Brain Drain

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The poem “The Critick and The Writer of Fables” published in 1713 by Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, is an ambitious attempt at a satirical play on gendered and formal limitations of Augustan poetry. The critick is representative of a male poetic society, and yet by acquiring a voice from Finch within the poem, it appears to represent one side of Finch’s own internal debate in deciding where her writing belongs. She makes a case for a new style of writing by satirizing the forms already in existence. The poem, at once, exemplifies an Augustan commentary about poetic definition while it inserts the thinly veiled female object of Finch, the fable writer, as the subject in the style of the Romantic poets. Finch carves a place for her own poetry between the satirical, warring poet and the pastoral, peaceful muse, making room for her various resulting combinations. Finch’s poetry resides somewhere between two chronological, poetic traditions, as well as a gender division, without fully occupying any one more than another. It is in her displacement that she finds her own space.

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The sequel to a previous post…

In response to a classmate who believes that French author Madam George Sand (Judy Davis) in James Lapine’s 1991 film Impromptu, is ”attracted to Chopin [(Hugh Grant)] because she unconsciously learned to be more feminine like he was,” I’d like to respectfully disagree.

Prior to Sand’s pursuit of Chopin, she is already quite feminine as demonstrated through her clothing throughout the film. As a child, she wears a dress and has long hair. Sand’s bed clothes in the very first scene are traditionally frilly with ruffles, bows and layers. At the first party where she is to meet her publisher, Chopin’s presence yet unbeknownst to her, Sand wears a rather eccentric dress/pants combination, but somewhat of a silken embroidered dress with a bow in front all the same. When she visits her mother prior to engaging in her relationship with Chopin she wears a conservatively elegant cloak and, when her mother dies, Sand’s mourning dress is a traditional black gown and her hair is traditionally upswept. Perhaps Sand entertains the idea of being fit for a more traditional dress when in pursuit of Chopin, but she also tries moving in the opposite direction by buying men’s clothing. Overall, I’d say Sand is never portrayed as strictly masculine nor feminine, but rather the perfect embodiment of both at once.

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I

My first introduction to Aurore “George” Sand, the French author, has come solely from my viewing of director James Lapine’s Impromptu. Having never read Sand’s work, nor any form of a biography, I have come to the topic with no preconceived notions. This film’s limited window into Sand’s life provides the opportunity for an interesting experiment. I’d like to compare my first impression of Sand as directed by Lapine with that produced by acquiring additional information. Will my initial understanding be supported, contradicted or enhanced by some quick research? Let’s find out.

When Young Aurore (Lucy Speed) first appears, she is a child running through the wilderness away from an authoritative voice calling her name. She arrives at a self-made altar of stones among the ferns growing at the base of a tree. There she kneels and prays:

Hear me, O Corambe. Corambe, thou who art man, woman and god in one, hear me. I free this bird in thy name. Come to me, sublime being. I want to know the meaning of life. And I want to find perfect, perfect love. I free this lizard in thy name. [To lizard] Don’t be dead. Oh, balls.

This shot dissolves to reveal Madame “George” Sand (Judy Davis) seated at a desk writing her memoirs.

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Between the pages of 155 and 268, our narrator, Powers, and Dr. Lentz struggle with their traditional masculine roles, feeling that they must care for and protect their women. Lentz feels responsible for his wife Audrey’s stroke occuring directly after their argument while he was intentionally unreachable. Guilt ridden for not taking enough care, he visits her waning consciousness with daily devotion at the Center. Powers also cares for his lost and confused C. but learns that:

The more care I took, the more I turned her into the needy one. And the more I did that, the needier she became. We construed her neediness between the two of us. And that was not care on my part. That was cowardice. (240)

Together, Powers and Lentz search for some sort of answer to the masculine condition through the production and training of Helen, the beloved and experimental neural net in Galatea 2.2. Lentz, although he can’t change the past, has the desire to change the future, developing a way to back up the brain in the case of memory failure. Powers interprets and mulls this goal:

We could eliminate death. That was the long-term idea. We might freeze the temperament of our choice. Suspend it painlessly above experience. Hold it forever at twenty-two. (170)

We have yet to learn what Powers gains from the experiment, but perhaps Donna Haraway might offer a clue.

