor anyone to be the sexed woman of conventional representation, because this woman is depicted as exnot women do not but because periencingherself in ways that "real" she is not depictedas experiencinganythingat all. Conceivedas essentiallythe Otherto male subjectivity,she is so purely an object that she eludes even imaginativeidentification. The followingdiscussionaccordingly beginsfrom a depictionof heterosexual intercourse that is perhaps a limiting case for masculinistclaimsaboutfemale"nature" generally,the famousRojack and Ruta scene in NormanMailer's1965 novel An American Dream.'oIt goes on to consider ways in which the patriarchally constructedfemale body revealedso explicitlyin Mailer's fictional universeis takenapartand exposedto scrutinyin the narratives of four majorfeminist novelists:Alice Walker,Doris Lessing,MoniAtwood.These writersall identifythemque Wittig,and Margaret

124

Molly Hite

selves with feminisms of one sort or another." Furthermore, as feminists all are directly concerned with the manner in which female sexualityis representedin mainstreamdiscoursesranging from advertisingto pornographyto what is commonly styled "serious" literature,and all use their fiction to criticize,ridicule, or otherwise challenge the presuppositionsencoded in parody, such discourses.

As JudithFetterleyhas pointedout, in An American Dream"there is no suggestionthat women are people;they are utterlyOTHER, the Enemy, that against which 'you' define 'yourself."'2 is It Mailer's that the male viewpointis universal precisely assumption ironic"you," borrowedfrom an un-ironiccommentary (Fetterley's on the novel by Fredric Jameson,refersto the reader,any reader) that allows him to regardwomen as completelyalien and yet to claim to be an experton female sexual desire.ForMailer,women are creatures theiranatomy,"onestep closerto eternity" of because of their ability to reproduce, but they are also imprisoned in biologicaldestinyby virtueof havingtaken (orhavingbeen taken) this "one step."'3They are thus both wholly known-because wholly defined-and wholly mysterious,because it is impossible to imaginebeing so purelya productof biology.They are defined, of course, by male projection,inasmuch as they are what men want them to be, but by the same token they are inconceivableas subjects, inasmuch as they possess only those wants and needs that answer to male demands.The point is clarifiedbrilliantlyin the early episode where the narrator protagonist and StephenRohis wife, enters the room of her Gerjack, havingjust strangled man maid, Ruta,with whom he has, alternately, vaginaland anal intercourse.
There was a high private pleasure in plugging a Nazi, there was something clean despite all-I felt as if I were gliding in the clear air above Luther's jakes and she was loose and free, very loose and very free, as if this were finally her natural act: a host of the Devil's best gifts were coming to me, mendacity, guile, a fine-edged cupidity for the stroke which steals, the wit to trick authority. I felt like a thief, a great thief. And like a thief returning to church, I seesawed up from that bank of pleasures up to her deserted warehouse, that empty tomb ...

Molly Hite

125

So that was how I finally made love to her, a minute for one, a minute for the other, a raid on the Devil and a trip back to the Lord, I was like a hound who has broken free of the pack and is going to get that fox himself, I was drunk with my choice, she was becoming mine as no woman ever had, she wanted no more than to be part of my will, her face, that mobile, mocking know-thecost-of-every-bargain Berlin face, was loose and independent of her now, swimming through expressions, a greedy mate with the taste of power in her eyes and her mouth, that woman's look that the world is theirs, and then I was traveling up again that crucial few centimeters of distance from the end to the beginning, I was again in the place where the child is made.... 14

In this passage,as throughoutthe story, sex is depictedentirely in terms of mastery.The woman whom Rojackis "plugging" (the term also commonlymeans shootingsomeone dead)is, of course, of a a servant,and furthermore representative a conquerednation. Rojackhas alreadybeen establishedas a war hero obsessed with her the memory of killingfour Germansoldiers;by designating a no ... Ja, don'tstop,ja,"she accedes, althoughshe is "Nazi" ("no, too young for the epithetto have morethan symbolicapplication), Her he gives a sort of moralfillip to her degradation. name, Ruta both the stateof rut, the Germanwith the bestial,suggesting aligns or heat, and the swinelike activity of rooting to which she is metaphorically subjected.Her pleasure,insofaras it figuresat all for here, is a function of being thus "rooted," by an inversionthat to Mailerrecognizesbut prefersto regardas paradoxical the point as of mysticismshe acquires"thetaste of power" a consequenceof being overpowered:"shewas becoming mine as no woman ever had, she wanted no more than to be a partof my will,"but in thus succumbing she takes on "thatwoman's look that the world is theirs ... ."Wantingis thus reduced completelyto beingwanted, and when at the conclusionof the long description,in which she functions as receptacleand mirror,she speaks, it is as if she has been poked into discourse. What emerges is her master'svoice. "Mr.Rojack... I do not know why you have troublewith your wife. You are absolutelya genius, Mr. Rojack."15 As a character Rutais "developed" primarily synecdoche,the by of speech in which a part stands for the whole. What she figure most evidently consists of in this passage is two orifices, which constitutethe sum totalof her sexuality(othergenitalareasare not mentioned)and thus the referencepoints of her identity, in Roto jack'sview. But if she is reducedsynecdochically a pairof holes,

