Polanski, Tess and the Phenomenon of the Rapist

How to solve the problem of Roman Polanski and his recent arrest for the rape of a thirteen year old girl? A director of numerous wonderful films: Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist, Chinatown, Macbeth , and Death and the Maiden, Polanski also directed and co-wrote the script for a film that has rape at its heart: his exquisite adaptation of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. There are many sets of debates raging questioning whether Polanski is guilty, whether the testimony of the thirteen year old girl involved can be trusted, whether the corrupt dealing in the US legal system mean that Polanski should be acquitted, what it means that the 13 year old girl now mother and wife can’t bear to have the case re-opened etc. For my own part, whilst I can see that Polanski’s court case was not exactly fair and that the judge was rather suspect, a fair punishment does not seem to have been meted out for what appears from the evidence to have been the rape and anal rape of a minor. But this is not what I want to discuss here.[1] Rather what I would like to do is rethink how Polanski’s case is narrativised using, as a point of comparison, Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Polanski’s film version of it: Tess. [1]

The great irony is that Polanski so carefully portrayed the agony of a woman convinced that her true lover, Angel Clare, will reject her when he realises that she is soiled by a rape in her early life. In the script for Polanski’s Tess, she writes to Angel how “My youth, my simplicity and the strangeness of my situation may perhaps lessen my fault. But since I committed it, I am guilty”, words that now seem eerily prescient: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mezs1kCTML0.

Hardy never actually tells us what Tess writes in her letter: instead when she does confess to Angel after their marriage she tells him, “I was a child—a child when it happened! I knew nothing of men”, words that are repeated in Polanski’s script. This is no defence in Angel’s view, and is also no defence in the eyes of many commentators offering their take on Polanski’s act of rape and the thirteen year old girl, whose testimony makes shocking reading. There are in fact sinister parallels between that testimony and Hardy’s representation of Tess’ rape by the rich and powerful Alec D’Urberville.

—

Q. What did you do when he said, ‘Let’s go into the other room’?
A. I was going ‘No, I think I better go home’, because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch.
Q. What were you afraid of?
A. Him…. He sat down beside me and asked if I was OK. I said ‘No’.
Q. What did he say?
A. He goes ‘Well, you’ll be better’. And I go, ‘No I won’t. I have to go home. He said ‘I’ll take you home soon’.
Q. Then what happened?
A. Then he went down and he started performing cuddliness… I was kind of dizzy, you know, like things were kind of blurry sometimes. I was having trouble with my coordination… I wasn’t fighting really because I, you know, there was no one else there and I had no place to go.”
Q. Did he ask you about being on the pill?
A. He asked, he goes, ‘Are you on the pill?’ and I went, ‘No’ and he goes ‘When did you have your period?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know. A week or two. I’m not sure’... He goes, ‘Come on. You have to remember’. And I told him I didn’t…. and right after I said I was not on the pill… and he goes… and then he put me – wait. Then he lifted my legs up farther and he went in through my anus.
Q. Did you resist at that time?
A. A little bit, but not really, because…
Q. Because what?
A. Because I was afraid of him.

(Source: Dominic Lawson’s article ‘Let’s not forget what Polanski did’: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-lets-not-forget-what-polanski-did-1794717.html)

—

There is even the fact that, like Tess who was sent to the D’Urberville household by her ambitious mother, this 13 year old girl is claimed to have been given to Polanski by her own mother as a delicacy, as if that lessens the criminality of the act committed. Of course, Polanski is like Alec too, in that he is accused of raping (and anally-raping) a teenage girl from a position of power and money and with little regard for the consequences. [3]

There is a difference, however, between Alec and Polanski; while Alec remains a shadowy figure [4], we know a great deal about Polanski’s life: especially about his tragic early life in Poland during World War Two and the death of his wife, Sharon Tate. Many commentators use Polanski’s past to argue that his terrible life experiences explain the act of raping a 13 year old girl. The French minister Frédéric Mitterrand recently said he was ‘dumbfounded’ by Polanski’s arrest, adding that he ‘strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them’. But does Polanski’s past really explain his actions?