Pulling out the ol’ Norton, I brushed up on Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, several quotes of which were rather pertinent to Helen. First off, “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism… a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (2269). Already, in this one definition, the cyborg blurs the boundaries of human, animal and machine as well as reality and fiction.

Since Helen is essentially a new “other,” her existence could be constued as a cultural encounter similar to, for example, that of Europeans and Native Americans. It is assumed from the ideology at hand that one must dominate the other. That said, how is it possible to avoid the dominant/male and submissive/female trap that haunts the majority of historical human existence? According to Haraway, the power lies within the technology.

The cyborg has no origin story… they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential. (2270-2271)

According to Haraway, Powers and Lentz are “inessential” as fathers. Once they load the data, Helen thinks on her own. Although Powers has coded Helen with gender, it is within the power of the cyborg to blur the boundaries of such a dichotomy as the masculine and feminine. Once blurred, perhaps some revelation will be made to both about the roles of men and women in society.

While this unique lesson of love between man and machine has yet to be revealed , one thing is certain. Helen has already invoked much discussion about what constitutes human intelligence, blurring the distinction between true knowledge and switch flipping. Are we nothing more than weighted switches constantly back-feeding input through our neural nets, or is there something inherently human that sets us apart from a machine?

I’ll be turning pages rapidly to find out…

In class, some postmodern themes, concepts and questions we’ve applied to fiction involve:

• the power structure of the subject/object relationship
• the question of veracity in representation and history
• the failure of language and it’s limitation on thought
• capitalism as an inextricable driving force in postmodern art

Postmodern photographer Cindy Sherman demonstrates the ways in which these issues also infuse her medium, effectively challenging the traditional assumption that photography is a true representation of the real. MoMa.org summarizes Sherman’s first collection, Untitled Film Stills:

The sixty-nine solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America—the period of Sherman’s youth, and the ground-zero of our contemporary mythology.

Sherman poses herself as if she were a film star and then snaps the shutter. As the photographer, she is the subject capturing what appears to be a realistic depiction of her object, creating a glimpse into the life of a starlet. At the same time, she is standing in as that object, an actress acting the part of an actress. The result is a representational copy of a starlet who has never existed, the perfect simulacra, calling attention to the problematic subject and object, and the assumption of real or historic photographic representation accentuated by her use of black and white photography.

In reference to Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #3 (1977. Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York) MoMa.org says “the protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen.” The question then becomes, who is the protagonist? It could be the actress being portrayed, the artist herself, or the idea of a woman preening in order to present herself a certain way. In essence, all three possibilities require acting and the lines blur as to where one ends and the others begin. Also, in Sherman’s choice of a kitchen setting, this woman seems out of place. even in her apron. She is too glamorous to be surrounded by typical household items and, against the barren walls, she becomes the only aesthetic thing of beauty in the room. While the surrounding items do little to help define who she is, they do tell who she is not. Or perhaps, to read it another way, the items do define her everyday life while being a celebrity is not her true self. The one truth that holds fast for all possibilities is that it is impossible to know who this person really is.

With this one, Untitled Film Still #16. 1978. Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the same questions are called into play. As a posed object, the camera control is in Sherman’s right hand, revealing more directly that she is also the subject. Point of view shifts to the floor here, offering a more voyeuristic peek into the domestic life of this celebrity. She looks away, denying that she is posing for the camera when she is obviously controlling all that is seen. We sit at her feet looking up in awe at her formally centered placement, perfect posture with one leg slightly in front of the other. The casual grip of her cigarette suggests that her stiff feminine posturing is a forced picture of casual relaxation and she holds this pose under the watchful eye of the formally posed man on the wall. Each are confined within the social definitions of gender during this particular era and the message is reminiscent of Cixous’ argument that language is structured around dichotomies that allow for no areas of overlap. As the creation of this collection drew to a close, Sherman said she had run out of clichés to represent, reminding us also of Winterson’s reference to clichéd language and it’s limitation of our thoughts.