126

Molly Hite

the holes themselves are expandedmetaphorically chambers into that contain social and antisocial forces, respectively chapel, church, warehouse, and tomb as opposed to jakes (toilet),hell, and pirate's hoard- and are settingsfor a dramaof societalprohibition and individualtransgression which the penis plays the role in of trickster-hero. bouncing back and forth between the two In openings,Rojackdisplayshis masteryin the sense of skill (in this sense Ruta's is "youareabsolutelya genius,Mr. Rojack" simplyadof but miring,audienceappreciation a virtuosoperformance), the Prometheanresonances in his account derive from a sleight of hand on Mailer's thatplacesfemaleand male desirein opposipart tion while at the same time makingfemale desirethe complement of male desire.The vaginais associatedwith the law, convention, decidesinitiallyto ejaculatethere at the same time society (Rojack as he decides to turn himself in to the police for his wife's Dreamare the real forces behind all such institutions.In contrast, the anus is alignedwith the forbidden("Verboten!" criesbut of Ruta courseis overruled), Satanic,the rebellious,and thus with the the source of individual-which is to say male-power. Because the vagina is preeminently"wherethe child is made,"it follows that what women want most of all in sexualrelationsis to have babies, not in order to entrap the man (the question never arises) but because they derive an unspecifiedsense of power from the act. Yet even within the fiction it is the man who is arousedby the possibilityof conception,both in this scene and in a laterone with the evocatively named "good" woman of the novel, Cherry, in which Rojack unableto reachorgasmuntilhe has pulledout her is diaphragm.In Mailer'suniverse it seems that what women are what men want to give continuallydemandingis serendipitously them, even if the demandis unsupported reasons.Laterstill in by the story, Ruta, revealed as the mistress of a rich and powerful man whom she is intent on marrying,accuses Rojack,'"You halfto make me a baby ... and then you didn't.That is a promised very little thing, but it does not create undying loyalty in a woman."16 There is no speculationabout what someone in her situationwould do with Rojack's anyone's)baby if she had it, (or and her referenceto "awoman" suggeststhat any such speculation is beside the point. Likeher ecstasy in being "plugged," desire her for his baby needs no explanationor justification."Awoman"is just like that.'7
murder)-and with women, who in the world of An American

Molly Hite

127

Withinthe logicof AnAmerican Dream,femaledesirecan be understood only in terms of male projectionbecause the male point of view is assumed. The self-absorption a perspectivethat finds of women passive, masochistic,and ultimatelymysteriousbecomes obviousonly with the introduction a femalepointof view, which of masculinist aboutwomen'ssexualityincomprehends assumptions asmuch as it is the view from underneath,both literally and In to to figuratively. contrast Ruta,whose submission Rojack's "high in plugginga Nazi"is the definitionof her own privatepleasure of The pleasure,the narrator Alice Walker's ColorPurple,Celie, is witness to her own degradation gives her own accountof it to and the first personwilling to hear, the other woman in her marriage, ShugAvery.
What is it like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I pretend I ain'tthere. He never know the difference. Never ast me how I feel, nothing. Just do his business, get off, go to sleep. She start to laugh. Do his business, she say. Do his business. Why, Miss Celie. You make it sound like he going to the toilet on you. That what it feel like, I say.'8

LikeRojack,Celie'shusbandMr. use (Walker's strategic of the blank, with its connotations of exaggerated respect, forced anonymity, and suppressed speech, is reminiscentof the treatment of anotherdominantmale in anotherepistolary novel of sexin Samuel Richardson's ual victimization,Squire B_ Pamela) The difperforms his sexual act intent on his own "business." ference is that althoughRuta'sresponse was assumed, Celie has her own voice, not incidentally a voice that speaks from the and marginsof the dominanttraditionof narration,19 the effect of her testimonyis to subvertpreciselythe assumptionsimbeddedin Mailer'sdescription.Male enjoymentdoes not guaranteefemale response;from a detachedperspective,the male orgasmis rather like having someone go to the bathroomon you; the bare facts of physiology prompt a devastatinganalogy that sobers Shug and leads her into a discussionof female anatomy.
You never enjoy it at all? she ast, puzzle. Not even with your children daddy? Never, I say. Why Miss Celie, she say, you still a virgin. What?I ast.
Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button that gits real

128

Molly Hite

hot when you do you know what with somebody. It git hotter and hotter and then it melt. That the good part. But other parts good too, she say. Lot of sucking go on, here and there, she say. Lot of finger and tongue work. Button? Finger and tongue? My face hot enough to melt itself.20

In communicating this apparentlyobvious information,Shug initiates a process of redefinitionthat is the centraltendency of the novel. She begins by replacingconventionalterminologyfor the female genitals, shifting the emphasis from a hole that requires pluggingto a buttonthat gets hot and finallymelts- a mixedmetaphor from the point of view of mainstreamdiscursivepractice, which of course has only recently begun to acknowledgethe existence of buttonsthat behave in this way. The consequenceis immediatelyclearto Celie:if the importantorganis not a hole but a button,stimulationcan come from such androgynous appendages as finger and tongue, and intercourseis not only insufficientbut unnecessaryfor female sexual pleasure.Shug'sredefinitionof the word "virgin" equally threateningto patriarchalcontrol over is women'sbodies, in that it places prioritynot on penetration,and thus on the social mechanism for guaranteeingownership of children,but on enjoyment,making the woman'sown response the indexof her "experience." These redefinitions, emergingfroma discussionbetween women, suggestthat when the hithertovoiceless begin to speak, meaningsnecessarilychange. From the beginning,Celie'sis an inherentlysubversivevoice. The first words in The ColorPurpleacknowledgeits threat, "You but better nevertellnobody God.It'dkillyourmammy,"21 the not and letters record what happens when Celie disobeys this ensuing paternalinjunction,which stigmatizesespeciallycommunication between women as death-dealing.Her disobedience takes the form of a "telling" among women that eventually recreatesthe world by reassigning meaning. As Celie discovers her voice, is patriarchal authority renamedout of existence.The rapistfather is revealed as only a stepfather,and thus Celie's children are redeemed from the stain of incest; God is transformedfrom a white male authorityto a colorless,sexless (or multicolored,omis transmuted nisexual) Everything;and the tyrannicalMr._ Celie'scurseinto a littleman given to collectingshells and through sewing and called merely Albert.22
In reconstruing the language, women restructure their relation to society. "Looklike you done got yourself in trouble," remarks

