In an essay revised for the second edition of her Nomadic Subjects, Rosi Braidotti takes
up the fraught question of men in feminism, somewhat ironically I’d say, by
building on Michel Foucault’s concretizing of the conceptual, the “materiality
of ideas”:
One cannot make an abstraction of the
network of truth and power formations that govern the practice of one’s
enunciation; ideas are sharp-edged discursive events that cannot be analyzed
simply in terms of their propositional content. (264)
What this means, for Braidotti, is that
heterosexual men are lacking
intellectually [...] a reflection on their position in history. The politics of
location is just not part of their genealogical legacy. They have not inherited
a world of oppression and exclusion based on their sexed corporal being; they
do not have the lived experience of oppression because of their sex. Thus most
of them fail to grasp the specificity of feminism in terms of its articulation
of theory and practice, of thought and life. (265)
The politics of sex and sexualities, for Braidotti, needs to
account for the materiality of ideas, and to address and even to enact not
merely propositional or conceptual empathies, but the interactive negotiation
of differences, or better, of pluralities; her Deleuzian nomadism, sieved
through Luce Irigaray, wants to work through an amalgam, an admixture, an
assemblage of intellectual deference and embodied resistance to his
“becoming-woman”:
For Irigaray, as for Deleuze, the
subject is not a substance, but rather a process of negotiation between
material and semiotic conditions that affect one’s embodied, situated self. In
this perspective, subjectivity names
the process that consists in stringing together—under the fictional unity of a
grammatical I—different forms of
active and reactive interaction with a resistance to these conditions. The
subject is a process, made of constant shifts and negotiations between
different levels of power and desire, constantly switching between willful
choice and unconscious drives. (274)
This blend of situated excisions and unraveling sutures
characterizes Braidotti’s repurposing of Deleuze, but what I’m hearing here
also resonates with my current reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The
Yellow Wallpaper” for my Arts One class. I have to confess that I bristle –
just as she appears to predict I might – at Braidotti’s foreclosed feminism, at
my preemptive and summary exclusion from feminist critique by virtue of a
generalized bifurcation of human sexual anatomy into a male-female antinomy, a
division which, despite her philosophical pluralism, Braidotti still maintains.
But I don’t want to appear to be a resentful, if privileged reader, grumpy
about some area of gendered experience that he can’t finally appropriate or
even access. And I do think Bradotti has a point: that sexual politics must
emerge from materially succinct, and distinct, lived subject positions, to
which we have incomplete access at best. (I am concerned, still, about the
seemingly unimpeachable gender solidarity, however, that she continues to
claim.)
Rather than resentment, I want to
suggest that this incompleteness, this dis-closure (as opposed to foreclosure)
might be more productively understood as an unnamable and inassimilable
source-point, a singularity, around which surges of differential and even
creative energy might be said to accrete.
As a man in feminism, or at least in its sights, what I want is to think
toward those gendered exclusions, those singularities, not to appropriate any vital
differences – what makes other lives others – but to participate, even if only
tangentially, in what Gilman characterizes as an economy of difference, what
she calls (in the story and in her tract) work:
Those who object to women’s working .
. . should remember that human labor is an exercise of faculty, without which
we should cease to be human; that to do and to make not only gives deep
pleasure, but is indispensible to healthy growth. Few girls today fail to
manifest some signs of this desire for individual expression. (Women and
Economics 157)
Labor – which she distinguishes from the “morbid, defective,
irregular, diseased” and pathological work of human motherhood, the reduction
of women to reproductive and domestic vessels (181) – is for Gilman essentially
expressive, inasmuch as it entails an instrumental – that is to say, a poietic – and even causal relationship
between what Braidotti calls “theory and practice” or between the propositional
and the active. Gilman’s critique is as site-specifically and as historically
gendered as Braidotti wants feminist work to be, but it also generalizes itself
and its “lived experiences” in contradistinction to Braidotti’s exclusions, to
introduce women’s experience into an aggregate of the human, to produce a still
fraught but nonetheless accessible, differential humanism. The exclusion of
women from the purview of the human is for Gilman something to be overcome – in
the act of writing, no less – rather than a set of exclusions to be materially
reversed and re-instantiated by a reactive, if just, politics:
What we do modifies us more than what
is done to us. The freedom of expression has been more restricted in women than
the freedom of impression, if that be possible. Something of the world she has
lived in she has seen from her barred windows. (Women and Economics 66)
The determinisms of oppression need to be overcome, but it is
in the eruptive and disturbing – and decidedly material – acts of resistance,
including a resistance on and through paper, as much as the utopian teleology
of a better, just and “modified” world, that Gilman values: the work, the lived
and living process, of pushing back and of tearing down and of breaking
through.
(public-domain image of Charlotte Perkins Gilman from the Library of Congress on-line collection)
The bars in the passage I’ve just
cited echo the bars on the windows in the abandoned, “atrocious” nursery that
Gilman’s unnamed narrator inhabits in the rural house her husband has rented
out (apparently to enable a rest-cure for his wife’s incipient hysteria) and to
which she is provisionally confined, a space that sharply inverts Virginia Woolf’s
“room of one’s own,” in which the patriarchal benevolence of her husband (and
other “doctors”) effectively bans expressive work of all kinds, especially
writing: “There comes John, and I must put this away,— he hates to have me
write a word” (13). Even the narrator
doubts her own expressive capacities, scare-quoting her first mention of “work”
both to trivialize her own labor and to accede to her husband’s will that she
deliberately distance herself from the unruly action, especially writing.