Sherman continually explores these themes in her later photography making a more blatant attack on the assumed “realism” in representation. In Untitled #225 (1990. Color photograph. Collection Philip and Beatrice Gersh, Beverly Hills.) this disturbing model appears to be a well dress aristocrat from another century wearing a great deal of make-up and a wig. It becomes difficult to identify where the artificial parts of this woman end and the real begin. The unreal appearance of the head and the more obvious artificial breast makes one question, is this even Sherman posing? The figure is also a mother, offering her artificial breast to an unseen child as if to say motherhood is only one aspect of a whole woman, not her full identity. Wealth, jewels, a fine wig and clothing are not reliable identifiers either. As they are nothing more than commodities, does the woman in wearing them then become a commodity herself?

Moving away from reference to realism altogether, Sherman’s woman becomes fully artificial, as does she, each replaced by the same doll. The pornographic and exposed positioning of Untitled #255 (1992) equates the “reality” of sex mags to that of posed plastic. The lack of reality is as exposed as the model itself and yet the demand for such “recreations” of sexual events inspires vigorous capitalist reproduction. This replacement also calls into question the authenticity of the artist’s role in representation, drawing attention to the lack of realism that occurs when objects are selectively chosen for representation. The model looks away from the camera to demonstrate, once again, a denial of the artificial situation.

Interestingly, using a doll as an unrealistic representation of a human being, although it seems to be a drastic difference of subject/object from the first pictured above, is no different in concept. Sherman brilliantly exposes photographic ”realism” as equally flawed in all.  

So far this semester, our class has covered:

• John Barth’s short story, “Lost in the Fun House”
• Jeannette Winterson’s novel, Written on the Body
• and Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fight Club. 

To help define what postmodern means we have explored excerpts from:

• Simon Malpas’ book, The Postmodern (2005)
• Hélène Cixous’ critique “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays” (1975)
• Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979)
• Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
• and Linda Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism (1988)

How do I cohesively make sense of all this??? Having drank fully from the fire hose for weeks on end, I wonder… Will I digest or blow? This post is where I just vomit in my mouth a little.

As Malpas explains, “at the heart of identity there is a ‘thinking I’ that experiences, conceptualizes and interacts with the world” (Malpas, 57). Consequently, running rampant throughout postmodern fiction is the question of this subject’s reliability as an authority representing truth.

• Barth’s narrator, Ambrose, is at once a child and an adult, interweaving the blind experience of ”living in the moment” with 20/20 hindsight and calling attention, through various narrative devices, to the limitations of the narrating subject both as child and adult, in other words, as narrator looking in at the main character and main character being himself.
• Winterson complicates her narrator by creating a nongender-specific bisexual who objectifies the beloved, Louise, pitting the power of subject vs. object, one against the other, both creating and destroying the linguistic barrier to fully realizing true love.
• Palahniuk splits his narrator’s identity into two dueling subjects within the same body who both objectify not only Marla, but each other, creating a power triangle rather than a single identifiable power source.

By complicating the subject, these authors use fiction to turn the subject in on itself and reveal it’s limitations. The point for the reader is that perspective and representation are not natural ways of reaching some sort of truth, but are cultural devices that, until postmodernism hit the stage, were accepted as natural. The most we can hope for, as Stephen Colbert often points out, is mere “truthiness” (or “falsiness” as the following parody explains), which is called into question each time subjectivity becomes decentered by an alternate version of the traditional subject. (Hello, Derrida!)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNHqX27hlz8]

Sexuality is also addressed in each piece, not just in terms of masculinity or femininity, but where the two overlap. According to theorist Hélène Cixous:

Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition … a culture’s values are premised on an organisation of thought in which descriptions of the feminine are determined by masculine categories of order, opposition and hierarchy. (Malpas, 72)

Lyotard says that metanarratives order the world for a particular culture and not all cultures order the world in the same way. Because of this he believes reality is not real, that it is rather “simplicity, communicability” (75) in the name of the “unity of experience” (72) and that the postmodern “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (81).

• Barth calls masculinity into question by addressing the subservience of women in the ’50s and how that defines the angered narrator’s role as he matures socially in contrast with what he feels differently internally. 
• Winterson’s non-specifically gendered and bisexual narrator draws attention to the dysfunction of defining through opposition, creating a world of confusion for the reader while, at the same time, pointing out the problem.
• Palahniuk’s split identity, one masculinized and one feminized, are embodied within one male person which shows that neither masculinity nor femininity encompass fully what comprises the essence of a human being.