Shouldn’t the real question be, why did Polanski still have sex and anal sex with a thirteen year old girl despite his intimate knowledge of pain, suffering and humiliation? Prof. Joanna Bourke’s commentary at the end of Rape: A history from 1860 to the present is particularly relevant to this kind of questioning, because she concludes that rape must be reframed as a male political issue rather than a female one. Following Bourke’s recommendation, the painful hounding of the 13-year-old-girl-now-mother should cease and instead we should be asking what made Polanski rape in the first place. Does violence create violence? Do we honestly believe that all rapists are totally evil like the “baddies” from some children’s TV show?
Do we really think that rape is a glitch in society, that it is just an unaccountable phenomenon committed by evil outcasts who were never part of our community to begin with? Or is there, as Bourke contends, something brutal and sinister in certain modes of modern masculinity? [5]

Even great directors like Polanski rape, hence Whoopi Goldberg’s desperately lame comment ‘It wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.’ (Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/29/roman-polanski-whoopi-goldberg). Goldberg finds it hard to reconcile the Polanski she knows with Polanski the rapist, just as anyone would find it difficult to believe that a friend or colleague had committed an act of rape. What I am really saying here, to use Bourke’s words, is that understanding rape ‘exclusively through rape victims is wrong: it lets men off the hook’ (Rape, p. 116) [6]. Why a man like Polanski committed this crime is a crucial question and one from which cultural commentary is too easily diverted. As Hardy would put it, ‘The woman pays’.

Notes
[1] Polanski’s Tess was in fact made only two years after Polanski was tried for rape, posing a few questions about his intentions in making the film.
[2] I would direct you to Kate Smurthwaite’s blog for a great piece of writing that deflates some of the more ridiculous arguments for Polanski’s release: http://cruellablog.blogspot.com/2009/09/roman-roads.html Also see Amanda Hess’ blog: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2009/09/28/common-roman-polanski-defenses-refuted/#comment-17499
[3] Polanski’s “position of power and money” is not sufficient to explain this case of rape. Money is related to power though (see Bourke’s comments in Rape about the sexual exploitation of working class women), but obviously it is not the main factor in every case and it is not only wealthy men who rape.
[4] We know that Alec D’Urberville maintains an invalid mother, that his family bought the D’Urberville name with their new money and later in the book, we see him working as a lay preacher to try to atone for his sins. Otherwise he is merely seductive, dangerous, brutal, sensuous and self-serving.
[5] I am far from saying that these issues surrounding masculinity are a new or modern phenomenon, but merely want to suggest that we need to look at masculinity in its modern context. Bourke’s study Rape, however, does cover the period from 1860 to the present day, so there certainly are lessons to be learned from history.
[6] I want to highlight that when Bourke calls for a focus on masculinity, she is not saying like Marilyn French that “All men are rapists.” Rapists, however, are not always male. She explains her argument in ‘Women, men and rape’, when she explains that

sexual aggression is not innate to masculine identity. There is nothing “natural” about men’s violence. Sexually aggressive men in modern western societies don’t bolster manliness but actually enervate male power regimes. Rapists are not patriarchy’s “stormtroopers”, but its inadequate spawn. Rape is a crisis of manliness; its eradication is a matter for men – for a radically different conception of agency and masculinity. (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/democracy_power/5050/tackling_rape)

Bourke suggests that rape is not innate to masculinity, but is characteristic of a particular type of masculinity, and I would argue prevalent in a specific masculine mode.

Zoe Brigley : 30 Sep 2009 00:45 |  Tags: Feminism Video |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Spanish translation of my poem, 'Blodeuwedd'

This is a translation into Spanish of a version of my poem, ‘Blodeuwedd’, a poem based on the story of the woman of flowers in the Welsh book of myth, The Mabinogion. It was made quite a few years ago through a project at UEA and the Centre for Translation in Tarazona, Spain. It was done by Eugenia Vasquez and Enrique Alda.

Zoe Brigley : 27 Jul 2009 15:24 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Women Writing Myth

This entry reviews some reading around women and myth and begs the question, why are so many British and American contemporary women writers attracted to rewriting Western mythologies? Partly these thoughts come out of attending a recent Angela Carter conference at University of Northampton and Angela Carter might be a good place to start. Sarah Gamble writes in Angela Carter –Writing from the Front Line that during the 1960s Britain was opening up to new European influences. Gamble argues that ‘counterculture’ was particularly significant to Carter, because it ‘represents a strategy by which she could renegotiate the boundaries between fantasy and concrete political action’ (1997: 43). According to Gamble, ‘in the wreckage of old myths and moral values, the subversive writer is free to play’ (45). Carter believed that ‘appropriation and adaptation is really what the fairytale is all about’ (67), and ‘the relationship between the radical writer and myth […] has necessarily to be contentious because […] myths have to be argued with, dismantled through the act of writing’ (138). In Gamble’s commentary on Carter, gender is implicit, yet there is a stronger sense of radicalism being a key influence, rather than a simple or obvious feminist agenda.

