American Postmodernism

One theme that ran through the novel was the importance of identity, and the factors that create it. Milkman inherits his father’s name, as his father inherited his father’s name, but it does not have meaning to him. To Milkman, Macon Dead is the name for a man focused on wealth and property, even if he acquires these things at the cost of his friendship with other people within the community. Just being Macon Dead’s son makes Milkman an outcast, with Guitar as his only friend. Once Milkman rebels against his father by going to see Pilate, he learns more about the other Macon Dead, his grandfather, but does he does not feel a strong connection to him until he learns his true name, Jake, and the story of his father. History is important, both generations of history and the background given in the novel when Morrison reveals how Milkman wanted to fly like Robert Smith. Discovering that his great-grandfather had that ability and tried to bring the next generation with him fills the void in Milkman’s identity that he had been trying to eradicate with money and women. Freed from being “Dead,” Milkman feels that he belongs in this community with so many members of his family and without the sins of his father to pay for. Learning more about the men in his family gives Milkman opportunity to find a male in his family other than his father to look up to.

For Milkman and other characters in the novel, being part of the community is important, because they decide your name no matter what your parents called you at birth, hence Guitar and Empire State. Perhaps Ruth and Macon Dead keep their names because of the respect the community has for her father and their money. I also thought it was interesting that about half the time in the book Lena is referred to as “Magdalene called Lena.” This shows that she has not fully assimilated into the community, as she remains sheltered in her parents’ house and goes by two names. She seems like a flat character until she stands up to Milkman and serves as the catalyst to get him to leave Michigan. Milkman does not have a strong sense of identity at this point but even worse, he does not realize how poorly he treats his family. I liked how the female characters in the Dead family gained depth as the book progressed—the reader learned more about Ruth’s past, a different story from what Macon said about her, Corinthians lead a double life because the standards her father created could not be met, and Lena lashed out at Milkman and spoke for all of them.

To respond to Kira’s question, I was also wondering the significance of the novel to the book of the Bible of the same name and I think one parallelism is that its story is not often discussed. The Bible’s Song of Solomon is sensual, a dialogue between lovers, a natural part of life but not something that goes over so well with some Christians so it is ignored. We know it’s out there, we know it happens, but we don’t acknowledge it. The same can be said of African American’s stories. We know there is a rich past and so many stories to tell, ones not found in the traditional history books, or even the Western canon, but these stories are not discussed. Morrison creates a world and brings it to a large audience so that it can be acknowledged.

Here’s a link to Biblical Song of Solomon:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/Bible/Song_of_Solomon.html

Morrison’s Song of Solomon runs the highway of postmodern conditions, which include blackness, black womanhood versus black manhood, history or its absence, naming that connects the individual from his/her heredity or obliterates filial ties, storytelling and perspective, and the absense of objective truth. Pilate’s story, her life, however, seems to suggest a supernatural purity and truth that supercedes all others in the novel. Even Milkman, the central character, is without conscience throughout most of the novel in regards to the women in his life, a fact that Lena makes clear to him. Is Pilate Morrison’s version of the ideal, African American woman or is she distopian woman in her isolation? According to Macon Dead the Second, she is.

Morrison however, seems to suggest that Pilate’s greatest earthly flaw, her unseemly stomach which lacks the natural mark of life, the navel, is precisely that which makes her magically angelic to those who know and love her, but diabolical to those who cannot accept such an anomoly. Pilate is "expelled" from ‘normal’ life because she is percieved as ‘unnatural.’ She is a dichotemy, a "snake" to her brother Macon and ultimately a savior to Milkman, her immediate family, Reba and Hagar, and the severed family line that Milkman seeks to rediscover. Pilate’s an outcast to her black people, and yet she is self-sacrificial for her daughter, Reba, and, especially, her granddaughter, Hagar, and as Milkman comes to appreciate, her house was open and accepting to both Guitar (her murderer) and Milkman.