These narrators struggle with the idea that identity is formed through the constriction of language and social mapping according to opposing genders. Each illustrates that society provides no useful language or ordering of our world to address these grey areas. Postmodern work obviously strives to draw attention to the gap between the grand narrative and what actually exists.

And, although there are many more threads to follow, the HUGE question of history (revered by Jameson as fact of lived experience) versus historicity (truthiness and the closest we can get to truth) is the last item I have time to duscuss. Jameson argues that the democratization of art subjects it to the corruption of marketing and capitalism. They are inseparable to the detriment of world cultures and history through depthless representation and pastiche unless we map how the depthless came to be, “in which we may again begin to grasp our new positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spacial as well as our social confusion” (54). SOOO, the question of historical validity appears repeatedly in our fiction selections.

• Barth criticizes history by describing the role of generations of copulation in constructing social understanding of sexuality.
• Winterson explores the narrator’s serial monogamy and only in breaking the tradition does he/she find love.
• Palahniuk creates Tyler Durden who desperately wants to break free from history to redefine it from his point of view.

According to Malpas, Hutcheon argues that parody is not dead, it is now focused to use form to reveal a failure of form. She also finds great value studying the unrepresentable in fiction, as much as that which has been represented as “history,” because both employ the same narrative devices (Malpas, 25-26). In the fiction we have read, we can see this parody in action, where our authors provide recognition of the power forms hold, and turn around to employ these forms to point out the flaws within them. We’ll talk more about this next week when we read more of Hutcheon.

Other pan drippings, grey in color, that deserve to make it into the gravy bowl are

• body/soul connections
• bodily parts in gender definition,
• disease: death in life and life in death
• and many, many more.

Sadly, the repair man is here and I have to supervise the fixing of shit.

In The Postmodern, Malpas says:

at the heart of identity there is a ‘thinking I’ that experiences, conceptualises and interacts with the world … This ‘I’ has been questioned, challanged and problematised by more recent modern and postmodern theorists. (57)

This ‘thinking I’ is certainly problematised by Jeannette Winterson in Written on the Body. By withholding the gender of the narrator and writing that narrator into numerous sexual experiences, the reader is left to his or her own devices in decoding the mystery. Faced with two choices, the reader can insert the association of his or her choice and move on or allow shifting assumptions to wash over the conscious mind.

As Malpas explains, according to theorist Hélène Cixous’ in her critique of modern subjectivity “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays”:

Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition … a culture’s values are premised on an organisation of thought in which descriptions of the feminine are determined by masculine categories of order, opposition and heirarchy. (72)

To consider Winterson’s audience, reader reactions within our class seem fraught with desire to code the narrator’s gender. Some folks are downright frustrated and combing sentences for any give-away. Obviously to reveal the strength of this desire is important, but why? Without a gender definition, is it impossible to contextualize the significance of the novel’s events?

Having read the book’s back cover, I knew that the narrator’s gender would never be revealed. This could be why I never grew frustrated. Certainly it was an odd experience seeing my perceptions slip from one gender to another. I became increasingly aware that situations and characteristics attributed to the same character conjured different results. By no means did I “get” what was happening to me, but the following passage by Malpas outlines that experience rather well:

One is not simply a woman or man, with all of the cultural coding that goes along with this. Instead, Cixous argues that a feminist criticism must explore the ways in which differences within a subject can be continually opened up to new forms of exploration and challenge. To this end she presents the idea of a feminist writing, an écriture féminine, that is able to affirm these differences, resist the closure of a male-oriented logic, and present subjectivity as a structure of continual renegotiations that transform the categories of patriarchy. (73)

Allowing myself to ride the gender wave with fluidity, I found what Winterson hasn’t written is most important. Where power exists and determines what is “acceptable,” or at least “attributable,” lies in our perception of how the masculine and feminine are defined by language. (Hello Saussure, my old friend.) Winterson’s brilliance demonstrates the subversive by using that very device. The notion of the free-’thinking I’ is exposed for all its cultural baggage. The reader  is offered an opportunity to see how their own assumptions are based on linguistic code, the power of Western culture’s structure of ordering. Within the story, while the narrator is able to convert Russian to English as a professional translator, he or she is also  betrayed by the failings of language as it applies to the properties of love. The resulting awareness of linguistic confines illuminates the more naturally occurring bisexuality or grey areas within the gender dichotomy, i.e. recognizing in masculinity the presence of sensitivity, or within feminity an ambitious determination. (73)