Carolyne Larrington frames myth more explicitly in terms of gender in her introduction to the edited volume, The Feminist Companion to Mythology. Larrington points out that

Women need to know the myths which have determined both how we see ourselves and how society regards us. Feminist anthropologists and literary historians in recent years have discovered new evidence about how women have been perceived; they have illuminated mythical patterns and re-examined historical traditions from a feminist perspective (1992: x)

Myth becomes an important space for debate in Larrington’s view, because it offers a site from which women anthropologists, historians and writers can critique the representations and treatment of women in the past. This concords with Marina Warner’s comment in From the Beast to the Blonde that ‘The matter of the fairy tale reflects such lived experience, with a slant towards the tribulations of women’ (xix).

Sometimes in contrast to more negative representations of the past, women writers remake the tribulations of women into something more positive. For example, in her study Celtic Goddesses: Myth and Mythology, Juliette Wood notes that ‘Latterly popular feminist ideas have added a new dimension to modern Celtic mythology, and to the noble savage and mystic can be added a strong but loving matriarchal goddess presiding over a harmonious social and physical environment’ (1992: 134). In contrast to the matriarchal goddess, another type that is drawn upon in the wild woman, the Amazon, as Annis Pratt explains in Dancing with Goddesses: Archetypes, Poetry and Empowerment:

Independent of men, more animal than human, living with each other ‘in groups’, knowledgeable about healing, potentially deadly but sexually hungry although hostile to patriarchal notions of matrimony, the wild women of the Russian woods carry traits of Artemis as Lady of Wild Things, of Amazon legend, and of indigenous shamanism […] The wild women inhabit a free zone closely impinging upon culture, a zone of partially repressed paganism (1994: 285).

The trope of the wild woman is also closely associated with mythical witches and untameable or celibate goddesses like Diana, Artemis, Hecate and the Welsh Arianrhod. Thinking through Robert Graves, Pratt explains that figures like Arianrhod are attractive to women writers remaking myths because they have ‘power not only over sexuality and generation but also over language itself’ (1994: 308). This threatening type of womanhood resurrected from myth is associated by Marina Warner with modern representations of feminists. In Six Myths of our Time, Managing Monsters: The Reith Lectures, Warner compares the blaming of feminists for social ills in the modern media with the threatening women described in Greek mythology: ‘Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin […] and they seize, as in the word raptor’ (1994: 4). Warner concludes that this kind of representation can only be negative for women: ‘The mythology of ungovernable female appetite can’t be made to work for women; ironies, subversion, inversion, pastiche, masquerade, appropriation – these postmodern strategies all buckle in the last resort under the weight of culpability the myth has entrenched’ (11). In spite of the problems in remaking stories though, ‘myth’s own secret cunning means that it pretends to present the matter as it is and always must be’ (13). Although ‘at its heart lies the principle in the famous formula of Roland Barthes, that history is turned into nature’, Warner asserts that ‘contrary to this understanding, myths aren’t writ in stone, they’re not fixed, but often telling the story of the same figures – of Medea or of dinosaurs – change dramatically both in content and meaning’ (13-14).

Bibliography
Cavarero, Adriana (1995) In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gamble, Sarah (1997) Angela Carter – Writing from the Front Line, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Larrington, Carolyne (1992) Introduction in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, ed. Carolyne Larrington, London: Pandora Press.
Larrington, Carolyne (ed.) (1992) The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London: Pandora Press.
Padel, Ruth (1992) In and Out of Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Warner, Marina (1994a) From the Beast to the Blonde, London: Vintage.
- (1994b) Six Myths of our Time, Managing Monsters: The Reith Lectures, London: Vintage.
Welldon, Estella V. (1992), Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood, New York and London: The Guildford Press.
Wood, Juliette (1992) ‘Celtic Goddesses: Myth and Mythology’ in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, ed. Carolyne Larrington, London: Pandora Press: 118-136.

Zoe Brigley : 27 Jul 2009 12:12 |  Tags: Feminism |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Writing Poetry for Children?