Molly Hite

129

to the unmarried,hugely pregnantSofia, but she only Mr._ Celie's responds,"Nawsuh ... I ain'tin no trouble.Big, though." discoveryof her own sexualitycoincides with her discoveryof a I to sexualdiscoursepreviouslyrestricted men:"Shug, say to her in mind, Girl, you looks like a real good time, the Good Lord my knows you do."In the developmentof the narrative,Celie, along with the appositelynamed Squeak,acquiresa voice and becomes all a producerof meanings,while Shugand Sofia,articulate along, and approveduntil it is evident that are increasinglyunderstood female voices are privilegedin this fictionalworld;they have the power and authorityto topple a social structureoppressingboth sexes and to createa new orderin which timeworntheoriesabout female and male natures vanish because they are useless for the describing qualitiesof people. Nearthe conclusion,Alberttries for to explainhis admiration Shug:"totell the truth,Shugact more manly than most men. I mean she upright, honest. Speak her mind and the devil take the hindmost...." But Celie immediately not takes issue with his categories: "Harpo like this, I tell him. You not like this. What Shug got is womanly it seem to me. Specially since she and Sofiathe ones got it."Albertcontinuesto worry the of problem,which has all the earmarks one of the old patriarchal
paradoxes-"Sofia and Shug not like men .
. . women either" until Celie makes the relevant distinction:"You mean they not like you or me.'23 On the basis of such redrawn itself, in the manlines, the entireimmediatesociety reconstitutes ner of classic comedy, around a central couple-a couple, however, neither young nor heterosexual.The entire metamorin phosis is to a degreeprefigured the earlyaccountof a victimization in which the act of intendingand the state of beingintended24 are so offhandedlyconfusedthat the effect is a ruthlessparodyof the ways in which men constructwomen's experience.

but they not like

want another look Pa call me. Celie, he say. Like it wasn't nothing. Mr._ at you. I go stand in the door. The sun shine in my eyes. He's still up on his horse. He look me up and down. Pa rattle his newspaper. Move up, he won't bite, he say. I go closer to the steps, but not too close cause I'm a little scared of his horse. Turn round, Pa say. I turn round. One of my little brothers come up. I think it was Lucious. He fat and playful, all the time munching on something.

130

Molly Hite

He say, What you doing that for? Pa say, Your sister thinking bout marriage.25

Becausethe voice relatingthis episode is Celie's,the assumption that female interiorityis constitutedby male projection-that the condition of beingevaluatedcan be expressed as "thinking bout marriage"is exposedfromthe outset as ludicrous.The society in which Celie finds herself is brutaland unjust,but it is also in imminent dangerof disintegrating underthe pressureof its own contradictions. The same contradictions become glaringlyapparentin fiction can that shows, conversely, how women try to conform to expectations, the strategiesthey use in the attemptto turn into objects, pure exteriority,the Other to male agency and subjectivity.The fact that strategies requiredat all belies the notionthatwomen are are "naturally" of these things;the fact that the strategiesare any elaborateand all-pervading can implies that the internalization never be complete.Constructing oneselffor the male gazerequires one to be at least as much artistas artifact.It is the passageof time, however, that undoes the construction decisivelyand revealsit as not only insufficientbut absurd.In Doris Lessing's novel TheSummerBeforethe Dark the protagonist,Kate Brown, discoversthat her own aging process has subvertedthe aspects of her physical most her identitythat she has assumedto be most characteristic, them as elementsin a banalsign system that exists own, exposing male responses. entirelyfor the purposeof elicitingprogrammed
Long ago, a young girl lay on her back in a bed, with a hand mirror held close to her face, and she was thinking: That is what he is going to see. What he very shortly did see was a face that could only be described as "elfin"or "piquant,"despite eyes of a depth of brown that could not be anything else but a spaniel's. For many years Kate, who spent the requisite amount of time in front of many different mirrors, had been able to see exactly what he was seeing, when his face was close above hers. Oh it was so wearying, so humiliating. . . . For the whole of her life, or since she was sixteen - yes, the girl making love to her own face had been that age - she had looked into mirrors and seen what other people would judge her by. And now the image had rolled itself up and thrown itself into a corner, leaving behind the face of a sick monkey.