That she remains existentially trapped
in a nursery speaks to Gilman’s critique of married motherhood and of the
limitations it imposes on women’s capacities for self-expression. (The narrator
has had a child, but she defers its care to “Mary,” admitting that she cannot
be with her infant son because it makes her “so nervous” [14].) She is
infantilized by her husband – “’Bless her little heart!’” – and effectively
mastered by his “care.” He presents himself as the intimate physician of her
psyche, but also doubts the reality of her feminine pathology:
John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living
soul of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)— perhaps this is one reason I do not get
well faster.
You see he does not believe
I am sick! (9-10)
Her tentativeness to assume the defiant agency of a speaker,
to even suggest that her husband’s wishes might be detrimental to her health –
and not, perhaps, only “one reason” but in fact the reason she cannot get better – is ameliorated by the
confessional dead-space of the page, its inaccessibility to him both as secret
diary and as empirically “dead” paper. Gilman juxtaposes the propositional and
the lived, the representational, abjected deadness of words on paper and the
lived realities of the narrator’s oppression outside the bounds of the page: a
juxtaposition crucial to Braidotti’s materialism. This bifurcation is sutured
in the tale – cinched, perhaps, without necessarily being healed or remediated
– in two ways.
First, in the impossible horizon of
the present tense, as the narrator’s descriptive account verges on speech act:
“I am sitting by the window now, up in this atrocious nursery, and there is
nothing to hinder my writing as much as I please, save lack of strength” (13).
These moments of reflexivity suggest that the act of handwriting, as an
assemblage of corporeal effort (or “strength”) and propositional or thematic
matter (whatever our narrator is describing or writing about) are drawn increasingly closer together. Her clipped style,
with its journalistically brief paragraphs, affirms this aspiration to
immediacy, to assemble action and description into the same written,
subjectively-permeable moment. The penultimate page comes closest to this
impossible presentism, when the narrator seems to be recording events in her
journal as they happen around her, effectively making them happen (again?) on
the page as her account unfolds:
Why
there’s John at the door!
It
is no use, young man, you can’t open it!
How
he does call and pound!
Now
he’s crying for an axe.
It would be a shame to
break down that beautiful door!
(35)
This torrent of clipped paragraphs is meant to represent an
hysteric break, but what it accomplishes in fact, on the page, is expressive plenitude, an
enlivenment. The potentially violent breach of that nursery door, behind which
she has deliberately locked herself in an effort – a labor – to exclude, and to exclude herself from,
patriarchal mastery, is avoided by her admission to John of where to find the
key, but it’s worth noting that her deference involves an immediate shift into
the past tense:
“John
dear!” said I in the gentlest voice, “the key is down by the front steps, under
a plantain leaf!” (36)
The expressive collision of word and event lapses into
narrative distance, objectified and written down in retrospect, as soon as her
husband’s access to her closed psyche is (however contingently, however much
“perhaps”) is re-enabled.
But the question of when and where – after the
fact – the narrator continues to transcribe her experiences remains troubling
here. The monstrous creeping she describes – creeping over her husband
prostrate form, after he has fainted in his own moment of appropriated hysteria
– does not entail a muted or inexpressible femininity, but is given voice
through her:
“I’ve got out at last,”
said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so
you can’t put me back!” (36)
She tears down the suppressive yellow wallpaper, behind which
she has been imagining – perceiving – the trapped spectral figures of creeping
women, but her account of this culmination of her self-assertion is recounted
from a transcendental point-of-view, outside of the narrative time-frame. That
paper, too, is the second image of subjective suturing that I want to take up.
The narrator has become pathologically fixated on the “unclean,” torn,
irregular, repellent, yellowed wallpaper leftover on the nursery walls. She
scans it for “patterns,” in an effort to read and interpret it, to master what
it says; it reduplicates a species of domestic panopticism, even – “those
absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere” on its surfaces (16). The narrator links the wallpaper, at least
overtly, not to oppression but to expression: “I never saw so much expression
in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have!”
(16). The wallpaper, that is, becomes a metonymy for the “dead paper” – to
which it is tied contiguously in the tale as a writing surface – onto which the
narrator pours out her life, animating the inanimate page over which our own
eyes pore. Still, that paper is suppressive, as the shadows of the window-bars
play across its surfaces. Visual layers emerge as the narrator tries to make
sense of what she sees, the elusive arrhythmic “pattern”: “If only that top
pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by
little” (31). Held under the surface, the submerged “pattern” is an
irregularity, the repeated figure of a creeping woman, who starts to push at
the paper’s outer membrane – trying to emerge from the amniotic wall – as she
“takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” (30). Writing as écriture féminine – in secret, excluded behind closed
doors, in an atrocious rented room – both stitches a subjectivity onto the dead
page, a monstrous graft, but also tears at those sutures, pushes viscerally
through the page to touch the material quick of the reader’s living world. This
is the marvelous horror of Gilman’s tale, its vital creepiness: that it tears
at its own pages the way our narrator tears through that paper.
Cited Things
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic
Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary
Feminist Theory. 2nd
edition. New York: Columbia
UP, 2011. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Old Westbury, NY:
The Feminist P, 1973.
Print.
- - -. Women and
Economics: The Economic Factor Between Men and
Women
as a Factor in Social Evolution. 1898. Ed. Carl
Degler.
New York:
Harper, 1966. Print.