Pilate’s character exudes a dual condition of both witchery and divine spirituality in her isolated existence. Her nonexistent navel "isolated her." "Already without family, she was further isolated from her people, for, except for the relative bliss on the island, every other resource denied her: partnership in marriage, confessional friendship, and communal religion," and yet she is the most generous and accepting character in the novel. She attempts to reconnect with her people, specifically her estranged and distrusting property mongering brother, Macon Dead, she accepts, loves, and spoils his son, Milkman, and she continually goes without to give more to her ‘daughters.’ She is an impoverished, ostricized bootlegger ‘with a heart of gold’ and she is even a confidant to Ruth when she is pregnant with Milkman. Furthermore, Pilate seems to function as ‘a life preserver’ whereas her brother, is depicted as ruthless capitalist who is devoid of any connection to his people since his father’s death and who is even capable of murdering his unborn son. Pilate, regardless of her lifetime’s expulsion from black society at large, is more connected to her family and history than any of the other characters in the novel, as illustrated by her encounters with her father’s ghost.

Milkman is self-destructive, as illustrated when he allows Hagar to kill him (and doesn’t), and he is without a filial history or individual purpose until he discovers Shalimar and the ghosts of his ancestors buried under desserted family names. He is guided by the bones he steals from Pilate’s house and the story of her pilgrimage to Virginia after her father’s death and her confrontation with her brother years earlier. Her spirit is connected to her father’s ghost and simultaneously connects to Milkman’s quest for identity in his search for his heritage. She bridge between ‘the lost generations’ of her family and a spiritual informant of past and present to her brother’s son. At her death Milkman whitnesses the wonderful spirit that his aunt Pilate is. "There must be another like you…There’s got to be at least one more woman like you." Perhaps, she is the only woman of her kind; one that recognizes and accepts her alienation, but that loves life and family anyway.

Morrison seems to portray Pilate as a Christ figure, one that gives up her life to better her family’s life and connections. She is never accepted due to her ‘deformity,’ but she is the messenger that carries her family history- "sing."

Another question I have concerns the 7 Days. Does Mr. Smith’s organization mirror Pyncheon’s Tristero? Both operate on a silent, virtually invisible plane in society. How alike and different are the two? Did Morrison get her idea from Pyncheon since her novel was published after The Crying of Lot 49?

As I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Soloman, I searched for the novel’s relationship to postmodernism and what I noticed immediately was Morrison’s selection of names for her characters.  For example, when Macon Jr. is nicknamed Milkman by Freddie after he catches Ruth nursing her boy well beyond the time she should, Freddie coins the name “Milkman.”  Everyone in town but Macon Sr. knows why the boy is called Milkman, though Macon has his suspicions given the significance of the name.  Of course, the irony is that we know the existing meaning of being the milkman’s kid has nothing to do with why Macon Jr. becomes Milkman, and this reminded me of the postmodern idea that all signifiers circulate and recirculate existing images (and yet bear different significance depending on the observer).

Pilate is another character whose name is significant but probably not for the existing image or meaning that it is taken from.  Yes, she’s a fierce black woman disfigured by a missing belly button, but it’s not like she killed Christ or anything.  What stands out about the naming of this character is the pride her illiterate father took when choosing her name, blindly, from the Bible.  And, what could have been a one-time, arbitrary method for choosing one’s child’s name, the procedure is adapted by Macon Dead in the naming of his own children First Corinthians and Magdalene called Lena.

Last thoughts on Song of Soloman and its connection to postmodernism are that the setting, characters, and the plot didn’t really ring postmodernity for me.  What did stand out was the constant shifting of realities for the characters over time and the disappearance of stability and something solid to stand upon as each made a rite of passage into adulthood; however, these moments in the novel only led me to consider how life is and has been this way in times that we wouldn’t necessarily label postmodern.