The face that "could only be described" by romance novel or fashion magazine diminutives-"elfin," "piquant"-is outgrowing

Molly Hite

131

the discoursethat created it. Kate'srecent, ironic comparisonof her eyes to those of a spaniel suggestsher developingawareness that the self-imageshe has cherishedand tended over the years is functions chiefly valued for reasonsof utility,thather "femininity" to signal her willingness to minister to the needs of primarily others with doglike devotion. The recognitiongives fuel to her suspicion that even the most intimate elements of her selfdefinitionhave been dictatedby a consumerculture.If her clothes constitutea sort of ready-to-wear language,declaringthat she is Madame or, as the narratorsummarizes dryly, "a pretty, Jolie it healthy,serviceablewoman," is equallytrue that her languageis as conventionaland as mass-produced her clothing."The as things she said, and a great many of the things she thought, had been
taken down off a rack and put on. ... have been directedtowardmakingher a consumerobjectthatwill attract,please, and depreciateas little as possiblewith the passage of time.
The maternal feelings of a woman are aroused, they say, by a certain poignant curve of the baby's head. .. . A goose just out of its egg follows a shape or a sound and is imprinted ever after by "Mother."... A famous African hunter describes how, when hunting, he kept the shape of the duiker or deer somewhere behind his eyes, and this inner print fitted over the camouflaged beasts that were so hard to see among their patterns of light and shade: but in this way he did see them easily. A woman walking in a sagging dress, with a heavy walk, and her hair -this above all - not conforming to the prints made by fashion, is not "set"to attract men's sex. The same woman in a dress cut in this or that way, walking with her inner thermostat set just so-and click, she's fitting the pattern. Men's attention is stimulated by signals no more complicated than what leads the gosling; and for all her adult life, her sexual life, let's say from twelve onwards, she had been conforming, twitching like a puppet to those strings. .. .26

."And all these "statements"

Sudden and ravaging illness has transformed Kate from a to no woman who "fitsthe pattern" a neuterbeing who attracts attention at all because she triggersno reflex in the surrounding male culture. The knowledge that the work of her life has amounted to shapingherself to the dimensions of a male "inner is that print" "sowearying,so humiliating"' initiallyshe is unableto contemplate anything further than the collapse of her image, which has always been for her the sole index of possibility.For a
woman in Kate'sposition, however, weariness and humiliation are revolutionary sentiments, and they allow Kate for the first time to

132

Molly Hite

at look beyondthe reflectionof male approval, the societythathas her since puberty in her looking glass. In this novel, imprisoned aging in women functions as a denunciation,an improperdiscourse, because there is no place for it. As an old woman, Kateis invisibleeven to her own neighbors,and her discoveryof this fact is unexpectedlyfreeing, precipitatingan actual denunciationin which she shocks a West End audience by making exasperated, comments on the self-delusionof the charactersin "outrageous" the play she is watchingand the self-delusionof an audiencethat supposes it is viewing a depictionof "peoplelike oneself in their rather than a reflection of its own recognisablepredicaments" was a farceand not at all a high-classand cherishedprejudices."It sensitive comedy filled with truthsabout human nature.The fact was that the thingshappeningin the world, the collapseof everything,was tuggingat the shapeof events in this play and those like them, and making them farcical.A joke. Like her own life. FarIn cical."27 learningto see beyondher own mirrorto the worldthis mirroronly partiallyand duplicitously gives back, she has learned to distrustall the images purveyedby her culture. If self-delusion a societalnorm,Lessingsuggests,it has a fixed is term, at least in women. Old age lies in wait like a lurkingreality, behind the glossy image.In the recent "theface of a sick monkey" a GoodNeighbour, and image are juxtaposedin the Diary of age and characters Maudie,a poverty-stricken perpetually of outraged narrator who is over ninety yearsold, andJanna,Lessing's woman and authorialpersona,the editorof a woman'smagazinethat as a matter of policy does not acknowledge the existence of old women. In the courseof the narrative, Jannais deflectedmoreand morefromthe arduousbusinessof tendingandpreserving own her flesh and drawn into the secret truth that Maudiemiddle-aged quite literally embodies, discovering how age insists on the of previouslyunmentionable activitiesand forces a conprimacy of corporeality the surface. to ventionallyrepressedlanguage
And I see that I did not write down, in Janna's day, about going to the loo, a quick pee here, a quick shit, washing one's hands ... All this day this animal has to empty herself, you have to brush your hair, wash your hands, bathe. I dash a cup under the tap and rinse out a pair of pants, it all takes a few minutes . .. But that is because I'm "young,"only forty-nine.... What makes poor Maudie labour and groan all through her day, the drudge and drag of maintenance. I was going to say, For me it is nothing; but the fact is,

Molly Hite

133

once I did have my real proper baths every night, once every Sunday night I maintained and polished my beautiful perfect clothes, maintained and polished me, and now I don't, I can't. It is too much for me.28

Maintenanceis clearlyessentialto imagebut not partof it; it is hesitantattemptto catalogsome of not supposedto show. Janna's the ordinarydetails of her daily existence is somewhat shocking, not because anyone supposedwomen did not reallytake a quick pee or shit, but because woman'sbody in patriarchal representation consists of certain parts and functions and not others. If woman in mainstreamwritingis her body, this body is primarily for men. For this reason even the account of a young woman's societally conditionedattitude toward her normal physical processes can be subversive,as in AnnaWulfs famousmeditationon her menstrualperiodin TheGolden Notebook (1962):"AmI smellIt is the only smell I know of that I dislike. I don'tmind my ing? own immediatelavatorysmells;I like the smell of sex, of sweat, or skin, or hair. But the faintly dubious, essentially stale smell of menstrual blood I hate. And resent. It is a smell that I feel as strange even to me, an imposition from outside.""29 Despite the fact that Anna here manifests a socially sanctionedrepugnance towardthe odor of her own menstrualblood, the very mentionof menstruationviolates an aesthetic prohibition,as Anna herself recognizeswhen she prefacesher observations,"Iam thinking,I Menstruarealise,abouta majorproblemof literarystyle, of tact." in eitheridealizedor earthilyerotic tion does not ordinarily figure descriptionsof the female body; it is one aspect of women's sexuality of no immediateinterest to men.30Moreover,it is one of several processes mentioned in this passage that involve something coming out of an orifice, and thus it contributesto the impressionthat these orificesare not only, or even primarily, points of entry. In depicting Rojack'sencounter with Ruta, Mailer female holes into various kinds of enclosure ofmetamorphosed fering various kinds of rewardsto the picaresquepenis, but the fundamentalcharacteristic these holes remainedtheir emptiof The ness, their receptivity to being "plugged." synecdoche that made Rutaessentiallyhole, somethingin which to root, is a common one, a slightlygrosserversionof the tropethat makeswomen preeminentlyvessels or containers: fragile,static,open, waitingto
be filled with everything from semen to language. Representations of menstruation, urination, defecation, and giving birth change the