The questions now is, what do we do with our new awareness? Do we get all radical and create an entirely new language, or do we collectively assign new meaning to old words? Before answering, maybe we should read “Is There Anything Good About Men?” by Roy F. Baumeister, Professor of Psychology & Head of Social Psychology Area, Florida State University. As he argues, if men are perceived to occupy positions of power, it must also be recognized that they occupy the majority of prison cells, make up the greater portion of the homeless population, and are often portrayed by the media as buffoons. Culture is a tool employed by all for daily understanding. It is not necessarily bad in its limitation, if only we take the time to study what it reveals about our thoughts and motivations.

Jeanette Winterson, in her novel Written on the Body, recycles the narrator’s conversation with two different partners.

With Inge, the anarcha-feminist who hates to blow up beautiful things:

She said, ‘Don’t you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his penis?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He did. When he died they found nothing between his balls but an old brush.’
‘You’re making it up.’
Am I? (22)

And again with Catherine, the writer, who feels that writers don’t make great companions:

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you know why Henry Miller said “I write with my prick”?’
‘Because he did. When he died they found nothing between his legs but a ball point pen.’
‘You’re making that up,’ she said.
Am I? (60)

Why does Winterson do this? I think there are several things going on here.

• The repetition moves beyond reinforcing the narrator’s serial monogamy. It seems to say that the interactions within each relationship are as worn out as the dating pattern itself.

• To repeat the reference to male genitalia in regard to both art and literature speaks to the inequality of masculine and feminine influence in the canonical world. Women are often the subjects of art, but not equally and respectfully acknowledged as creators of that same art. (According to this article, “of the approximately 25,000 artists working between 1880-1930, probably forty percent were women, but fewer than five percent were shown in museums.”)

• In addition to Winterson’s reference to clichés, quotes and previously designed literary styles, she incorporates this device to demonstrate that people are not original from day to day within their own consciousness, let alone in the scheme of humanity – whether from person to person or age to age.

• The question of reality comes up here too. The conversation, in single quotes, shows each partner questioning the veracity of the narrator’s story. ‘You’re making that up.’ The reply from the narrator is never spoken aloud. The words Am I? are asked as if to say, “Its been said before. Does that make it true? What is real anyway?”

Do you have any more connections to throw into the mix?

THE TEXT
For our final presentation, our group filmed our own docu-parody wherein characters dressed as one theorist speak lines reflecting the viewpoint of another. Essentially, they all bumble around being ridiculous, acting out parts we think will produce sufficient commentary.

MY CHARACTER SUMMARY
While it is difficult to comment on a film you have yet to see, I can tell you that the character I created is a woman pimped out against her will. She eventually becomes a cyborg with found parts and learns that she is with child, MiniBorg. Dreaming of the child’s future, she spouts off some Derridian dissallusionment about the failure of merriment when it is created from broken toys, planning to circumvent this for the sake of her child.

THEORETICAL LENSES
Haraway with a dash of Derrida
My interpretation of the text is obviously influenced by Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” To focus first on the character of Oppressed Woman, she is nameless and only called “baby.” It is as though her own identity is something she cannot claim, yet her body is taken. She is pimped out, a slave to the male dominated power stucture the likes of which Haraway seeks to escape. Haraway believes that the cyborg can exist outside the confines of Western duality. As new beings, they can be recoded. In the film, once Oppressed Woman becomes Cyborg, she is empowered and moves on.

MiniBorg, the bastard child of Oppressed Woman and Mickey Mouse, is a genderless zygote bridging the gap between male/female, physical/non-physical, human/machine… and cyborg/mouse. This last lovely twist joins humans and machines with animals at once, breaking down all the barriers. Because cyborgs have no origin story, no dominating patriarchal tradition or otherwise, there exists possibility for freedom from Western dualisms which Haraway names as:

“Self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man” (Haraway 2296).

Haraway also says that ”social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in “essential” unity” (2275). We must deconstruct the labels, the sense of other, and in turn deconstruct oppression.

