Internalization of an External Gaze: The Underside of Consciousness

(From Thursday, September 9, 2010)

Standing by the bamboos she had a clear view to the sea, but anyone passing could stare at her. They stared, sometimes they laughed. Long after the sound was far away and faint she kept her eyes shut and her hands clenched... ‘Oh, let me alone,’ she would say, ‘let me alone.’ –Mother (20)

Such is the scene we enter upon at the beginning Wide Sargasso Sea, the short ‘mad woman in the attic’ novel by Jean Rhys. The novel’s central female character, Antoinette, spends her life from childhood unto death entrapped by a powerful “Panopticon” stare aimed at her by former Jamaican slaves and wealthy European gentlemen. She is at once branded as an inferior Other, and soon internalizes this identity. Thus branded, she is forever exiled to an uninhabitable margin of society, where, tragically, she flounders and perishes. Irene Visser writes extensively about such an imprisoning gaze in her 1997 Journal of Gender Studies piece, “Reading pleasure: Light in August and the theory of the gendered gaze.” Her two strongest points-- 1) that the external gaze is unconsciously internalized by those at whom it is aimed; and 2) that the appropriation and commodification tied with it fosters in its victims a fierce rebellion against domination-- I will apply to the visible and invisible results of this social prison-state in Wide Sargasso Sea’s post-slavery 19th Century Jamaica.
In all reality, Coulibri Estate begged to be disdained. For generations it had been host to slavery’s cruelest passion, namely, the burgeoning wealth of a few English planters on the suffering backs of millions of innocent victims. After slavery was outlawed in British territory, however, this wealth and power vanished immediately. As nearly all of the former planters retreated either to the large cities or back home to England altogether, eventually Antoinette’s family occupies it as one of the last remaining English plantations in the country. Their isolation quickly becomes a friendless cell as former slaves, eager to employ their fresh power over and against her now-powerless family, begin harassing Antoinette and her mother. She watches as her mother absorbs daily abuse until “at last she refused to leave the house at all” (18). An important observation suddenly dawns upon Antoinette: “Standing by the bamboos [her mother] had a clear view to the sea, but anyone passing could stare at her” (18). Her family’s position becomes perfectly clear to her: they are vulnerable on all sides to a hostile, hating, guarding stare.
Visser paints the situation of Antoinette’s isolation bleakly, claiming in her extensive abstract,

The gaze is external: ‘I see from only one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.’ It is elusive, inapprehensible, a controlling influence that subjects and subjectivates.

This is clearly the case at Coulibri Estate. In the young girl’s active mind, she quickly comes to understand a distinct differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Girls her age taunt her, jeering “Go away white cockroach, go away…Nobody want you” (23). Her playmate Tia explains the situation rather more rough-hewn. In an internal voice, Antoinette recollects Tia’s words one afternoon: “She hear all we poor like beggar. We ate salt fish-- no money for fresh fish…Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger” (24).
It is here that Antoinette’s instinctive inmate ‘Otherness’ becomes, as Visser claims, dangerously internalized: “The gaze is always alert,” she says, “omnipresent, differentiating… branding as inferior… [It] is most powerful when internalized as the ‘underside of consciousness’” (Abstract). Antoinette reveals the gaze’s impact on her internal consciousness when she confesses, “She is ashamed of me, what Tia said is true” (26). Not only has the stare surrounded Antoinette, it has penetrated her heart. Visser anticipates a probable conclusion for the girl’s troubled mind: “The internalization of that controlling and discriminating gaze is an important aspect of [a character’s] later psychic conflicts” (Abstract).
Indeed, Antoinette can never escape this looming fate. As she grows up and eventually marries, the domination of the gaze transfers from the former slaves at Coulibri to her English husband. Antoinette is effectively sold to Mr. Rochester in an act that confirms what Visser and others call the “commodification” aspect of a dominating society. Commodification describes the point at which something non-object is transformed into a commodity, and sold, bought, or in any manner appropriated to the control of someone else. In terms of the external gaze, it is representative of the viewer’s desire for mastery and control. As Visser points out examining the work of writer John Berger, “A gendered, male gaze controls woman, but also desires woman; and while it is directed at woman for sexual pleasure, it may also contain resentment and anger.” Every one of these qualities is identifiable in Antoinette’s husband—for instance, the desire for control over his wife’s finances; adopting Bertha as a new and foreign name for her; the strong urge to “kill” her sexually (92); and the hatred with which he conquers Antoinette’s “magic”, her “hatred”, and her “beauty” (170).
In his conquest over his wife, however, Mr. Rochester faces strong opposition. Antoinette resists his edge over her, at one point poisoning him, at another drawing blood with a savage to his arm, and ultimately burning to the ground (presumably) his fine English manor. She is conflicted internally by an unwillingness to bend to his control. Visser examines a similar resistance in another literary character, “Joe” from William Faulkner’s Light in August. She identifies behavior in him that fits Antoinette perfectly: “In order to keep his sense of personal integrity, Joe has to oppose and fight any attempts at domination and mastery over him.” According to her, this is the instinctive response to a life spent in the shadow of the external gaze.
For her entire life, Antoinette has known only this shadow, only this external gaze peering over guarded walls and piercing her internal conscience. Unfortunately, not until the crashing conclusion of the novel, when she destroys Mr. Rochester’s house (though also herself) is she able to resist successfully. What began in isolated protest from the meager walls of Coulibri follows through to her ultimate psychic conflict, the “mad woman in the attic’ conflict that Rhys envisioned as prequel to the same in Jane Eyre. Antoinette’s life in between is full of a strife for which she cannot be held responsible. As a powerless member of society imprisoned behind the stares, gossip, lies and objectification of both the black Jamaicans and the white Europeans, she can do nothing but close her eyes, clinch her fists, and sigh ‘Let me alone, just let me alone.’