134

Molly Hite

implicationsof the synecdocheby grantingorificesanotherfuncor tion, one associatingthem with superabundance excess rather than lack or need of fulfillment.

Because figures of speech like those identifyingwomen with receptacles have a tendency to harden into essentialdefinitionsof "thefeminine," coherenceatwritingthat disruptstheir rhetorical tacks one of the main ways in which patriarchy refashionsfemale In to corporeality its own specifications. the concludingsection of her utopian narrativeLes Guerillares, French,feminist writer the extendsthe familiarconceitwell past the breakMoniqueWittig31 ing point to expose its inadequacy.
The vessels are upright, the vessels have acquired legs. The sacred vessels are on the move. ... They move slowly at first then faster and faster, these vessels buried up to the neck and receptacles of the most diverse objects, human spermatozoa coins flowers earth-messages. It must be asked, why these excesses? Must they not hold violence in abhorrence? Is not their structure fragile and will they not shatter at the first onslaught if they are not already in pieces from collision with each other?32

If women are indeed "sacred vessels,""buried to the neck"in up their dependence and passivity, fragile and liable to shatter on contact, it should be impossiblefor them to acquire legs, move, mixedas the one in TheColor fight.The metaphoris as intolerably Purplein which a buttongets hot and melts, and in both cases the failure of rhetoricsuggeststhat patriarchal languagecannot fully the containand controlthe female body. ForWittig,furthermore, of metaphorsis partof a comprehensivestrategy judiciousmixing aimed at counteringthe inclinationof the literarymainstreamto of take tropes for truth. Claimingto write in the "lacunae" established discourse,fillingin its gapsand pointingout its internalconconventionalsymbols she tradictions,33 also likes to appropriate resonancesby placingthem in and to exploit their unauthorized the context of alternativemythologies.Thus the female breast, another part of the body that frequentlystands synecdochically for female nature, connotes neither nurturancenor vulnerability in Les Gu6rillares. When "thewomen"who are the collectiveprowork baretheirbreasts,it is an tagonistof this highlyexperimental
aggressive gesture and precedes a wholesale massacre of the male

Molly Hite

135

In enemy.34 a laterand perhapseven more utopianfiction,Lesbian

Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary, Wittig provides a revisionist

myth of origin for the many breastsof the statue of Artemis,or the Diana, located in Ephesus,and this myth transforms goddess from a fertilityfigure into a warriortotem. "Amazons habitually their removed right breast to the temple, from which brought comes the famous statue of Artemiswith multiplebreasts."35 The new explanatory structure inverts the usual implications of segmentingthe female body. The amazons'literal self-mutilation counters the symbolic truncation reducing women to sex, to genitals,to breasts.The functionof the statuechanges;ratherthan showingwhat is essentialaboutwomen, it becomesthe resolution of a story or the answer to a question about what became of revisedversion,the absenceratherthan the something.In Wittig's of breastsbecomes the defining feature. presence A much more popular and apparently conventional novel, also Atwood's LadyOracle proposesthe statueat Ephesus Margaret as a paradigmof the patriarchally controlledfemale body, but Atwood'sreadingat least initiallyattemptsthe less radicalprojectof demystifyingand dismissing,ratherthan rewriting,this body. At this point in the story, demystificationand dismissalare crucial and gesturesfor the protagonist narrator Joan Foster,for Joanhas created a number of discrete identities in attemptingto accommodateherselfto a numberof conflictingversionsof the feminine ideal, only to discoverthat no matterhow many women she succeeds in being she never satisfiesanyone'sdemands.Her confrontation with the statue is accordinglya turningpoint.
She had a serene face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. She was draped in breasts from neck to ankle, as though afflicted with a case of yaws: little breasts at the top and bottom, big ones around the middle. The nipples were equipped with spouts, but several of the breasts were out of order. I stood licking my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly. Once I would have seen her as an image of myself, but not any more. My ability to give was limited. I was not inexhaustible. I was not serene, not really. I wanted things for myself.36

The seriesof judgmentsby which Joandetachesherself-"My ability to give was limited. I was not inexhaustible.I was not serene.
. . I wanted things for myself'-follows from a description that uses domestic analogies to devalue the domestic virtues the god-