 The conception of MiniBorg, the little “hu-mouse-chine,” demonstrates Derrida’s decentering as he says:

Ethnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when European culture . . . had been dislocated . . . forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference’” (Derrida 918).

The same holds true for a male dominant culture. In the film, the Marxist Pimp is the obvious power center, but not for long. Hope lies with the MiniBorg Messiah who will dislocate Marxist Pimp power and create a new center. As Haraway says, illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. In this case, that’s a good thing.

In both our docu-parody and our commentary, the characters and presenters have been incorporated onto disc. They/we are now cyborgs as technology is part of us/them. This is one more way of merging with and educating through communications machines, recoding meaning for ourselves. Of course, Haraway would say the we are all cyborgs already, with or without the disc.

Challenging the Reproduction of Gender Inequality in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

In Anne Brontë’s novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ideological apparatuses, as defined by Marxist theorist Louis Althusser, work to mold and sustain vast differences between men and women in the early nineteenth century. Each gender is groomed to occupy a separate societal sphere, men as master of the public realm and women as mistress of the domestic. These distinctions foster inequality and oppression of women, yet they are consistently reinforced by both genders within the patriarchal system. The danger of such inequality, at worst, allows for the abuse and silent oppression of women while, at the very least, it reproduces the same oppressive social system from generation to generation. Helen Huntingdon, the novel’s heroine, is the tool by which Brontë experiments with an alternate existence. Helen challenges the traditional role of motherhood by raising her son Arthur differently than a more traditional mother, Mrs. Markham. She also takes issue with the oppressive nature of marriage for women. By examining the cycle in which inequality of gender is enforced and reproduced, Brontë successfully confronts the traditional Victorian ideals which foster inequality, vice and abuse.

Brontë’s Markham family is the epitome of late nineteenth century societal views. The topics that Mrs. Markham, as an authority on traditional Victorian motherhood, uses to reprimand Helen are telling of the general opinion of her day. Her first criticism is of Helen’s wine restriction for her young son, Arthur, which in turn leads to a critique of Helen’s child rearing practices in general. “If you would have your son walk honourably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them — not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone” (Brontë 28). Mrs. Markham is arguing that a young boy’s education requires experience, not shelter, and that a mother’s role is to be unobtrusive, not overbearing. Mrs. Markham undermines her own authority by requiring a man with religious authority, the vicar, to validate her claim on this tradition. “[M. Millward will] tell you the consequences; —he’ll set it before you as plain as day, —and tell you what you ought to do” (Brontë 30). In doing so, Mrs. Markham maintains a discriminatory stance for herself and broadcasts it among her parlor. In the vicar’s absence, Gilbert defends the veracity of his mother’s words, unaware of his own role in reinforcing the societal precedent. He reiterates what his mother had said, that Helen must not shelter her son like a hot-house plant. “Shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on a mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements” (Brontë 30). Laura Berry’s scholarly article, “Acts of Custody and Incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” addresses this ideology:

Brontë’s fictions deny the idea of sentimentalized motherhood as a potential haven from imprisoning or torturous anti-familial or institutional structures. If homes imprison, mothers do not, in this novel, liberate … The family then is the place where gender difference is created. It is by “protection” and “influence” that a mother forms a daughter; but “making a man” of a boy is achieved in giving him a liberal hand. (Berry )

Essentially, as is evident within the previous passages, mothers are expected to remain in the domestic realm and to mature their sons through the freedom of experience, an effort championed by free men and sanctioned by the church. Interestingly, both genders within the same family share this male-centric point of view, one perpetuated unawares until Helen challenges the requirements of motherhood.

