Category Archives: Gender Relations

Interplay of dialect and descriptive prose

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As I read Hurston for this time, as with the short story of hers that we read, the novel’s parallel regional dialect and more formal descriptive prose struck me. It occurred to me that reading these two tones of language alongside each other is like listening to a symphony: first, you might hear the more expressive, upbeat, jolty part of the music, and then it slows to a flowing, more pensive section that somehow seems to explain or contextualize the first. For example, Janie’s utterance to her grandmother that “‘Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think. Ah…'” is very evocative of her sense of mourning in and of itself (24). However, this feeling of mourning and disappointment is enriched by the text that follows shortly after, which I find absolutely transcendent:

“She knew things that nobody had ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind….She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making….She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25).

Janie “knew” all of the above, but she couldn’t say it all to her grandmother; neither would her grandmother want to hear it, nor might Janie be able to communicate this newly acquired wisdom to anyone other than herself. I love the way Hurston lets us into Janie’s conscience here, without necessarily breaking down that divide that still exists for her between her inner self and the characters around her.

Becoming a Woman

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In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston embodies the modernist idea of the “new woman” in the character of Janie Crawford. Even in the first few chapters, we sense that Janie is a woman who is inclined to do what she wants and for her own pleasure. Although her two marriages in the first six chapters are ultimately failures, they act more as stepping-stones for Janie to discover herself: “She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25). Hurston suggests that Janie is learning about herself, learning what she does and does not like, and in that process, she is becoming an independent woman.

Nonetheless, Janie struggles between what she wants and what society expects from a woman. She hates when Joe Starks bosses her around, but she also feels the need to please him and obey him because that is what is expected of a wife:

“Janie made her face laugh after a short pause, but it wasn’t too easy. She had never thought of making a speech, but didn’t know if she cared to make one at all. It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things. But anyway, she went down the road behind him that night feeling cold.” (43)

Janie’s struggle is reminiscent of Larsen’s Helga in Quicksand: both characters desire something, whether it is sex or independence, but the internalized rules of society prevent either from immediately achieving it. However, Janie’s internal monologue is much more reflective than Helga’s, and we sense that she has the potential to truly become that “new woman.”

Narrator or Author

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In our last class we discussed the line that exists between the author and the narrator. The narrator of a story is just another character of the novel. All the opinions and thoughts expressed by the narrator do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author. This was one of the critics expressed by Du Bois for Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. Thurman’s narrator would both criticize Emma Lou, while at the same time express her thoughts, almost always self-hating, as his/her own opinions.  In these instances it can be difficult to distinguish the author from the narrator. Had the novel been in the first person point of view, from Emma Lou’s perspective, there would not have been any accusations towards Thurman. Another example provided in class was Nabokov’s famous work, Lolita. In this case as well, the narrator, who also happens to be the main character, is often confused for the author. This caused Nabokov a lot of problems as well as creating a lot of controversy.

This brings me to The Berlin Stories. In this case the author and the narrator both share the same name and a lot of other similarities, including the experiences mentioned in the novel. Since the work is fiction, are we as the readers supposed to separate the author or from the narrator? This is made very difficult with the fact that they both share a name.

Something else I found very interesting was the fact that this is the first piece or writing that has the average man as the storyteller. Stories such as The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men have this same man. In The Great Gatsby the main character is Gatsby, but the narrator, who is also a character in the story, is Nick Carraway and in All the King’s Men, the story is about Willie Stark but the story is told by Jack Burden. Up until now, we have only had an unknown, invisible character as the narrator. This is the first instance of a character being a vessel to tell the stories of other people, such as Sally Bowles. The Berlin Stories, were published in 1945, maybe this technique is a more recent development.

New Women

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The character of Sally in The Berlin Stories helped me to gain a better understanding of Modernism’s New Woman. As I was reading I began to see the essence of Sally in several of the female characters in modernist literature. I thought of Sally Seton from Mrs. Dalloway, Daisy Buchanan from the The Great Gatsby, Kitty Baldry from The Return of the Soldier, Lily from The House of Mirth, Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun also Rises, Petronella from “Till September Petronella.” (Although not within the modernist time frame, I also thought of Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s because of the parallels in the relationship between Holly and the narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the relationship between Sally and Chris.)

Notwithstanding the individuality of these women, to varying degrees they share very similar characteristics and personality traits. They are sexaully liberated and are very aware of the power of their bodies to their male counterparts and even to themselves. They are explicit in their desires. They are outspoken. They are at times selfish. Their personalities are sometimes dramatic and purposely exaggerated as if they constantly have to perform to an audience. They are also clever and skilled at manipulation if not checked by other characters. One thing that is important to note is that they are also all seemingly white.