With all the different elements running through the narrative in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, it is difficult to find a place to start.  This text, which is so imbued with history, language, place and folklore, is almost too overwhelming to dissect, and yet, I found it to be the most approachable story that we have read/watched thus far.  Perhaps this is due to the numerous and evocative descriptions of place.  I am looking back at the recently posted blog by “zpeterse.”  Here, one reader of the text identifies with the sights and smells of a certain place, the south side of Chicago.  I grew up in neighborhood called Marquette Park in Southside Chicago, and am familiar with the amalgamation of smells that waft through the air (our house was blocks away from a Nabisco factory, and no they didn’t give free cookie samples, believe me, I tried). My ties to this place help to define who I am.  What is also interesting about this text is what a full spectrum of experience helps to define place and time.  Milkman, when he is in Shalimar, becomes homesick, not just for the familiarity of place, but also misses his family and friends.  The elements of folklore also present in this story – the myth of flying, the story of Icarus – also work to create the story of a family that is now named Dead.  Though at first Milkman is driven by the greed for gold to travel the country and find his roots, on his journey his sentiments change, and he is more interested and driven by the want to know about his family, his “people.”  The struggle of this journey is echoed in the complexity of finding African American family histories, which are not always readily available.  As an aside-I work in the Alexandria Library at the Local History/Special Collections Division.  We are working now to compile a database of Slave Births, for the years 1850-1864.  This index asked slave owners to register all slave births, with names, dates, and counties in Virginia.  As I am going through and entering the information, the lists are full of mistakes, misspellings, blank spaces.  This is but a small part of the issue, but it does show the precarious nature of tracing African American family histories through slavery and beyond.  Morrison, in Song of Solomon, creates a family epic, spanning generations, which seeks to explore both the history of the family and the future of their histories

Thought this might interest you all…two of the books on our syllabus are listed here.

http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/?cnn=yes

I think that what struck me most while reading Song of Solomon was how many different kinds of slavery there are in the novel. There is, of course, the slavery from which Milkman’s ancestors are freed. But his father, Macon, who was not a slave himself, enslaves other black people. Guitar’s grandmother observes this in the beginning of the book, when Macon demands money from her, even in her impoverished state: "A nigger in business is a terrible thing to see. A terrible, terrible thing to see" (22). In a way, Milkman enslaves his sisters and his mother, or "pees" on them, as Lena points out. "Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a women and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you" (215).

It seems that the enslaver is always enslaved. Macon becomes a slave to his own greed, as he feels the need to own. He tells Milkman: "Let me tell you right now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too" (55). Milkman becomes a slave to greed as well, or hunger, as he calls it, for money (at least in the beginning). When he goes looking for the gold in Shalimar, he thinks: "The fact was he wanted the gold because it was gold and he wanted to own it. Free" (257).

I also saw, in the novel, how many prisons can exist for people. There is the obvious one, the Butlers’ house, where the killers of Jake/Macon Dead Sr. lived and where Macon and Pilate hid after their father’s death (and which just might look like the witch’s house – another prison – in Hansel and Gretel): "They couldn’t bear the stillness, the walls, the boredom of having nothing to do but wait for the day’s excitement of eating and going to the toilet. Anything was better than walking all day on carpeting, than eating the soft bland food that white people ate…" (166). There is also Milkman’s parents’ house on Not Doctor Street, from which Milkman could not seem to pry himself. But the characters imprison themselves. They allude to freedom, but they shackle themselves – Milkman with sex and liquor, Guitar with hate (although he calls it love), and Hagar with her obsession.

There is also an obvious connection between freedom and flying. All through his travels, Milkman’s old skin is peeling away, gradually freeing him from his former life – he loses his possessions, his suit is torn away, his shoes come apart, and his fine watch is splintered. It is in Shalimar, where Milkman finally has nothing, that he gains freedom: "So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself. There was nothing here to help him – not his money, his car, his father’s reputation, his suit, or his shoes. In fact they hampered him" (277).  When he is finally free, he truly gains the ability to fly, which is what he longed for, even as a little boy looking out the window: "For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it" (337). I struggled a little bit with the freedom/flying/Byrd connection – perhaps it is that true freedom is always available, but that one must take it to have it? Like taking flight?

I looked up the Song of Solomon verses in the King James bible, but I made little headway in relating them to this novel (if there is even a connection). I wonder if anyone else saw anything in them?

Morrison in Song of Soloman takes up with the problem of identity.  Milkman Dead’s body is a tabula rasa that becomes littered with everyone else’s history, culture, and desire.  In fact, through much of the story there’s a question of whether Milkman exists at all (is it I’m Milkman already Dead or Milkman Dead still alive).  The first time Milkman feels real at all was when he knocked his father into the radiator.  The Oedipal maneuver by Morrison is one of many that seems to me overtly Freudian that she is actually mocking him and distancing herself from that kind of psychological reading.  The second time, or the first time something real had "filled his mouth with salt" (183), was when Guitar gave a "crisp concreteness" to the lost gold story told to him by his father (184).  Of course, the first time an event had formed "a clean-line definite self" of Milkman, turned out to be a hoax.  The gold that promised a life of freedom and comfort turned out to be the bones of a white man, which later turned out to be the remains of his grandfather.  The gold that symbolized a "flight" from Milkman’s stalemate life turned out the be the bones of a man who had actually taken "flight".  This knowledge in the end sets Milkman, from his perspective, free.  The road to self knowledge for Milkman is, in the very least resemblance, the same as the one for Oedipa Maas. 

There is so much in this novel, it makes me dizzy thinking about what to write.  Let me say, since it looks like I’m the first to blog on the book, some generalities: this story takes place in a specific time, in specific places, within real historical realities.  Milkman Dead shares his birthday with the author, which she gives on the first page.  Most of the novel is set in what seems like Southside Chicago, even though Dead repeatedly says he’s from Michigan.  And it deals with issues related to the "Great Migration," most importantly, race riots.  Guitar takes on this overtly political role as the black radical.  While she represents Guitar’s duty (an eye for an eye) in what I took for a positive light, Morrison by the end is distancing herself from this character.  It’s unclear what Morrison thinks of Milkman by the end. Did he finally realize his true self, as a part of the Song of Soloman, as a true member of this great diasporic family, or did he, like his grandfather before him, up and leave his family and problems behind.

If cherry jam is the enemy, the unlived "other" life, then raspbery twigs represent home, the whole being, the chosen way. Ginger represents the unreal, the supernatural, the place of longing and desire. The other shore. The other world. Ginger, not grown in the United States, is not a natural smell. The brain plays tricks on the senses and ginger is not actually smelled but felt. If you’ve ever drove through south Chicago, like I have many times, the range of smells is confounding. You know that there’s the Wrigley gum plant, the soap plants, the automobile plants of Gary, In., but these smells, all mingled together, never match up in the mind to the exact source. 

As complex and problematic as the novel was in its subtle shifts in time and narratives, I found the novel to be the most dynamic and interesting yet. While all of the naratives in Russ’s novel are rife with feminist rhetoric (even Jeaninne ultimately rejects the patriarchal assumptions of her self-worth, i.e. marriage and children), each woman is unique; none fold to the male ontological notion that all women are "essentially" feminine. They don’t possess the same characteristics, preferences, interests, and capabilites and none of the women want what the men in the novel think they want: child-rearing and a husband.

As Haraway articulates, as does Russ in multiple scenes throughout The Female Man, women (feminist cyborgs and the like) do not live cookie-cutter lives according to essentialist theories that prescribe to women what they should be because it is ‘their nature.’ This point is reminiscent of The Intuitionist/ Bell Hooks discussion in which I asserted that while Whitehead’s protagonist is a black woman who encounters other black ‘folk’ in the novel, Whitehead’s black characters are tremendously varied, none of whom lend to an essentialist ontology. Whether these characters conform to traditional archetypes of black experience (cliche’s according to some) or not, none are "essentially" the same. Similarly, Russ’s ‘female men,’ though they are all genetic analogues, are all very different people. Each is a product of her (what Bourdieu calls) habitus. We are told that their respective universes are alternatives to one another, and by extension parallels since each produces the four ‘analoguos’ women, but each world is a radically different environment from the next, which yields strikingly different subjects. According to John Fiske, "Culture is not concieved of as the asthetic ideals of form and beauty found in great art, or in more humanist terms as the voice of "the human spirit" that transcends boundaries of time and nation to speak of "a hypothetical universal man (the gender is deliberate- women play little or no role in this conception of culture)." Russ implies through her variant women that there is no universal experience of women. All lead unique, individuated lives within her respective ideological constructs (male in Joanna’s and Jeaninne’s realities). ‘Essentially,’ typical female experience is one of subordination according Haraway, but the plethora of possible female identites are limitless. Women must unite with other women consciously (Haraway) since women are so diverse. Women’s groups are not ‘natural,’ but they are conscious constructs. Russ’s female protagonists, such as Jael, the assassin, "The Reasoner," lives by her own constructed, conscious "hatred" of anything male. Janet, ‘the savior,’ is another utopian possibility of female identity not yet known in the world of the reader since we still live in a gendered society. 

Russ also implies that Janet’s world is the utopian reality in which women become the historians (Janet explicitly revels in her telling of Whileawayan history since the plague), the scientists, the dominant keepers of civilization, but this female uplift is only possible if gender is no longer a fissure in the human race. Haraway suggests that "imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis" may also create "a world without end." I don’t agree. Men and women are men and women. Whether gender is a social construct or a ‘natural’ phenomenon or combination of socialization and biology, I like being a woman and understood as being such. Thanks.

"The cyborg incarnation" of Janet is not bound to the history of men, which according to the anti-feminist characters in Russ’s novel, such as the men, is "a very bad mistake." As ‘the sharp glasses man’ at the party on page 43 tells Janet, "You can’t challenge men in their own fields." This of course signifies all fields in Joanna’s world, a world in which she has literally become ‘a female man’ because she has pursued a line of work in a ‘man’s field’ as a writer and, God forbid, a thinker. "If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and rightnow very bright and beady eyes, that I too am a Man and not at all a Woman."

I found the end of the novel to be problematic at the point at which Jael claims responsibility for Janet’s world, the genderless utopian future that neither Joanna nor Jeaninne will ever be a part of. How is it that Jael’s war and its objective, the ultimate demolition of the male species, can yield Janet’s world if the two women of different realities from two different times, Jael of the relative past and Janet of the ‘undetectable’ future, have crossed paths? According to an earlier passage in the novel on page seven, the narrative voice (perhaps Joanna, perhaps the author, perhaps a muddling of the two) informs the reader "the paradox of time travel ceases to exist, for the Past one visits is never one’s own Past but always somebody else’s; or rather, one’s visit to the Past instantly creates another Present…and what you visit is the Past belonging to that Present- an entirely different matter from your own Past." So, since Janet visited Joanna’s world, one alternative past, but a past that isn’t hers, and Jael’s world, another version of the past that also isn’t Janet’s, then neither Past is Janet’s. Jael tells Janet that the plague is a false record of history generated by the women in power after the war in Jael’s universe in which all men on earth were wiped out. However, though perhaps what Jael tells Janet was true prior to Janet’s time travel, Janet has existed or entered Jael’s reality, and therefore, everything from that point on changes retroactively. So, either the plague really did happen in Janet’s past prior to time travelling/ universe hopping or it was a lie. Either Janet’s entry into Jael’s universe instantly created another present in Janet’s world (one that is not Janet’s), in which the plague was a socially generated fabrication, or it wiped out Whileaway altogether, for if Jael’s war is the cause of a genderless reality, not the historical the plague of Janet’s actual present, then Janet’s Whileaway and its history no longer exist. Perhaps Janet can never return to Whileaway because it no longer exists. By visiting the Pasts that are not the pasts of her present, or visiting pasts that could have been her Past before the plague and therefore, retroactively changed everything, her former present reality might not exist in exactly the way it was before she started universe hopping, in which case, Whileaway is not Whileaway and never really was.

I’m still very confused about this, as evident in my rambling. I’m sure there are numerous combinations of realities and mutant worlds, and other possible impossibilities that Russ attempts to unfurl. I’d like to know more about them.

Here’s how you cite an online posting (according to Gibaldi’s MLA Handbook, p 233):

Author’s Name.  “Title of the Document.”  Online posting.  The date when the material was posted (day month year).  The name of the forum.  The date it was accessed <website address in brackets>.

For example:

Lavagnino, John.  “OCR and Handwriting.”  Online posting.  7 May 2002.  Humanist Discussion Group.  24 May 2002 <http://list.village.virginia.edu/
lists_archive/Humanist/v16/0001.html>.

Rather than attempt to untangle the mysteries of gender or lack of gender in The Female Man, I have decided to post this week on the use of names in postmodern literature.  I am interested in knowing if an attribute of postmodern literature is the symbolic (and often overtly so) naming of characters.  The prosecution offers the the generic women in The Female Man as Exhibit A:  Spossisa (“three times divorced”), Eglantissa (“thinks only of clothes”), Aphrodissa (“cannot keep her eyes open because of her false eyelashes”), Clarissa (“will commit suicide”), Lucrissa (“strained forehead shows that she’s making more money than her husband”), Wailissa (“engaged in a game of ain’t-it-awful”), Lamentissa (Wailissa’s partner for the “ain’t-it-awful” game), Travailissa (“usually only works”), Saccharissa (“naughty” and “playing a round of His Little Girl across the bar with the host”), Amicissa (“the Good Sport”), Ludicrissa (“too plain to be invited”), Amphibissa (“never invited…for obvious reasons”), Domicissa (“never opens her mouth in public”), Dulcississa (“whose standard line is, ‘Oh, you’re so wonderful!’”). . .(34)

 

According to my trusty 1995 Webster’s New World Dictionary, here are the meanings of words similar in spelling:

spouse = husband or wife

eglantine = a European rose with sweet-scented leaves and pink flowers

aphrodisiac = arousing sexual desire

clarity (?) = clearness

lucre = riches; money

wail = to make a long, loud, sad cry, as in grief or pain

lament = to mourn

travail = very hard work OR intense pain; agony

saccharine = of or like sugar OR too sweet

amicable (?) = friendly; peaceable

OR amiss (?) = astray OR improper

ludicrous = causing laughter because absurd or ridiculous

amphibious = [living a double life] that can live or operate on land or water

domestic = of the home or family OR tame; said of animals

dulcet = soothing or pleasant to hear

Some of the connections seem rather blatant and, in The Female Man, seem to clearly reinforce the existence of female stereotypes [Aphrodissa, for example, attempts to arouse sexual desire with the stereotypical girl-maker, that is, make-up (the pinnacle of which may be the false eyelashes, associated clearly with a female eye-batting approach to winning a male’s attention)]; however, some I find surprisingly intriguing (Domicissa, for example, who never speaks in public, matching with the “tame” meaning for domestic, and even furthermore, tame in a way to be “said of animals,” perhaps indicating that Domicissa falls into an animal-like silence in public – due to repeated male domination?)

 

As Exhibits B and C in the symbolic name trial, I offer the names from Crying [Oedipa, of course, (with an Oedipus correlation), but also “Mucho” Maas (“much more”), Dr. Hilarius, San Narciso [name of a place, but comparable to narcissism – self-love – or Narcissus, Manny Di Presso (manic depression?), Metzger’s “actor/lawyer friend,” and the list goes on…] and from Lathe (the obvious George Orr – noticeably similar to George Orwell).

Is it an attribute of postmodernism to make heavy symbolic use of character names, or does it just happen to work out in these cases?  Also, is the symbolism/meaning/comparison always so blatant, or are these authors trying to ridicule a "need" (of their readers) to make such obvious connections?  Lastly, are the meanings of the names as obvious as we/I think they are, or is there more to them?

In keeping with this week’s theme — deep uncertainty and an attendant tentativeness — I’d like to make a quick observation that’ll certainly bear reconsideration as soon as I click "Publish."  I’m not so sure I agree with much in Haraway’s essay, for many reasons.  The first is that, as Jarrod pointed out, the style is unnecessarily mushy.  Any call to arms that declares itself a "manifesto" might have been more effective if written more clearly.  [It’s possible that Haraway is attempting to avoid the phallogocentricism of most academic arguments, but then she might be essentializing a ‘feminine’ discourse that people like Russ are so intent on satirizing].  At any rate, that’s not the main problem I had with the essay.  I wanted to see a more thoughtful examination of how the blurring boundaries Haraway outlines lead to oppositional opportunities as opposed to an unwitting support of transnational capitalism — especially as it concerns the boundary between "animal-human (organism) and machine" (152).  When I think of cyborgs in contemporary society, I perhaps incorrectly think of the person walking along with an iPod in one ear and a phone implanted in the other — or maybe those people caressing silvery, fetishized objects upon which they push buttons in order to play some video game as they walk zombified through campus.  [I’m a Luddite, of course…].  My point is that the blurring of organism and machine seems to service the economy, in the sense that people don’t use cell phones to foment revolution; they use them because they’re a status device with cool ring tones, and perhaps they can’t bear their own thoughts for the few minutes it takes to get from the parking lot to the classroom (which becomes inevitably dull, unless you sit in the back and play that video game).  In short, I’m inclined to believe that the blurred distinction between humans and machines "is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet" rather than "about lived social and bodily realities" (154) — and Haraway hasn’t really given me any reason to believe otherwise.

  I thought the epigraph to the left of page one (from R. D. Laing’s The Policics of Experience) deserves some discussion.  Its placement on the left side a two-page spread, as opposed to on a page by itself undermines its importance, yet it sets the tone for how Russ perceives male-female relationships and expresses them in the novel.  It is easy for the reader to overlook this passage from a 1967 book in order to begin the main text (I admit I did at first).  However, this brief excerpt highlights major points of discussion for Russ.  Laing, using the names Jack and Jill (notice the “J” theme and how nicely that works out) as examples, says that Jack has the power to “invalidate [Jill’s] experience” and this sense of a woman needing to be validated is expressed later in the book, when Russ is talking about dating rituals and the need for women to have men acknowledge their existence.  Joanna sums this up when she says that she has said to men: “Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me” (140).  She was at one point dependent on a male to define who she was.

  Jack, Laing continues, also has the ability to make the Jill doubt herself and question that an experience ever existed, by “shift[ing] the modality of her experience from memory to imagination.”  Jeannine, the most conventionally feminine of all the characters (her name resembles the word feminine as well—perhaps that is why she gets so mad when she is called Jeannie, because her name loses some of its audio ties to the adjective she identifies so closely with, or perhaps because no one is listening to her and her needs), has this experience of her memory losing credibility when she decides she wants to marry Cal despite all the inadequacies of their relationship, because she wants to be married.  She is daydreaming about being able to tell her mother she is going to have a baby (within the confines of wedlock of course) and “Cal himself hardly figures in this at all, for Jeannine has forgotten his laconism, his passivity, his strange mournfulness…” (131).  I think there are definitely people like this in society today, who get married to be married, but often times, men who have been divorced get remarried more quickly than their spouses to be married and to have someone take care of them, fulfill the role that Jeannine does for Cal (doing the dishes, all the cleaning because who else will do it), so this marriage for marriage’s sake has evolved in the past 30 years but still reinforces the “angel of the home” expectation of women.

  The last section of Laing explains how this type of manipulating another person continues because you question the sincerity of the accuser: “How can you think such a thing?” and then by placing that doubt and guilt in the accuser’s head, you make them want to prove that they don’t think that way at all.  This allows the cycle to continue, so there are multiple passages in the book where men make women are made to feel guilty and so the cycle of inequality continues. A more extreme example of this is how rape is the woman’s fault because her skirt was too short, she looked at the guy, etc.  Russ is calling the reader’s attention to the fact that society is the way it is partly because of men, and partly because women allow themselves to be manipulated by men.

Here’s what I’m wondering. Is it possible that Jeannine, Joanna, Jael, and Janet are all the same person? I don’t mean the same genetic material living on different worlds in different times. I mean, is there only ONE of her and the rest (or all) are schizophrenic creations of an oppressed mind? Yes, I realize that they all have their own stories and it doesn’t seem like they would mesh well into one brain in one time period. But here’s my theory: Joanna (I’ll use her for the sake of argument; it could really be any of them I guess) is a woman living in 1969 under the patriarchal values of a capitalistic, technology-driven society. She goes to parties where men spout misogynistic rhetoric at her and call her a “prude” for not putting out. Her “doctor….lawyer…janitor…president…manager…etc.” are all male. Her brother (keep in mind they’re all the same person) tells her that she should marry anyone, it doesn’t matter who. She is called “bitchy, castrating, unattractive, neurotic, etc.” when she expresses her opinion. She is expected to sit idly by while a man she does not like nuzzles her ear and gropes her. She is sexually harassed. She is raped and feels massive guilt because rape is what females live with and what males “get away with.” Couldn’t living in this world drive anyone crazy? Perhaps that is what Russ is trying to tell us. Joanna (or Jeannine or Janet or Jael) creates alternate selves to deal with each different reality that she encounters. Jeannine is the “feminine” one who DOES want marriage and children, but is confused. Jael HINTS at being there from the beginning, but doesn’t show up until the end where she is depicted as a warrior who kills men and uses them for their bodies. Is that what the rape victim in Joanna wants to do to males? Janet is the only semi-happy character and she lives on a planet where none of this is possible. Is this the escapist in Joanna? Are all of these separate, yet equally important urges within the same person? And because of these different urges did the subject have to split into different personalities to cope?

 

The part I feel where it is most evident of a multiple personality is when Janet sleeps with Laura Rose. The narrator says she is there in “spirit,” but lives among the rafters. If it is multiple personalities then this scene almost seems as if Joanna has an out-of-body experience while watching herself do something that is “wrong”—such as lesbian sex.

Well, there you have it. It’s not too well-thought out, but just a suspicion I was harboring while reading the book. I don’t know…it seems like an interesting episode of Law and Order: SVU (not that I put the TV and novel on the same level)or a companion to Fight Club. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong…

Referring to the “communication sciences,” which she claims are tools that “embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide,” Haraway says:  “the solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information….The biggest threat to such a power is interruption of communication” (164).  I immediately connected this quote to The Female Man (and perhaps I’m taking Haraway’s idea out of context, because in the article she’s referring to biotechnology), but this struck me as somewhat applicable to the overall narrative structure of Russ’ novel.  The Female Man uses what I think we can all agree is a jarring narrative technique:  Russ has essentially interrupted the flow of communication of information to the reader by presenting the story in a jumbled, incoherent way.  This idea of language as a force of domination harks back to Lacan, whom Haraway matches in a dichotomy against Freud, the former psychoanalyst representing “the informatics of domination” column (161).  (From the course reader I’m getting the impression that postmodernism is all about dichotomous columnar charts…j/k ).  It seems that feminists have embraced Lacanian theory so enthusiastically because his view of psychoanalysis is heavily dependent on language; and if sexism and patriarchy are embodied in the language we speak, then we can do something about them.  I don’t know if this “interruption” was Russ’ intention in organizing the novel the way she did, or if the effect of her narrative structure challenges our conceptions of women, feminism or gender relationships; but the novel’s presentation certainly challenged me, and this seems in step with the feminist movements–which, as I perceive them, aim to challenge traditional conceptions of women and their place in our culture, among other things.  

One of my very first questions about The Female Man is why are there four alter-selves? Why four? What is the significance? Throughout the majority of the book there are only three, and even at the end when Jael becomes more prominent in the story, the girls are still frequently referred to as the only three. And yet I still wonder, why four? I’m not well versed in literary symbolism, even the most recognizable, so while maybe most of the class might automatically know, I am honestly perplexed. So I consider the earthiness of the novel as a whole. There is a lot of significance placed on the separate “worlds.” There is a huge inner-discussion on nature vs. nurture. And about a bah-zillion references to the moon. And so I’m considering these earthy issues, and I think that there are specifically four and only four because there are four primary directions. God help me if there is a fancy word for this. But, each girl represents the different direction that the one soul (?) went, and in physical terms, there are only four possible directions one can go. However, after Jael’s explanation of how she found the girls and how her Womanland people can explore all of the separate states of “time,” you were kind of left to wonder if there were even more J’s out there in yet undiscovered worlds. So with that hanging in question, my four directions theory might fall to pieces. However, considering only the information provided, there are only four J’s and to satisfy my own curiosity, I think it’s to represent the four directions.

Another issue that I debated was Russ’s obvious conclusion on nature vs. nurture. She seems to be illustrating her belief that one’s surroundings determine how an individual develops. Regardless of genes, these four girls are completely different and each has their own unique self based on where they are from and the separate lives that they’ve lived. If there are suppose to be kin-like similarities they were brief and insignificant, because although I had a hard enough time keeping the initial three J’s separate, I certainly didn’t find a repetition of similar behavior, physical attributes or thought patterns. These girls were very different. Even in the description of the Manland, where they surgically alter the sex of people, the idea was that however they were raised, that’s how they’d turn out. If they were molded from a young age to be feminine, then they would serve a feminine role in adulthood, and if they were raised in a masculine environment (the rich men’s chosen children) then they would grow up to be soldiers, etc. Russ didn’t seem to put any weight in the genetic force behind someone’s development. I don’t have a conclusion on these thoughts exactly, it’s just an issue that I kept noticing and wondering why she chose nurture over nature. The only thing I can think is that perhaps to put such determining weight in nature would be admitting that there is absolute truth. That genetically you will without a doubt become A certain person. Whereas by basing someone’s individualism on nurture, it is all up to chance, and thus the four J’s similarities and differences are surprising and unknown. Very much looking forward to class so I can better understand this crazy book.