Mrs. Markham is not without defiance within her own household. Her daughter Rose naturally opposes her mother’s reverence toward her brothers, sensing through her societal innocence, the disparity between herself and them. She complains to Gilbert when asked to make him tea once tea time is over, “you—we can’t do too much for you … I’m nothing at all … I’m told not to think of myself” (Brontë 53). Rose is young and still in training. Her burning opposition is repeatedly snuffed out by her mother’s constant discipline in accordance with the laws of gender. “You know, Rose, in all household matters, we have only two things to consider, first, what’s proper to be done, and secondly, what’s most agreeable to the gentlemen of the house—anything will do for the ladies” (Brontë 53). According to feminist theorist Judith Butler in her essay “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” the body becomes a cultural sign:

Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis; the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions—and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them; the construction “compels” our belief in its necessity and naturalness. (Butler 2500)

Rose doesn’t naturally understand the distinction between genders because it doesn’t naturally exist. Mrs. Markham, having fully absorbed gender ideology, believes that not only must she conform, she must teach Rose to conform as well; to submit to the rules of difference is preferable to the punishment offered if either one of them does not.

This snapshot of Victorian life demonstrates that religion, motherhood and education are the vehicles which perpetuate rather than challenge the rule of inequality. According to Marxist theorist Louis Althusser in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” an imaginary social construct is used to coerce submission to and reproduction of the labor condition. This ensures the power of the ruling class:

Of course many … contrasting Virtues (modesty, resignation, submissiveness on the one hand, cynicism, contempt, arrogance, confidence, self importance, even smooth talk and cunning on the other) are … taught in the Family, in the Church …in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the … relations of exploited to exploiters, and exploiters to exploited are largely reproduced. (Althusser 1495)

The domestic realm espouses the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), particularly as it functions within the previously mentioned private, rather than governmental, realms of religion, family and education. In addition to class division, this enforced separateness also applies to gender, illustrating the masculine social power driving women into submission. Within Helen’s first marriage to Huntingdon, she has assumed the role of modesty and submission in response to his self importance, smooth talk and cunning. Helen understands the failure of this system for women and seeks an escape from its grasp.

Brontë intentionally creates the Markham setting ripe for Helen’s retort, allowing her to challenge not only the way in which men are socially groomed, but to rebuke the male dominant religious authority over the subject. “Mr. Markham here, thinks his powers of conviction at least equal to Mr. Millward’s. If I hear not him, neither should I be convinced though one rose from the dead” (Brontë 30). Holding fast to her spirituality while simultaneously rejecting the domination of religion, Helen directs her rebuttal to Gilbert, specifically challenging the unseeing portion of his male point of view. She asks how he would raise a girl as compared to a boy:

You affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; — and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation … It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation … whereas, in the nobler sex, … exercised by trial and dangers, is only further developed. (Brontë 30-31)

By exposing the duplicity between the rearing of young men and women, Helen logically questions whether or not Gilbert believes feminine character and virtue is inherently fallible. Gilbert trapped within the machine of a defunct society, objects. “Heaven forbid that I should think so!” (Brontë 31). Herein lies exposed a great contradiction between the practice of a disguised lack of faith in women and the heralded ideal of the virtuous “angel in the house.”

Seeking balance and equality, Helen defends her practice as a mother with a strong presence in her son’s life. She breaks from prevalent expectations saying:

You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others. Now I would have both so to benefit by the experience of others, and the precepts of a higher authority, that they should know beforehand to refuse evil and choose the good, and require no experimental proofs to teach them the evil of transgression. (Brontë 31)

According to Helen’s declaration, Brontë rejects the idea that such freedom afforded young men should be fully experienced only to later be reigned in through marriage. She also rejects the opposite extreme of sheltering young girls to the point where they have no self-actuated sense of wisdom and virtue, ill preparing them for independence and strength in difficult times. Scholar Elizabeth Gruner, in her essay “Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon and Isabel Vane,” says of the same passage quoted above:

Helen’s argument here neatly defends the novel, as teaching by others’ experience, and her own maternal practice, while simultaneously undercutting any conception of an essential gender identity. Masculinity and Femininity are taught in this novel and can be played, revised, changed—as Gilbert himself learns. (Gruner 312)

A compromise must be met. The possibility exists, for which Helen is an example, where each gender benefits from preparedness to function in all aspects of society rather than to perform supplementary roles from separate spheres of a distinct division.