136

Molly Hite

dess is usually presumedto celebrate.To give, nourish,and sustain in these deromanticized terms is simply to be edible, with "a like a mound of grapes"; to be a mechanismfor or body shaped with spouts,moreor less in workingorder.And nurture,equipped such blatantand excessive femininitypromptsa comparisonthat in is alignsfecunditywith pathology.The body "draped breasts" "as though afflictedwith a case of yaws."It appearsthat sustenance can be overdone;Diana is far too much of a good thing. But this image of superabundant femininityalso resonatesinsidiously with other images in the novel to suggest that when a definesthe goodthing,goodnessis ultimately function patriarchy of limits. Too much of a good thing may be the worst thing of all from the perspectiveof a value system that aims above all to conof trol manifestations the feminine.In orderto be product,object, or fetish, women must remainwithin boundariesordainedfrom outside, constrictedto the dimensionsthat the dominantculture deems appropriate devices rangingfrom exemplarsto definiby tions to corsets. If this culture aligns the feminine with nature, spontaneity and contingency, it also aims to regulate these so characteristics that they stay within manageabledimensions. For a woman to possess them in excess is as dangerous to masculinist assumptions as for her not to possess them at all. Because the female body is the symbolic equivalent of such "feminine" qualities,excess of body is most frequentlyconstrued as the outwardand visible sign of a worldout of control,and it insinuates as well that what a woman actuallyis goes beyond the prescribedformulasto include a subjectivitythat is not the same as being thoughtof, a desirethat is not the same as beingdesired. This may be why the pregnantwoman can inspiresuch misogyny, for despiteher conformityto the maternaldefinitionshe is too obviously a being with insides, too clearlyoccupiedwith generating more materiality, much there."NowI'mgoingto be all mentaltoo in birth," accuses Len, a characterin Atwood'sfirst ly tangledup Gestation.Don'tyou realize novel TheEdibleWoman. "Fecundity. what that will do to me? It'sobscene, thathorrible,oozy.. ."-and the ellipsispoints echo his convictionthat he has finallyventured into the realm of the inexpressible."3 An even morethreatening figureis the fat lady,the embodiment of woman'sinsidioustendency to occupy more than her allotted space and the subject of a number of importantmeditationsin

Molly Hite

137

where fat is at once a metaphorfor femalepower and LadyOracle, for female powerlessness.38Like the goddess with multiple breasts,the fat lady is both an inadequatemodel of femalereality, in that she is victimizedby (as Joan puts it, "obliterated" her by) of demandsthat physicality,and such an exaggeration patriarchal she serves to throw all such demandsinto question.The novel explores this dialecticof constrictionand dilation,reductionand inflation,in the processassuminga formthat, like the fat lady's,has been called excessive and undisciplined.39 Overweight as a child, Joan continues to be haunted by the the specterof too much flesh and is visitedthroughout storyby vifemale bodies-ghostly images of her motherand sions of "other" whore and Mediterranean aunt, fantasiesof herselfas Felliniesque "creature housewife, the prospectof a reconstituted composedof all the flesh that used to be mine"rising up to engulf her,40and of especiallythe apparition a circusFatLady- more or less closely associatedwith the fat-girlidentityshe has officiallyshed. Clearly these visitants representaspects of Joan that exceed the societal roles to which she is tryingto conform.It is less clear, however, thatthey are merelyJoan's The imaginingsor projections. shadeof her mother,for instance,arrivesto announceher own death long before that death is discovered,and the Fat Lady seems to gain autonomyas the storydevelops,at one point emergingunheralded and unanticipated the middleof that Canadian in nationalritualof male bonding,a hockey game. If unauthorized subvertsJoan's fat accommodation various societal definitionsof the feminine, it to also subverts the novel's accommodationsto the confines of a single genre. For LadyOracleis at once a realisticfiction, representingthe limits placed on women in contemporary society and concerned with the function of the gothic novel in particularly providingan outlet for female desire, and a gothicnovel itself, in which the workingsand creaturesof female desire are at least as real as social institutions. The situationis furthercomplicatedby the fact thatJoanherself is a writer, or two different kinds of writer in two concurrent, mutually exclusive identities.Using the name of a fat and loving fictions of female desire that aunt, she writes "costumegothics," allow her to act out fantasiesin which she transforms menacingor
contemptuous men into romantic supporters of her courage and independence.41 Under her own name she writes a long poem,

138

Molly Hite

also titled Lady Oracle, described by variously horrified and delightedmale charactersas "across between KahlilGibranand Rod McKuen"42 -another instance,it turns out, of goingtoo far in to satisfy demands, in that she becomes a threat:too suctrying she cessful, too popular,too much what is required.Furthermore, is a writer of the spontaneous and largely unconscious variety-she composes the "costumegothics"by touch-typingat top speed with her eyes closed and shapes the epic poem Lady Oraclefrom a series of experimentswith automaticwriting-and thus in many ways she parodicallyembodiespreciselythe threat of &criture whose transgressions Hel6neCixouscelebrates feminine, "Her femalemultiplicity. as an encroaching languagedoes not conit it carries; does not retain,it makespossible.When id is amtain, biguously uttered-the wonder of being several-she doesn'tdefend herselfagainstthose unknown women whom she'ssurprised at becoming,but derives pleasurefrom this gift of alterability."43 Evadingreductionto a single self at the end of LadyOracle, Joan definesherselfinsteadas "anartist,an escape artist," proceeds and conto escape even the identityconstitutedby her own narrative, that she did not tell the male reporterwho turns out to fessing have mediated her entire story "anylies. Well, not very many. Some of the names and a few other things, but nothingmajor."44 of This emphasis on the triviality the lies, occurringas it does within an oddly indeterminateconclusion, suggests that on the ought to be read as still anotherfabrication, contrarythe "story" another identity constructed as a bid for male approval and infinite variety. neither definitivenor exhaustiveof the narrator's in If LadyOracleseems the ironicfulfillmentof ecriture feminine its celebrationsof multiplicityand its overflowingof genre boundariesand evasionsof closure,it is excessivebecauseit systematically underminesthose masculinistconventionsthat render the The femalebody paradoxical. exampleof the FatLadyimpliesthat women are not uncontrolledor uncontainedin some absoluteor essentialsense but only in relationto societalprohibitions.In the same way, feministdepictionsof women as sexual,as embodied, are exorbitant only insofaras they violatecriteriaof verisimilitude and decorum imposed entirely from outside-by a dominant for culturethatassumesfemalealterityas a precondition represenwriter and "the"reader as male. In the tation, positing both "the" context of such a culture, any writing that begins from a female