Is Emma Lou a New Woman? Are there Black female characters in modernist literature that are New Women? We have discussed in class the supposed responsibility put upon Black writers to be representative of their race. There were damaging stereotypes that plagued Black women at the time. These writers must “uplift” the race. Does that mean not including women characters that share the characteristics of New Woman? I think Emma Lou is a type of New Woman.

 

Public Spaces in Rhys’s “Till September”

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{I’ve finally gotten back to my computer over break—apologies!}

One thing that very much impacted me on my way back through Rhys’s stories, especially “Till September Petronella,” is the way that public space is treated. Or rather, how public space treats the protagonist. There are explicitly antagonistic moments, like “No Models, No Hawkers”—a definite statement about how the metropolitan anonymous environ categorizes, simplifies, and excludes its outsiders.

But there are also more atmospheric moments, like in the story’s opening, when there “was a barrel organ playing…all the tunes I liked.” We realize shortly that this is actually a moment of reprieve, a brief oasis: the protagonist likes music, finds small bits of solace there, but in general has the sense that her colorless London is “spiteful.” Being in public is a continual performance for the speaker—maybe the accompaniment of church bells and barrel organs is something like a soundtrack emphasizing that performance. London is home—“And just for a while [being glad to be back] bears you up”—but not a home where the protagonist can be at ease. “You get round the corner,” she says, “and it lets you drop.”

The sense of ongoing, draining public performance is one of the underlying betrayals in the story: even the members of the small, disintegrating party on their retreat aren’t really in private. They’re performing class, privilege, power over one another, and in that context, there’s no real chance for intimacy. The story’s most intimate moments are probably the protagonist’s kiss with her reflection, or her silently moving through the house with her memories of Estelle. Her private self is dominated by the imperative to achieve that public performance successfully—and the failure in one literal performance is a telling tether for the rest of her public identity. The ways in which women were allowed to present and perform their identity publicly—putting on makeup in public, riding bicycles—was only recently shifting, and Rhys’s women characters feel painfully mired in past standards, performances, and limitations, even if they have been ostensibly revised and relaxed.

Lady Bruton’s Gender Ambivalence

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Lady Bruton’s apathetic, and perhaps even antagonistic, attitude toward the wives of her male friends, such as Clarissa Dalloway, reminds me of the attitude Gertrude Stein takes toward her partner Alice B. Toklas and the “genius’ wives” who she expects Alice to entertain while she talks to the male geniuses in Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

“Thus, when [Lady Bruton] said in her offhand way ‘How’s Clarissa?’ husbands had difficulty in persuading their wives and indeed themselves, of her interest in women who often got in their husbands’ way, prevented them from accepting posts abroad, and had to be taken to the seaside in the middle of the session to recover from influenza. Nevertheless her inquiry, ‘How’s Clarissa?’ was known by women infallibly, to be a signal from a well-wisher, from an almost silent companion, whose utterances…signified recognition of some feminine comradeship which went beneath masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and Mrs. Dalloway” (106)

We sense at the end of this passage, however, that Lady Bruton is also a self-identified, card-carrying woman, and her loyalties lie with women as well as, and apart from, her bonds to their husbands, “beneath masculine lunch parties.” Lady Bruton, like Gertrude Stein, insists on creating a female-mediated space, where she holds authority, even if the other most powerful people in the room are all men; in Stein’s case, those men are artists like Picasso, and in Lady Bruton’s, they are men like Dalloway and Whitbread. It’s an odd in-between place that Lady Bruton holds, between feeling a kinship to her female “comrade[s]” and dismissing them in favor of their husbands, considering them to be mere accessories to their husbands’ more important trajectories. Nevertheless, her unmarried, self-empowering, gender-ambivalent societal status is certainly radical.

On the “New Woman” of the Modernist Era

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From Marianne DeKoven, “Modernism and Gender”:

Shifts in gender relations at the turn of the century were a key factor in the emergence of Modernism. The period from 1880 to 1920, within which Modernism emerged and rose to preeminence as the dominant art form in the West (it remained dominant until the end of World War II), was also the heyday of the first wave of feminism, consolidated in the woman suffrage movement. The protagonist of this movement was known as the “New Woman”: independent, educated, (relatively) sexually liberated, oriented more toward productive life in the public sphere than toward reproductive life in the home.

The New Woman was dedicated, as Virginia Woolf passionately explained in “Professions for Women,” to the murder of the “Angel of the House,” the notorious poetic idealization of Victorian nurturant-domestic femininity. This New Woman inspired a great deal of ambivalent modernist characterization, from Hardy’s Sue Bridehead and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler to Chopin’s Edna Pontellier and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe. (174)

Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) is an interesting text to read alongside the notion of the New Woman.

How so?