As Rose requires constant reminders to conform to her feminine identity, Gilbert also requires more than one lesson in his education to break free from engrained gender perspective, demonstrating how deeply entrenched the importance of gender identity is to the commonwealth. The town gossip darkens Helen’s true virtue because, as a wife who left her husband regardless of his abuse, she no longer fits within the ideal of “angel in the house.” Here the machine manipulates Gilbert once more. Performing his gender duty, he avoids Helen, punishing her for doing her gender wrong (Butler 2500). Silence aggrieves the lovers, and Gilbert finds himself “deceived, duped, hopeless, my afflictions trampled on, my angel not an angel, and my friend a fiend incarnate” (Brontë 102). Not until Helen offers her journal, appointing a witness for her story, does Gilbert escape his torment. While he does loosen his grip on the feminine definition, the reader is left to wonder if this change is binding. Scholar Russell Poole, in his article “Cultural Reformation and Cultural Reproduction in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” argues:

Helen’s diary is often identified as the means of instruction … but we should not exaggerate its effect … A few of [Gilbert’s] comments as a narrator suggest that a mitigation of his more aggressive traits has occurred subsequent to marriage rather than before it and certainly not as a precondition of it. (Poole 863)

Gilbert is like a child under the instruction of Helen, one in constant need of a reminder not to fall into old habits, learning who Helen is as a person, not as a misunderstood cog in the gender hierarchy. Regardless of Gilbert’s retention level, more importantly demonstrated is the fact that silence must be broken by women and their stories acknowledged by men before change can occur.

Brontë appears to fall short under the contemporary lens of feminism when Helen’s relationship flourishes with Gilbert and their wedding merely reinserts her into the same system from which she fled. Her property becomes Gilbert’s; it is he who must grant permission for Helen’s aunt to stay in the home that was once hers; and Arthur “he was my own Helen’s son, and therefore mine” (Brontë 469). Gilbert makes a statement of claim on both mother and son, as if they are property to be owned. This reads as if Brontë could envision no practical solution for the plight of women. Although she is not able to write Helen out of society’s grasp, all is not lost. Rather than becoming an example by which women may redeem their power, Helen, more realistically for Brontë’s time becomes the subject for discourse among Brontë’s readership. Scholar Carol Senf, in her essay “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Narrative Silences and Questions of Gender,” explores the value in Brontë’s delineated story telling technique, one by which Helen’s tale is both divulged edited through Gilbert:

Like the unique narrative structure, the wife’s story framed by that of her husband, this emphasis on domestic life—especially on the relationships of men and women during courtship and marriage—encourages the reader to focus on questions of gender, especially to see the way that nineteenth-century notions of marriage consigned women to silence. (Senf 450)

As Helen’s full story unfolds, Gilbert and the audience of the novel learn of the horrors that can exist when expectations of women remain unchallenged. Beyond that initial lesson, a more subtle lesson is also divulged. Helen’s experience of oppression and abuse, that which had been locked within the confines of her journal until shared with Gilbert, becomes the property of Gilbert once they marry. Personal expression is no longer her own. Brontë, may not have had the vision to free Helen from the stranglehold of mastership without denying her love, yet she offers this subjection up to all of society to reform as a whole.

These social values and customs of the early nineteenth century are of importance to study because remains of those gender imbalances are still present in society today. To understand where gender inequality fails and reproduces oppression of women can help to pinpoint ways in which it can be remedied. Historic trends provide commentary through literature, allowing for study of the causes and effects within this division. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in particular, provides a most valuable social commentary as it is the first novel of its kind to reveal the harsh reality of those women who suffered the worst of oppression of the time. Without discussion of the process by which women perpetuate their oppression, the importance of the challenge posed by Brontë is unable to be fully appreciated for the impact it has had in liberating the minds of women and imparting change upon a nation.

Works Cited:

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 1476-1508.

Berry, Laura C. “Acts of Custody and Incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 30.1. (1996): 32-55. JSTOR. 4 April 2007

Brontë, Anne. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. New York: Oxford University Press. 1992

Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 2488-2501.

Gruner, Elisabeth Rose. “Plotting the Mother: Caroline Norton, Helen Huntingdon, and Isabel Vane.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. 16. 2. (1997): 303-325. JSTOR. 4 April 2007

Poole, Russell. “Cultural Reformation and Cultural Reproduction in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 33.4 (1993): 859-873. JSTOR. 28 March 2007

Senf, Carol A. “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Narrative Silences and Questions of Gender” College English. 52.4 (1990): 446-456. JSTOR. 28 March 2007