After discovering some fascinating children’s books recently such as Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing and Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There, I have begun thinking about writing for children and in particular poetry for the child reader. What are the differences then between writing for children and writing for adults?

In thinking about this question, I just wanted to note a few comments in the essay ‘Poetry Mosaic: Some Reflections on Writing Verse for Children’ by Ian Serraillier. Serraillier follows the recommendation of the Russian poet Kornei Chukovsky who suggests that ‘As young children think in images, the poem […] must be graphic, with each verse – or even couplet – suggesting to the artist a suitable illustration’ (p. 97). Rhyme is also important, since it ‘helps the young child to remember more easily, and also to get the sense’ (p. 97). Serraillier goes on from these tenets to suggest that the world of folk poetry is particularly enjoyable for child readers, suggesting ‘English and Scottish ballads’ for their ‘lyric quality and the rapid story-telling’ (p. 98). This kind of poetry is ‘closer to its origins – in song and dance and the spoken word’ (p. 102). For Seraillier, the children’s poet is ‘a curious mixture of creator, interpretor and craftsman’ (p. 102).

I’m still working through my own ideas about writing for children, but I do find Seraillier’s suggestions useful if incomplete.

Works Cited
Serraillier, Ian (1977) ‘Poetry Mosaic: Some Reflections on Writing Verse for Children’, 97-102 in Edward Blishen (ed.) The Thorny Paradise: Writers on Writing for Children, Harmondsworth: Kestrel Books.

Zoe Brigley : 09 Jul 2009 15:11 |  Tags: Literature For Children |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Reading for Oxfam

This is quite a good recording of me reading at the Oxfam Marylebone Bookshop. It was quite a hard reading, because the poem (‘The Jewel-box’) is rather emotional and I hadn’t read it before, but it turned out quite well.

The poem is published in the recent issue of The Manhattan Review which features a lot of young British poets: http://www.themanhattanreview.com/archive/13_2.html You can see more of them reading on UTube.

Zoe Brigley : 06 Jul 2009 13:05 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Digest of Kristeva's study Strangers to Ourselves

I am posting here for my MA students an index of the various posts on this blog which constitute a digest of Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. The index covers most of the study (all except the last chapter which you are reading!). It might be useful to put the chapter in context, so do feel free to have a read.

Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/toccata_and_fugue/
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/toccata_and_fugue_1/

The Greeks Among Barbarians, Suppliants, and Metics
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_the/
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/more_of_kristeva/

The Chosen People and the Choice of Foreignness
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_the_1/
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/more_of_kristeva_1/

Paul and Augustine: The Therapeutics of Exile and Pilgrammage
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_paul/ http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/more_of_kristeva_1_2/

By What Right Are You a Foreigner?
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_asks_by/

The Renaissance, “so Shapeless and Diverse in Composition”
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_the_1_2/ http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/more_of_kristeva_1_2_3/

On Foreigners and the Enlightenment
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_foreigners/

On Diderot
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_diderot/

On Fougeret de Monbron, a Cosmopolitan with a Shaggy Heart
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_fougeret/

On Hegel
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_hegel/

On the French Revolution
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_the_1_2_3/

Zoe Brigley : 07 Jan 2009 17:20 |  Tags: Feminism Theory |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

An Appreciation of Charles Bennett's poem, 'Salthouse'

Salthouse

When we walked up the hill above Salthouse
and saw, looking down where we’d been,

ourselves on the beach waving,
we were there and here and no-place,

coming and going at once, perceiving
the speckled clouds as sleeping seals,

as we dipped our toes in the breeze
and watched from the hill’s shoreline

a kestrel come in with the tide
and hold his stillness open

over the ship weathervane
of the famous drowned church,

his shadow on the ground below him
the anchor that kept him aloft.

Commentary
I really enjoyed reading this poem by Charles Bennett. It has a quiet beauty about it and a strong sense of awe about nature.

The poem begins in Salthouse, a small village in Norfolk (see http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk/salthouse.html), with the act of climbing a hill with all its symbolism of work, ascension, success. The first couplet lingers on the summit of the hill and then introduces the players, the mysterious “we” who might be companions, lovers or simply fellow travellers. They are caught in the act of looking back before the poem jolts from one couplet to another in a kind of jump-cut.