Molly Hite

139

perspectivein attemptingto articulatea woman'sexperienceas a body necessarilyexposesmany of the conventionsthroughwhich this body has been created and maintainedas a discursiveconstruct. For the feminist fiction writersunder discussionhere, the the project of "writing body"implies a critique of this construct that reveals its ultimateimpossibility.

NOTES
1. Roger Scruton, "Bodily Tracts," the Times (London) LiterarySupplement, 23 July 1982, 807. 2. Ibid. 3. Ann Snitow's "The Front Line: Notes on Sex in Novels by Women, 1969-1979" (Signs 5 [Autumn 1980]: 702-18) is an important early document in the Anglo-American feminist discussion of sexuality. With the widespread distribution of "French feminist" writing, the female body has become the site of the dispute about the issue of difference. Two anthologies dealing with what a Signs forum (Signs 10 [Autumn 1984]: 106-135) termed the "Feminist Sexuality Debate" are Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); and Pleasure and Danger: ExploringFemale Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). See also Christine Froula's excellent treatment of the subject, "The Daughter's Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History," Signs 11 (Summer 1986): 621-44, and The Female Body in Western Culture:Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). 4. For a brilliant discussion of a patriarchal text "that dramatizes with unusual clarity the disjunction between the speaking (male) subject and the spoken (female) subject" (p. 327), in which men literally inscribe an account of feminine desire on the female body, see Kaja Silverman, "Histoired'O: The Construction of a Female Subject," in Pleasure and Danger, 320-49. 5. H6lne Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in New French Feminisms:An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 256; Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 29. 6. Mary Jacobus suggests that inasmuch as 6criture feminine insists "on woman as a writing-effect instead of an origin" it is less an essentialist position than one that reaches "for the conditions of representability." See her "Is There a Woman in This Text?"New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982): 117-41. The reading that sees "feminine writing" as something producing the difference specified as femininity is certainly consonant with, for example, Cixous's catalog of male "feminine" writers. Certain feminist theorists are more dubious about the possibilities for essentialism in French feminism. See especially Beverly Brown and Parveen Adams, "TheFeminine Body and Feminist Politics," m/f, no. 3 (1979): 35-50; H~61ne Vivienne Wenzel, "The Text as Body/Politics: An Appreciation of Monique Wittig's Writings in Context," Feminist Studies 7 (Summer 1981): 264-87; and Diane Griffin Crowder, "Amazons and Mothers? Monique Wittig, H1~lne Cixous, and Theories of Women's Writing," Contemporary Literature 24 (Summer 1983): 117-44. Monique Wittig, although often grouped with

140

Molly Hite

Cixous and Irigaray as a "French feminist," has conducted a sustained attack on many of the positions associated with 6criture feminine in both her essays and her recent fiction. See especially "One Is Not Born a Woman," Feminist Issues 1 (Winter 1981): 47-54; and Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary (written with Sande Zeig) (New York: Avon, 1979). Other important essays introducing 6criture feminine to English and American audiences include Josette Feral, "The Powers of Difference," in The Future of Difference: The Scholar and the Feminist Conference Series, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980), 88-94; Michele Richman, "Sex and Signs: The Language of French Feminist Criticism," Language and Style 13 (Fall 1980): 62-80; and Ann Rosalind Jones, "Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L'EcritureFeminine," Feminist Studies 7 (Summer 1981): 247-63, reprinted in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 361-77. For an extended treatment of Cixous's work through 1983, see Verena Andermatt Conley, Hdlane Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). 7. Irigaray, "When Our Lips Speak Together," in This Sex Which Is Not One, 205-18. 8. Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa," 245-64. 9. One charge frequently leveled at either U.S. feminist criticism or &criturefeminine (insofar as the latter is construed as invoking an unmediated female "nature")- but rarely at both simultaneously - is that of theoretical naivete, of ignoring the extent to which our experience is shaped by the cultural and particularly linguistic forms through which we necessarily represent it to ourselves and others. For a summary of the charges against U.S. feminist criticism, see Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), esp. 1-88. For some of the charges against 6criture feminine as an essentialism, see the articles cited in note 6. 10. The passage has been the occasion for two ground-breaking feminist analyses, Kate Millet's in Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970; reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1983), 12-21; and Judith Fetterley's in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to Modern Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 155-89. I return to it because, like Millet and Fetterley, I find it curiously revelatory of the sexual politics encoded in all sorts of other, ostensibly lower-key, representations of female sexuality. 11. Alice Walker has often called herself a feminist but lately prefers her own coinage, "womanist," as less suggestive of a white middle-class movement. See "Womanist"in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: WomanistProse (New York: Harcotirt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi-xii. Doris Lessing was of course a trailblazer for the women's liberation movement, although in her 1971 introduction to a new edition of The Golden Notebook (the novel was first published in 1962; the 1971 introduction is reprinted in all editions from 1971 to the present), she emphasizes that feminism is a very small aspect of a major upheaval: "probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint" ([New York: Bantam, 1981], ix). Despite these disclaimers, she returns to feminist issues as a central concern in The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and the two novels published under the name of Jane Somers, The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could ... (1984). Both Margaret Atwood and Monique Wittig identify themselves as feminists. Wittig may be better known in this country for her theoretical work than for her fiction. 12. Fetterley, 155. 13. Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: New American Library, Signet, 1971), 86, quoted in Fetterley, 189. 14. Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: Dial Press, 1965), 44-45. 15. Ibid., 44, 46. 16. Ibid., 229. 17. An excellent discussion of female "nature"as an explanatory principle grounded in

Molly Hite

141

the social reality of appropriation is Colette Guillaumin's "The Practice of Power and Belief in Nature, pt. 2: The Naturalist Discourse," trans. Linda Murgatroyd, Feminist Issues 1 (Summer 1981): 87-109. 18. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Washington Square Press, 1982), 79. 19. Walker's invention of what is effectively a written "dialect"for Celie's "letters"consciously continues the practice of Zora Neale Hurston and thus invokes a black feminist tradition. Walker is extremely aware of the risk such a marginal discourse runs of being judged simply incorrect or primitive and plays on the implicit contrast with the dominant ("standard") dialect throughout The Color Purple. See Walker's "Zora Neale Hurston," in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 83-92. 20. Walker, The Color Purple, 79. 21. Ibid., 11. 22. Stephen Spielberg's film omitted this transformation altogether, although this is arguably the point where Walker offers a "positive"vision of female-male relationships. Furthermore, Spielberg felt it necessary to reinscribe the law of the father, dismantled entirely in the book, by providing Shug with a wholly gratuitous "daddy," both a biological father and a Christian minister (and thus emissary of the great white father whom Walker's Shug dismisses during the course of the speech that provides the book with its title). The father's speech, withheld from his transgressive daughter, finally enfolds the entire alternative community, which is absorbed into the church itself- Spielberg unerringly provides climax and denouement by restoring the patriarchal status quo. 23. Walker, The Color Purple, 38, 82, 236. 24. Or being an Intended; the designation ("This is my intended") is in some contexts a sufficient identification for a woman-consider the female character known only as Kurtz's Intended in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. 25. Walker, The Color Purple, 20. 26. Doris Lessing, The Summer Before the Dark (New York: Bantam, 1979), 160-61, 7, 2, 186. 27. Ibid., 153, 155. 28. Janna, or Jane Somers, the narrator and protagonist of this novel, was also identified as its author when it was first published in England and America. Lessing's own account of the hoax and its aftermath appears as a preface to the paperback edition containing both Diary of a Good Neighbour and its sequel, If the Old Could. . ., vii-xii, in Doris Lessing, The Diaries ofJane Somers (New York: Vintage, 1984). See also, 127. 29. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962; reprint New York: Bantam, 1981), 340-41. 30. Roger Scruton says as much when complaining of the lack of interest intrinsic to the "gynaecological novel," 807. 31. The comma is intended to suggest that Wittig is both French and feminist-the latter in a sense recognizable to most U.S. and English readers-rather than "French feminist" in the way that, say, Irigaray and Cixous are. 32. Monique Wittig, Les Guirillares, trans. David Le Vay (New York: Avon, 1973), 142-44. 33. References to lacunae appear in Les Guirilleres and Lesbian Peoples. Two critical treatments that deal extensively with Wittig's use of lacunae are Wenzel's and Crowder's. 34. Wittig, Les Guirillares, 99-100. 35. Wittig, Lesbian Peoples, 10. 36. Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (New York: Avon Books, 1978), 282. 37. Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (New York: Fawcett Popular Library, 1969), 163. 38. Kim Chernin explores the symbolic meanings of female fat as treated in Lady Oracle

142

Molly Hite

and The Edible Woman- as well as in contemporary Western societies generally - in The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyrannyof Slenderness (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1981). The landmark work on the issue is Susie Orbach's Fat Is a Feminist Issue (New York: Berkley, 1978), a self-help guide based on Orbach's work with body image. 39. Reviewers had an especially hard time with Lady Oracle after the success of the obviously controlled Surfacing (1972). "It may be that the genre [of "popular feministoriented fiction"] is not congenial to Atwood's real gifts: perhaps the very confusion of 'Lady Oracle' is a measure of her discomfort," wrote Katha Pollitt in the New York Times Book Review, 26 Sept. 1976, 7-8. LeAnne Schreiber naturalized this "confusion"by making it the product of a pathologically confused character, writing in Time that "Thenovel does not develop, it meanders, circling around and turning on itself- letting its contours be defined by the chaos of the heroine's psyche" (11 Oct. 1976, 98). 40. Atwood, Lady Oracle, 353. 41. Atwood's interest in the female gothic has a long history. As a graduate student in English at Harvard University she intended to make this genre the subject of her doctoral dissertation. For a feminist reading of the female gothic that corroborates a number of Atwood's insights, see Claire Kahane, "The Gothic Mirror," in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 334-51. 42. Atwood, Lady Oracle, 250-51. 43. Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa," 260. 44. Atwood, Lady Oracle, 367, 378.