Post-colonial Metamorphosis in Zadie Smith's White Teeth

--the growing divide between parent and hybrid species.
(From Wednesday, December 8, 2010.)

Even in the darkness, Irie could see Clara scowl. “Permishon for what? Koo go and share and ogle at poor black folk? Dr. Livingshone, I prejume? Iz dat what you leant from da Shalfenz? Because if thash what you want, you can do dat here. Jush sit and look at me for shix munfs! (313)

This speech by Clara is an eruption of confused resentment, spouted during a late night argument between her and her only child, Irie. Gaze, attitude, and voice cover the ground between the two women in a mist of bitter feelings as they face each other off: Clara, middle-aged, crouched beside the traditional roots of her Jamaican heritage, against Irie, 17 yrs old, standing headheldhigh with the propriety of a proper British teenager. The broken words Clara speaks smack of the uneducated speech of Afro-Caribbean dialect, working thus to identify her with her family's rich history, while Irie, who has been seemingly metamorphosing into a different person after studying beneath the pseudo-British Chalfens, reflects an altered perspective and attitude raging downward at her mother. This passage thus sets the stage for the fissured conflict between Clara and Irie and the broader clash of generations—the traditional and the hybrid.

In this speech Clara draws a subtle yet clear distinction between herself and her daughter. A significant phrase in this passage is “Dr. Linvinshone, I prejume?”—an expression which hearkens back to the earliest periods of colonization and Christianization of Africa, the great unpeeling of the vast dark continent. When American explorer and journalist Henry Stanley first met Dr. Livingstone in 1871 on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, he reported greeting him with these words in a measure of “cowardice and false pride" (see footnote). The words reflect marked deference and were probably similarly spoken by Clara, packed also with an underhanded use of the “absurd intonation” she remarks about being taught to “a generation of English kids” (303)--perhaps directing them as a mockery of Irie's British education. She cleverly uses them also to refer to the historical tragedies associated with Africa’s colonization. She locates herself among the “poor black folk” whom she imagines Dr. Livingstone and others, particularly the Chalfens, “ogling” under the pretense of aiming to help them.
Apart from this, her garbled words, “Jush sit and look at me for shix munfs!” seem to pack a hidden resentment toward Irie, as if Clara feels that her daughter has become a detached member of her family. She could easily feel betrayed by Irie’s pretentious attitude (seen in the previous dialogue) after complementing her prior to the argument on her “honest to God Bowden” body (222). In Clara’s view, Irie’s new criticizing perspective, then, has separated her from what she truly is, or at least from what Clara perceives her to truly be.
Indeed, Irie's speech does seem to reflect this. She speaks down at her mother, saying “Why can’t you just sit up properly and talk to me properly and drop the ridiculous little-girl voi—” (313). Is this merely insolence on the teenager’s part, or has the time she’s spent with the Chalfens convinced her that she’s of some other breed than her mother? Irie leaves this conversation reflecting that her “parents were damaged people, missing hands, missing teeth” (314). She is thus in fact, as Clara accuses, “ogling” her mother and father, even dismembering them. Her perspective has effectively morphed into something disconnected from its roots.
Along with her newly adopted gaze and attitude, Irie’s actions reveal a sly power rising against her parents. The narrator describes her as having developed a “well-worn tactic” to get what she wants from her mother: “She knew from experience that her mother was most vulnerable when in bed; late at night she spoke softly like a child, her fatigue gave her a pronounced lisp” (312). This is top-rate scientific manipulation, taking advantage of her mother at her weakest point. This behavior is reminiscent of colonizing practices McClintock describes in her piece, in which she discusses the invader studying the desired territory and culture before piercing it, as it were, directly between the armor (see footnote). Often the fatal blow to a nation before its completed colonization was the establishment of a dominant language. When a colonizing nation places its language at the top of the educational hierarchy, for example, the newly ‘othered’ language always takes on a stigma of simplicity, rudeness, even savagery. This is an ancient tactic, mastered by such conquistador masterminds as Alexander the Great and Hernán Cortés. Irie makes the method her own. When Clara is most linguistically incapacitated she is most vulnerable to manipulation. Irie is well-aware that this occurs at night whenever Clara removes her false teeth--teeth which have acted as her most loyal protection since her moped accident. With her teeth removed she opens up a gap in her armor just large enough for Irie’s scheming devices.
Thus, Irie demonstrates a bold and thorough severance of the bond between her and her parents, especially Clara. A stark divide has been crafted over time that distinguishes Irie as her own breed apart from that of her parents. As a second generation immigrant, Irie has developed her own version of a colonizer’s gaze that scientifically observes defects in her parents’ physical and symbolic bodies. Whereas she rests on a podium of education, possesses a backdoor connection with the colonizer, and owns full reign of the colonizer’s language, her mother, a first generation immigrant, remains among the lower rungs of immigrant society. Indeed, Clara self-identifies with the servile deference and ‘otherness’ of a second-class citizen. Her roots place her on the outer margins of English society, where interestingly she is willing to remain--even if it means forging a broad split with her only child.