The description that follows creates a doubleness as the travellers at the summit of the hill also exist in the space of the beach. These others might be the selves left behind in previous times, experiences, eras, but there is a strong sense of multiple identities. This weird warping of time and space is complicated by the gesture of the others on the beach: they wave. A wave is a gesture of recognition, so the others must know and recognise the travellers on the hill. They almost seem to be encouraging the climbers and one might read into this that the others are fathers, mothers or ancestors encouraging the continuation of a lineage. The act of waving is also a friendly gesture and one wonders whether the others on the beach are happier than the travellers who have made the strenuous climb. In this couplet, there is a questioning of identity and a sense of unreality and loss of these other selves that appear like a fleeting apparition.

This feeling continues in the next couplet where there is disorientation as the narrator is literally unsure whether he is “coming or going”. The imperceptible becomes the concrete and tangible objects appear in the insubstantial: this is the feeling of the seal/cloud metaphor. It is also significant that the seal is sleeping, as sleep refers to dreaming and also creates a feeling of anticipation and stillness: what will happen when the seal awakes?

It is at this point that a change occurs in the poem and it moves from insubstantiality and lack to sensual experience. The image of dipping a toe in the breeze recalls the anticipatory act of testing sea water before plunging in and the whole poem appears to anticipate the appearance of the kestrel.

When the kestrel does arrive, he travels with a natural flow – the turn of the tide – and in contrast to the climbing of the hill by the human travellers, the kestrel remains motionless and still. The kestrel is remote to the world of human beings; he floats at a distance over human attempts to read the natural world (the weathervane) and the tragedies that they suffer at the hands of nature (the drowned church).

The kestrel does, however, have something in common with the human travellers watching him: a sense of doubleness. Yet even this is different to the human doubling at the beginning of the poem, because rather than being a source of anxiety, the kestrel’s double (its shadow) is an anchor, something that keeps it rooted and safe. The narrator in the end seems to admire the kestrel’s lack of self-consciousness, a fault that is so endemic to human beings. Like Rilke and others, Bennett admires the kestrel’s ability to be at one with itself, a characteristic that takes it far higher than the hill summit climbed by earth-bound humans.

Zoe Brigley : 12 Oct 2008 10:48 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Article in the THS about Blogging

This is just a note about an article in the Times Higher Supplement about blogging. It’s an interesting read as it deals with academics who also write blogs. In fact this blog was mentioned as an example of a blog to watch, although it is not too high in the Technorati ratings! You can check out the article here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=403827

Other blogs that were mentioned as interesting sites to watch were:
*A Don’s Life – http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/
*Neurophilosophy – http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/
*New Journalism Review – http://srh.typepad.com
*Dave’s Landslide Blog – http://daveslandslideblog.blogspot.com
*Petermr’s Blog – http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/
*Mind the Gap – http://network.nature.com/people/UE19877E8/blog
*and Improbable Science – http://dcscience.net/

Zoe Brigley : 09 Oct 2008 21:45 |  Tags: News |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

‘Charlotte Brontë’s Letters to M. Heger’ by Linda S. Kauffman

Writing about web page http://bronteparsonage.blogspot.com/

In beginning her exploration of Brontë’s letters to Constantin Heger, Kauffman suggests that the letters reveal Charlotte Brontë’s transformation ‘from Heger’s correspondent into the novelist of Jane Eyre’ (Kauffman 1986: 160). Kauffman intends to connect the rhetorical strategies of the letters and of Jane Eyre to map ‘the metamorphosis of the rhetoric of passion from an authentic to a fictional discourse’ (p. 160).

To start with, Kauffman maps out the narrative of Brontë’s and Heger’s encounter including:
• Charlotte’s and Emily’s trip to Brussels in 1842 to learn languages;
• their return to England at the death of their aunt;
• Charlotte Brontë’s return to Brussels alone in 1843;
• and her final return to England in 1844.
Brontë began writing to Heger after her return and there is evidence to suggest that there were more letters than survive today. In the letters that do remain, Kauffman notes a variety of characteristics that fit the ‘amorous epistolary discourse’ on which her study focuses. These include:
• ‘the denial of the reality of separation’;
• ‘the desire for contact’;
• ‘despair at the master’s silence’;
• and ‘resigned desolation’ (p. 161).
In initial letters, Brontë is ‘submissive’ and puts ‘emphasis on having been given the authority to write’ (p. 161). However, when Heger write back with a firm, stern tone providing instruction as to how she must write, Brontë rebels and does the opposite; ‘she becomes more outspoken, more indignant, less submissive’ (p. 161-162). Kauffman notes that ‘[l]ike all amorous epistolary discourses, Charlotte’s letters are demands, pleas, threats, and confrontations, filled with the same marks of internal tension, contradiction, self-division, and torment’ (p. 163).

Like Mary Jacobus in ‘The Buried Letter’, Kauffman notes that the figure of student-governess-teacher is an ambiguous one in nineteenth-century British society. She describes Brontë as ‘simultaneously a family intimate and a family employee; the boundaries between belonging to and being excluded from the family are constantly shifting ones’ (p. 163). In Jane Eyre, Blanche Ingram tries to humiliate the governess-heroine and in her letters, Brontë expresses anguish at her humiliation in being a governess. In her letters to Heger, Brontë seems unsure as to whether to situate herself as governess or pupil as she tries to reconcile Heger’s warmth in past encounters and the coldness of his silence. Gaskell and others have tried to suggest that the romance between Heger and Brontë was imagined, but Kauffman provides much evidence that suggests that Heger exploited teacher-pupil relationships on a regular basis with his charismatic personality. Brontë’s letters are always a work of persuasion for him to break his silence and write to her again, which he never does. Silence is of course an obsession of Brontë’s novels too: ‘[i]h her letters, poems and novels Charlotte continued all her life to portray the intense misery of loneliness, exile and unrequited love’ (p. 170).

Reference
Kauffman, L. 1986, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Further Reading
Eagleton, T. 1975, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës, London: Macmillan.
Gerin, W. 1967, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius, Oxford: OUP.
Moglen, H. 1976, Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived, New York: Norton.
Winnifrith, T. 1973, The Brontës and their Background: Romance and Reality, New York: Barnes and Noble.

Zoe Brigley : 09 Sep 2008 13:05 |  Tags: Brontes Feminism |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

‘The Buried Letter’ by Mary Jacobus

In this essay on Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Mary Jacobus begins by comparing that novel with another by Bronte, Shirley. Jacobus argues that Shirley is the ‘seed’ of Villette and that her earlier ‘assertion of the unalienable rights of self’ in Shirley leads to the situation of Villette where ‘repression returns vengefully on the heroine in the form of a ghostly nun’ (1986: 40). The idea of Villette being a ‘buried letter’ crops up early on and Jacobus refers to the letters of ‘Reason’ and ‘Feeling’ that Lucy Snowe writes to Graham Bretton: ‘one for his benefit […], the other for hers, an outpouring of her innermost self’ (p. 41). This sense of revelation and concealment is also clear in the narrative of the novel:

The narrative and representational conventions of Victorian realism are constantly threatened by an incompletely repressed Romanticism. Supernatural haunting and satanic revolt, delusion and dream, disrupt a text which can give no formal recognition to either Romantic or Gothic modes. The buried letter of Romanticism becomes the discourse of the Other, as the novel’s unconscious – not just Lucy’s – struggles for articulation within the confines of mid-nineteenth century-realism. The resulting distortions and mutilations in themselves constitute an aspect of the novel’s meaning, like the distortions of a dream text (p. 41).

Jacobus argues then that Villette is haunted by Romanticism, which was at the time being rather superseded by the rationalism and empiricism that had dominated since the Enlightenment period. Yet Jacobus also adds that Villette is haunted by other ghosts: ‘the unacknowledged phantom of feminism and […] the strangeness of fiction itself’ (p. 42). Fiction is apparently a ‘peculiar reserve both of repression and of the Unheimliche – the uncanny’ (p. 42). Jacobus concludes: ‘Lucy’s haunted self-estrangement encodes the novel’s alienation from its ghostly subject’ (p. 42).

Interestingly, in relation to narrative voice, Jacobus points out that both Matthew Arnold and Kate Millett have seen the narrator, Lucy Snowe, as being one and the same as the author, Charlotte Bronte (although Arnold uses this as a stick to beat Bronte with and Millett uses it to portray Bronte as a woman meditating on a ‘prison break’). Jacobus suggests that Bronte invites the reader to make such an identification only to then pull the rug from under us frustrating any equivalence between the narrator and author. There is a discussion of Lucy’s lies and her unreliability as a narrator. Jacobus suggests that Lucy forces the reader to ‘misread’ her, even while her hidden thought break through is imagery of the supernatural and the Christian Passion.