Footnotes:
-The Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley. Boston, 1909.
-Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. McClintock, Anne, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. Print.

The Apparition of These Faces in the Spoon

(From Tuesday, November 2, 2010)

Whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of selected discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, 'false'? And might we then not go on to say that it is this falsity of self that makes possible in Chamcha a worse and deeper falsity--call this 'evil'-- (Satanic Verses, 441)

According to this particular passage, Saladin Chamcha somehwere makes the leap from a simple 'false' to a profound 'evil'. I'd like to delve into this leap a bit, as I've a nose it could lead to quite the fall.

A possible explanation can perhaps be seen stored in the warning Chamcha’s father gives him years before: “A man untrue to himself becomes a two-legged lie, and such beasts are Shaitan’s best work” (48). This stern warning comes after Saladin tweaks his name from Chamchawala to simply Chamcha, which Pops isn't too fond of. In his view, as mine, when Saladin Englifies his name it signifies a voluntary exchange of home-made perceptions of self (for names have always been the functional grounding of our self-concept) for those provided by a dominant Someone Else. From this point on Saladin can no longer see himself but from the eyes of greater England, or at least what he perceives greater England to be. He will alter his appearance according to the proper British mirror, that is, the "British" concept of himself.
Unfortunately for Chamcha, however, he was never given a proper British mirror. On one hand, his voluntarily colonized eyes allow his adopted British mates to have full control over his appearance. When a few men see him as a goatish demon (the savage nature of immigrants, in their eyes), he literally takes on this very form. Thus by extraction, what he views as his self-made re-invention is actually the work of a powerful downward--and inward--racist curve that directs his eyes as it sees fit. On the other hand, he has no British mirror because he simply isn’t British. His Indian culture, background, language, way of thinking, etc, is distinctly different from the historical Anglo-Saxon culture of Great Britain. So instead of looking at himself with British eyes, Chamcha looks at himself by nature through an Indian lens. But here’s the trick: in the language of his birth, a language from which he will never be able to separate himself (again, natural lens), he has altered his name to mean, literally, “spoon”. As any curious kid could tell you, spoons turn reflections upside-down. No matter what appearance he tries to create for himself, then, Saladin Chamcha views himself and the world with skewed eyes: he is an upside-down man in an upside-down world.
A man with a skewed mirror coupled with skewed eyes is easy prey for “Shaitan’s best work.” It is impossible for Chamcha to escape internalizing the body of a hairy, smoking demon. As he says in his own words: “I have become embroiled…the grotesque has me” (269). Thus, by an initial falsity of self he takes on the form of a colonizer’s brutish apparition both in outward and inward form. The skewed internalization of his demonization as seen from the adopted, though distinctly external, eyes of the British, Chamcha has self-made, selected, even willed.
This is precisely as Ashcroft might predict. He states in his passage on mimicry, "He [the alien] copies the habits of the landlord...[and] is encouraged to mimic a compassion for the one exploiting him." It is the nature of skewed identity politics for the alien to base his/her self-concept and ways of walking around in the world off those thoughts and habits of the occupying force. Saladin falls for this heart, body, and soul. Rushdie seems to hint in this (in my view) that the work of racist domination always curves the mirror of the self irreversibly, oppressively inward, thus corrupting the self-concept of any victim of racist domination.

The Art of Self-Sloughing in The Satanic Verses

(From Thursday, October 21, 2010)

…there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. (5)

In Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, the sloughing off of selves is almost an art. Gibreel and Saladin are both masters, in fact professionals, in the business of self-off-sloughing. Gibreel has made a career filming up to “eleven movies ‘sy-multaneous’” (11), slipping from identity to identity, day after day. Saladin, the “Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice” (60), has formed his career on a transmutable voice that can take on any identity the radio (or film) industry demands. On the business level, these skills can be attributed to years of practice and fine-tuning. On a personal level, however, the skills can be more attributed to the characters’ urgent desire to flee the selves of their homeland.
At home in Mumbai, Gibreel first perfected not the art of self-sloughing, but the “art of dissimulation” (25). He leads multiple lives—and keeps them strictly separated—in order to maintain his high social status. The stress of this performance nearly costs him his life, so he knows something has got to change. When he ultimately flees the country aboard flight AI-420 he is on one hand fleeing this social demand, but on the other, shedding this conglomeration of past identities all together. When he is reincarnated during his fall, he lands a new role of a new man…sort of. We’ll flesh that out more later in the text.
Saladin Chamcha has struggled his entire life to perform a similar feat. He successfully changes his last name (or shortens it), leaves India for an English education, and abandons the “father-ship” (41), as he calls the overseeing control of his father, for a life lived on his own terms. He carefully crafts a new accent and handwriting technique to disguise his background, but when he returns to India one last time he realizes that he has never successfully sloughed off his old Indian self. His voice slips, his handwriting and mannerisms betray him. The walnut tree of his birth, he realizes, still stands lodged in his father’s backyard: “Cut it down, sell it, send me the cash” (70). With the cash from the tree in hand, he tears the bark off his birth-tree in an act of finally peeling off his old self.

Math and the "And Next?" Dilemma

(From Wednesday, September 29, 2010)

Of the many threads running through In the Heart of the Country, I want to analyze what I have found as the “And Next?” dilemma. The narrator says on page 21 (that is, in section 42), “Would that all my life were like that, question and answer, word and echo, instead of the torment of And next? And next?” She wants a word and an echo, a cause and effect, a beginning and an end. Indeed, she wants anything to pull her out of her pointless present.
I am no mathematician, but I see this as a Cartesian dilemma: the narrator’s life lacks the necessary balance of two cooperating planes, time and choice. As I see it, ideally a person’s life can be structured neatly as follows: infinite time running along the x-axis, infinite individual choice along the y-axis; life beginning at point (0,0), following a course staked across sundry points on quadrants I and IV, and finally reaching a definite endpoint somewhere six feet below ground. An echo heard is a small point on the graph left by a word spoken. Cause and effect exists because these two planes cooperate.
For our narrator, however, these two planes never do meet; that is to say, time passes with no regard to her decisions, and she sees no need to make decisions with regard to time. On one hand, she has no hope for the future: she will never redeem her lost youth, she will never have children, her father will never love her, and no one will ever care. But on the other hand, this gives her enormous personal freedom, basically allowing her to do whatever she wants, whether that be murdering her parents with an axe (hypothetically, thank goodness) or changing her physical appearance. She fashions these together in a meaningless philosophy: because "life will continue to be a line trickling from nowhere to nowhere, without beginning or end" (96) a person ought never to be "more than whim" (115). Essentially, nothing will change, so nothing matters; therefore, let's all do crazy stuff and see what happens.
Of course, this doesn't work out so well for her. She finds herself trapped within the indefinite bounds of a "black hole" (85), or "a yawning middle without end” (89), thus denied any form of definition. She knows instead only an asymptotic existence in which she “can expand to infinity…[or] shrivel to the size of an ant” (Section 96).
This novel is many things, but it is at least an exploration of this kind of unbounded, pointless existence. The narrator neither knows her past nor wishes to accept the pointless “And next?” future that lies ahead of her. She yearns for definition and meaning, for anything that might take her off a pointlessly winding path and give her direction. This seems clear, both textually and mathematically. The next task, then, is to determine the causes of why she was lead down that path in the first place. (See close-reading assignment.)

Orlando's Nature Sanctuary: No Longer a Future Heaven

(From Monday, September 13, 2010)

She quickened her pace; she ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content… (182)

With these words Orlando the woman escapes once again to her Never-Never Land beyond time and space. She lies in an English moor outside London and traverses decades and oceans alone, lying comfortably on her back. Anne McClintock might disagree, however, with the nature of Orlando’s so-called escape. Her chapter on gender and nationalism (Ch. 4 “No Longer in a Future Heaven”) describes an escape of a rather different sort, claiming that often through history, in literature as in nations, women

Haunt analysis as an elided shadow—deferred, displaced, and dis- remembered…and are thus effectively deferred to a no-where land, beyond time and place. (95)

When Orlando falls contented in her secret moor, then, it’s a bit shortsighted to consider the action a comfortable escape. Rather, she has been thrust there, like a dust mop set roughly in its place in the closet under the stairway. This is supported in the description of Orlando’s almost helter-skelter jaunt through the woods. The heather roots don’t coax her gently down, they fling her, even breaking her ankle so that she can’t rise back up. If Orlando is forced to find contentment in a place where there can be no real contentment, McClintock is justified. Her sanctuary, isolated from society as it is, is still a no-where land that can bring her nothing.
Further connection between Orlando and McClintock's text is provided, of course, by Orlando's remarkable ability to flit through time and place. I like McClintock's use of the word elide in her analysis. The term packs an underhanded implication: behind its dictionary definition, "to omit", stands the result of the omission, a slurring of something- often speech- or in Orlando's case, identity. McClintock is implying that women have not only been exiled into social no-where land, they have been denied a corporeal self they might call their own. Both an omission from society and a slurring of identity across time and place is readily visible in Orlando. As she lies fugitive in her wooded sanctuary, Orlando progresses, we might imagine by textual hints ("Tick-tock, tick-tock, so it hammered, so it beat" (183)) several years, perhaps even decades, through time; and as she does so, she significantly alters her life philosophy, insert: identity, ("I am nature's bride") unto passionate love with Shel (184). Though these events in a fictional novel are by definition quite unreal, a visible elision of Orlando the character is, according to McClintock, an everyday reality for women everywhere, and therefore something always worth a further look.

Fight Club: A Lopsided Picture of Masculinity

(From Tuesday, April 7, 2009)

Tyler Durden’s whole purpose as an invented alter-ego was to change what is into what should be. First in the main character’s immediate life, and then much beyond that as well, he sought to radically overturn all the things that were holding people back from being who they were truly meant to be. In our society, how many of us are actually pursuing the things that we really want to pursue? How many of us are gas station attendants instead of veterinarians? But Tyler Durden wasn’t concerned with “people” in general.
For rather than focusing his well-meaning efforts on everyone in society, all of his efforts were geared toward men, and men only. To jump on the scene that Scott brought up last in his argument, there’s a point in the film where Tyler says, “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” That quote gets right at it. In his view, true men should have very little to do with the influences of women.
Those men in the movie outside of Tyler’s fight club are pictured as wimpy, drab, effeminate boys working uninspiring jobs and leading all-around meaningless lives. I think of the main character’s boss, or the main character’s catalogue-decorated apartment. This portrayal conveys the message that maleness should have nothing to do with femininity; that masculinity is altogether different in purpose than femininity; and that men chasing un-male pursuits are effectively wasting their lives.
Bob, for example, is first introduced to the audience as a blubbering, big-breasted bambi whose manhood has been eliminated by his testicular cancer. He spends his nights crying about the man he used to be. That is, until he is radically transformed by Tyler Durden’s new definition of a man, as someone who uses his life, even in dying, to pursue a cause worthy of his calling as a man. Even without his male parts Bob is able to die a man.
A feminist, however, would with good reason be appalled at Tyler Durden’s version of a “man”. The only relations Tyler has with women are sexual. Marla’s terrible emotional state doesn’t concern him at all. Although she could definitely use his self-improvement practices just as much as anyone else, she’s disposable sex property. It’s only at the movie’s end, when Tyler Durden and his “men” are done away with, that Marla’s other female qualities are accepted by the masculine. When the main character holds her hand and really means it, we see him understanding the bigger picture of his role as a man. Men actually can benefit from relationships with women. It's a novelty of which Tyler Durden was apparently unaware.
The main character gained a lot from Tyler- an identity and an insight into what makes up life-, but from this crazy, ultra-man alter-ego he could never gain an accurate understanding of what a full man really looks like.