Lucy Snowe is of course the narrator of other people’s stories. She tells the story of Polly (Paulina) for example and her lament for the girl’s weakness might be a kind of displacement for her own feelings of hopelessness and despair. This might also apply to her identification with the spinster, Miss Marchmount, and with the deranged woman who she cares for at the Rue Fossette during the vacation from her teaching work. Jacobus sees both figures as ‘aspects of Lucy’s repression’ and she is adamant that Lucy’s ‘regression from child to invalid to cretin parodies and reverses the Romantic quest for self’ (p. 44). Many characters find Lucy enigmatic and want to discover her true self, but instead she is simply ‘a blank screen on which others project their view of her’ (p. 44).

Not even we, the readers, discover who Lucy is. For example, Jacobus refers to Lucy’s refusal to identify Dr. John as Graham Bretton, a reticence that suggests to Jacobus that ‘Lucy prefers to retain her social invisibility’ (p. 44). Instead she prefers to watch the acting out of other people’s relationships. In thinking about this acting out, Jacobus touches on the scene where Lucy does act in a play, but she is ‘impersonating a man while clad as a woman from the waist down’ (p. 45). Jacobus sees in this a ‘nonsubservience to her spectator’s role’ and the transformation of ‘her part into an unorthodox piece of intersexual rivalry’ (p. 45). I wonder whether there is also something more here. Why does Lucy refuse to become completely “male” by dressing up in the full costume? Is there some kind of anxiety here about being dislocated from her sex?

In any case, role play is obviously significant. Jacobus talks about the roles of middle-class women and she emphasises that ‘[t]he governess is peculiarly the victim of middle-class sexual ideology, for the only role open to her is that of bringing up children while marriage and motherhood themselves are paradoxically taboo for her within the family that employs her’ (p. 45). Falling between categories then, Lucy has to play a very unfulfilling role and it is no coincidence that she prefers teaching in Madame Beck’s school to being a governess or companion. Jaconus quotes from Bronte’s letters to show that Bronte had strong views about the role of the unmarried woman:

when patience had done its utmost and industry its best, whether in the case of women or operatives, and when both are baffled, and pain and want triumph, the sufferer is free, is entitled at last to send up to Heaven any piercing cry for relief, if by that he can hope to obtain succour. (Bronte in Jacobus 1986: 46)

Jacobus associates this ‘piercing cry’ with the actress, Vashti, who is such a strong presence in the book. To Jacobus, Vashti is a typical Romantic protagonist: ‘the satanic rebel and fallen angel whose damnation is a function of divine tyranny’ (Jacobus 1986: 46). Lucy’s reaction to this is of both ‘revulsion and admiration’, while Graham Bretton only feels ‘indifference to the spectacle’ (p. 46). In fact Graham Bretton brands Vashti as ‘a fallen woman, a rebel against conventional morality’ and ‘a demonic symbol of sexual energy created by a woman’ (p. 47). Vashti is the opposite then of what Jacobus describes as ‘the static, male-fabricated images of woman’ that Lucy views in the gallery (p. 47). Lucy may appear to be more like the gallery women, but M. Paul recognises in her pink dress the possibility of a ‘latent scarlet woman’ (p. 47).

This mingling of the familiar and unfamiliar brings us back to the uncanny and Jacobus notes how Freud who wrote a seminal essay on the uncanny found that quality particularly in works of fiction. This is especially the case in Villette in which Bronte is ‘suspending the laws of probability for those of the mind’ (p. 47). Jacobus emphasises that the narrative of Villette is dislocated and that it ‘insists on the irreducible otherness, the strangeness and arbitrariness, of inner experience’ (p. 47). Jacobus concludes:’The real becomes spectral, the past alien, the familiar strange; the lost home (heimlich [meaning “homely”]) and the uncanny (unheimlich [literally “unhomely”]) coincide’ (p. 47).

In considering home, Jacobus notes that Lucy cannot be at home in Bretton, but Polly/Paulina as the angel in the house rather than the fallen angel can make herself at home. Yet it is Lucy’s inner drama that is more interesting than the romantic plot of Lucy and Graham, because its supernatural manifestations ‘challenge the monopolistic claims of realism on “reality” – to render its representations no less fictive and arbitrary than the Gothic and Romantic modes usually viewed as parasitic’ (p. 48).

Jacobus now turns to the ghostly nun noting that realist readings of the nun have analysed her symbolism as merely a technique of ‘Gothic machinery’. Jacobus challenges such a view suggesting that the appearance of the nun ‘symbolizes not only Lucy’s repression, but the novelist’s freedom to evoke or inhibit the Unheimliche; to lift or impose censorship’ (p. 48). Jacobus considers now the moments when the ghostly nun appears:

1. When Lucy goes to the garret to read Graham Bretton’s letter.
2. When she buries Graham Bretton’s letters under the pear tree.
3. When M. Paul tells Lucy in the garden that they are alike and have an affinity.

Jacobus considers the ambiguity of the nun’s status, which, though it is revealed as a prank near the end of the novel, is never fully explained. Jacobus wonders whether the nun might actually represent Lucy’s ‘quest for identity and […] her self-estrangement’ (p. 51). There is a long list of women who are represented and constructed by Lucy, who are created through her telling of them: Mrs Bretton, Mme. Beck, Ginevra, Zelie de St. Pierre and Paulina. Jacobus comments; ‘No other woman in the novel has any identity except as Lucy bestows it’ (p. 51).

The whole novel is made by Lucy’s imagination and perhaps her fantasy, especially in creating M. Paul. Jacobus states that M.Paul ‘is animated by a wish fulfillment which it is surely justifiable to see as Charlotte’s own’ (p. 51). In the reflection and affinity of M. Paul and Lucy, Jacobus sees ‘not so much the rehabilitation of the plain heroine, as the persistence of the Lacanian mirror phase’ (p. 51).

[Lucy] is the joker in the pack, the alien, ex-centric self which no image can mirror – only the structure of language. Like the purloined letter in Lacan’s reading of the Poe story, where the meaning of the letter (the autonomous signified) lies in its function in the plot rather than its actual contents, the nun derives her significance from her place in the signifying chain. She has one function in relation to Lucy, another in relation to M. Paul, and another again in relation to Ginevra. The different meanings intersect but do not merge; the threads cross and intertwine without becoming one. (p. 52)

In response to this multiplicity of meanings with regard to the ghostly nun, Jacobus considers how, especially during Lucy’s delirious night walk through the city, the nun comes to represent ‘the external obstacle to marriage between Lucy and M. Paul’ (p. 52). As Lucy glides through the city, the families of the story flash before her eyes; the Homes, the Brettons, the Becks, M. Paul’s adopted family and M.Paul himself alongside his ward. While on the one hand it seems that Lucy is yet again an ‘excluded spectator’, Jacobus asserts that she is also ‘metteur en scene in a drama of her own making’ (p. 53). It seems that the nun has now become a ‘bourgeois belle’, yet Lucy’s commentary on the matter is far from clear and leaves us wondering if this is another fabrication. The nun does return one more time though as the costume left behind by de Hamal, who in leaving it on Lucy’s bed ‘labels her as the nun of the Rue Fossette – at once accusing her of animating the spectre from within herself and forcing her to recognize its true identity’ (p. 55).

At this point, Jacobus moves on to the final evasion: the conclusion of Villette. Just as Lucy writes two letters to Graham Bretton, there seem to be two endings to the novel:

The entire novel, not just its ending, bears the marks of this compromise – between Victorian romance and the Romantic imagination, between the realist novel and Gothicism. The relationship between the two texts is as arbitrary as that between the two letters; as the signified slides under the signifier, so the buried letter bears an ex-centric relation to the public version. This is not to say that the real meaning of Villette, “the TRUTH”, lies in its ghostly subtext. Rather it lies in the relationship between the two, which points to what the novel cannot say about itself – to the real conditions of its literary possibility. Instead of correcting the novel into a false coherence, we should see in its ruptured and ambiguous discourse the source of its uncanny power. The double ending in reversing the truth/fiction hierarchy, not only reinstates fantasy as a dominant rather than parasitic version of reality, but at the same time suggests that there can be no firm ground; only a perpetual de-centering. (p. 55).

Reference
Jacobus, M. 1986, Reading Women: Essays in Feminist Criticism, London: Methuen.

Further Reading
Millett, K. 1970, Sexual Politics, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Zoe Brigley : 09 Sep 2008 12:06 |  Tags: Brontes Feminism Theory |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem