We Didn't Start the Fire

Illustration of Bluebeard by Gustav Doré, public domain on Wikimedia Commons

by Vanessa Giesbrecht

Both Laura Mulvey and Angela Carter are well-noted female writers in the 1970’s that have talked about feminism through their writings. In Mulvey’s famous article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she talks about how most popular cinema tends to express patriarchal views through various male gazes using the method of psychoanalysis to explain how and why men, both within movies and the viewers, react the way they do. However, what has to be noted here is that in the article, Mulvey appears to almost exclusively talk about the male point of view and their superiority, thus barely touching upon the female’s perspective as either a character or the viewer. The only times where she does talk about women is how they are erotic objects for men and how they have a desire for a penis that they lack (according to Freud). This is where Carter comes in with her novel The Bloody Chamber. Within these gothic fairy tale retellings, almost all of the protagonists are female and we get to see things from their perspective. Unlike Mulvey who makes sweeping general statements on how men act and react when with the opposite gender, Carter counteracts this by making her protagonists more complex with how they behave and react to different gazes. Although some of Mulvey’s concepts do fit with some of the situations presented in The Bloody Chamber, Mulvey’s concepts also prove to be oversimplified with how differently Carter’s female protagonists respond to their respective situations.

The male gaze within “The Bloody Chamber” short story follows Mulvey’s idea of sadistic scopophilia fairly closely. Mulvey explains that sadistic scopophilia, also known as controlling voyeurism, “has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt…asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (Mulvey 14). This matches up perfectly with the Marquis’s behaviour as he goes on to punish his wife for her curiosity by killing her as he did with his previous wives, which he gets pleasure from. He has this power because, as Mulvey explains it, “the male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action” (Mulvey 13). This sense of being purposefully given the key to the chamber by her husband was also noted by the protagonist as she reminisces on how during her time at the castle, she “had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself…” and ended up “behav[ing] exactly according to his desires…” (Carter 34). As much as she is aware of the fact she’s being controlled, she doesn’t fight back for long when the Marquis finds out about her voyeuristic discovery of the bloody chamber. Due to the fact that her husband has all of the power while she had none at that moment in time, she has no choice but to do as he commanded as there was no way for her to fight off his ever-present gaze. These events within “The Bloody Chamber” fit very well within how Mulvey views the patriarchal differences in power through cinema.

Progressively, while fetishistic scopophilia exists in “The Erl-King,” the female protagonist in the story does have more of a sense of being able to have a choice in her actions. The Erl-King himself exhibits fetishistic scopophilia, which is when the male fetishes a particular part or feature of the woman, thus making her less threatening. The Erl-King fetishes the protagonist instead of having a fetish of her current human body: he wants to turn her into a bird to literally objectify her. It’s his strong desire to have her be a part of a collection of singing birds all while “subjecting [her] to a controlling and curious gaze” (Mulvey 8). The protagonist makes note of this in reference to the Erl-King in that “there are some eyes [that] can eat you.” (Carter 86). Like the protagonist in “The Bloody Chamber,” both women were taken to a place that “portray[s] a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically” as the “The Bloody Chamber” takes place in an isolated castle while “The Erl-King” takes place in an enchanted wood where the Erl-King lives in a closed-off clearing (Mulvey 9). Despite being placed in similar situations leaving them alone with their male counterparts, the female protagonist in the “The Erl-King” acts differently from the other girl. While she was willing to stay with the Erl-King due to her love for him, once she realizes his true intentions on how he “would do [her] grievous harm,” she begins to formulate a plan in her mind on how to kill him in order to help herself and his previous victims escape (Carter 90). Carter purposely made this a much more complicated situation showing that women are not simply puppets that can be toyed around with by men according to what Mulvey was saying, but that these women also hold their own thoughts on how they are being looked at. They also have the capability to respond to the situation differently.

Finally, the feral girl from “Wolf Alice” is the one to experience discovering and being aware of herself instead of the male duke caretaker. In her article, Mulvey referred to Jacques Lacan’s idea on babies recognizing themselves in mirrors: “Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognizes its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego” (Mulvey 9). This was particularly important with the feral child in “Wolf-Alice” because she had very little awareness of herself when the nuns dealt with her. Once she interacts with her reflection in the mirror at the duke’s castle, she “imagines [her] mirror image to be more complete…” as if it was another living being like herself (Mulvey 9). She jumped and celebrated only to find that “when she retreated from the mirror, she halted…puzzled, to see how her new friend grew less in size” (Carter 123). As she enters puberty and begins to menstruate, develop breasts, and start to grow pubic hair, she slowly gains “…the internal instincts of self-awareness” as she now starts getting a sense of self and time from the changes going on both in and out of her body (Mulvey 10). Due to the growing feral child gaining awareness, it “gives rise to the future…identification with others” as she now mentally recognizes and even sympathizes with the duke once he gets injured by the villagers (Mulvey 10). Now that her self-awareness has made her more aware of the state of others around her, she was the one who ended up breaking the monstrous curse over the duke. This goes against Mulvey’s argument where it appears to be referring to the fact that women don’t get to have a chance to express thoughts about themselves outside of a male’s perspective. During the events of “Wolf Alice” however, the feral child ended up making sense of herself and her identity without the marquis’s presence influencing her too much. The feral child building up her ego and gaining self-awareness shows that once again, both men and women are capable of gaining a sense of self and identity without the need to be based on a gaze from a male protagonist.

Despite some of Mulvey’s concepts having a general fit with several of The Bloody Chamber’s stories, her ideas can also be too simplistic, disregarding how women are capable of reacting differently under these different scenarios. Out of the stories mentioned here, “The Bloody Chamber” would be the best example of how Mulvey’s concepts can apply to literature as this female protagonist was the one putting up the least amount of resistance as she believes that she does in a way deserve to be punished for being voyeuristic disobeying her sadistically voyeuristic husband. The protagonist of “The Erl-King” on the other hand defies and fights back against the Erl-King trying to fetishize her by objectifying her as another one of his captured birds. Instead of focusing on the character of the duke, the focus on the feral child and her coming to terms with self-awareness shows that women are able to have these tendencies of knowing about their potentially more complete selves. One would wonder how these two women viewed each other at their respective times with their different ideas on how men and women behave within their respective medias. Either way, both women were influential in how women in various forms of media are challenged to be more developed characters.

Works Cited

Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Web.

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber. New York: Penguin, 1993. Print.

Dome Roof Inside Antwerp Central Station, by Mark Ahsmann, CC BY-SA 3.0 on Wikimedia Commons

by Elliott Cheung

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

New International Version, Genesis 1:2-4

In writing Austerlitz, Sebald endeavours to tell a story that, in its scope and controversy, is harrowing to tell. Faced with the barbarism of the Holocaust and the impossible challenge of bringing its victims’ histories back from the dead, he manipulates both language and image to create the time and space in which the character of Austerlitz exists—a character whose journey simulates exactly what Sebald is attempting to do. Austerlitz’s elegiac, almost confessional digressions on his past, as written by Sebald, strive to redeem the language that the work of the Nazis corrupted; the images he presents to the narrator serve to recreate the time and space in which the “subjects” of the photos once “existed”. Using this interposition, Sebald weaves together Austerlitz’s memory—the subjective experiences from which he once hid, but later chose to recollect. His journey from hiding to recognition reflects the collective memory of the Holocaust’s victims—a memory once forcibly and efficiently destroyed by their persecutors and buried with themselves, but eventually recovered and exhumed from the deep by their descendants. The novel, in both narrative and form, ultimately takes as its objective “to penetrate the darkness which surrounds” the Nocturama of the Holocaust stories (Sebald 5), bringing them into the light of understanding through Austerlitz’s penetrating eyes. By imbuing him with a voice and a soul, Sebald creates a work of poetry that battles the barbarism of unintelligibility and gives the atrocities of the Holocaust a thoughtful and appropriate interpretation. Sebald infuses the fictional character of Austerlitz with an authentic and personal voice, conveying his story through an interweaving of words and images that, in their use of various literary devices, is highly poetic in form. In doing so, he rebukes Adorno’s pronouncement, using this poetry to revive the victims of Auschwitz from the unintelligibility and destruction brought on by both time and the Nazi oppressors that attempted to bury them.

In order to artistically achieve his objective, Sebald endows the narration—of the narrator and of Austerlitz—with qualities characteristic of poetry. As the narrator describes the process through which he meets and develops in relationship with Austerlitz, and as Austerlitz begins to tell his story, the narrative voice is personal, individual, and authentic, filled with painstaking, well-lived detail. Take, for example, the description of his thoughts and feelings as he recounts his childhood:

I have never liked looking back at the time I spent in that unhappy house, which stood in isolation on a hill just outside the town and was much too large for two people and an only child. Several rooms on the top floor were kept shut up year in, year out. Even today I still sometimes dream that one of those locked doors opens and I step through it, into a friendlier, more familiar world. (Sebald 44)

Not only does Austerlitz describe the physical and locational aspects of the home; he also expounds upon the sensations that arise within him as a result of being situated in his surroundings. His detailing is not only physical, but emotional, as if he was dotting the landscape of his mind. This level of authentic vulnerability reflects the idea of “poet as genius” as found in English and German Romantic traditions, which the Nazis’ “heterogeneous German compounds” (Sebald 236) attempt to directly repudiate. As well, the other stories recounted in the novel are filtered through his mouthpiece and told in his voice; as the sole source of information, he even possesses the power to be the creator of these other stories, the same way his creator Sebald has “fabricated” his story. Stories are by nature subjective, and represent the perspective of the one who retells them, much as a work of poetry bears the mark of its poet regardless of the in-text speaker. Indeed, being the mechanism through which much of the novel’s content is conveyed, Austerlitz represents the voice and artistic aspirations of Sebald himself. His story^[1], born of Sebald’s reinterpretation of historical materials, each with their own stories, stands against the “barbarism” of the Nazis and their quest to stamp out the qualities of creativity, authenticity, and individuality from all “concerned in the transaction[s]” they processed (Sebald 176). Where the Nazis attempted to obfuscate and to destroy, Austerlitz’s voice endeavours to reveal and to revive.

Austerlitz’s primary battlefield, for both the person and the text, lies in its language, as author and character attempt to combat the horror and incomprehensibility of the past by recounting and explaining it. Again, Sebald makes use of the parameters provided by the text as well as the character within it; the elegiac, yet ambiguous quality of his language and the confusion it creates in the reader throughout the text reflect Sebald’s difficulty in discussing his intended content, as much as it does Austerlitz’s “sense of indisposition” (Sebald 3) at discovering the successive layers of his heritage. This dichotomy is reflected in Austerlitz’s attempts to decipher the ruthless euphemisms employed by the Nazis, contrasted with his personal “effort to fit the presumptive sense of [his] reconstructions into the sentences and the wider context” (Sebald 236). As he enumerates the various processes at work in Terezin to the narrator, and indirectly to the reader, in the subsequent passage, the personal commentary and inflection with which he relays the information stands in opposition to the efficiency of what he is describing, creating in the reader the same sense of uneasiness he feels. As much as their efforts to uncover the past are valiant, the challenge is by nature overwhelming as well as painful; this is the reason for Austerlitz’s “constant process of obliteration, a turning away from [himself] and the world” (Sebald 123), and his subsequent nervous breakdown. The character’s torment, “the almost total destruction of [his] linguistic faculties” (Sebald 140) as a result of his realization, models the sensitivity and awareness with which the author Sebald must approach and does approach his subject matter. Indeed, Austerlitz “could not even understand what [he] himself had written in the past” (Sebald 124)—almost suggesting that no matter what is said, it all amounts to incomprehensibility in the face of so devastating a subject. He recognizes that to give voice to such great suffering is to subsume millions of unheard personal stories—lives—under the will of his authorship and fictionalization. Though a difficult burden to carry, and one deserving of Austerlitz’s mental distress, without it, none of their stories might ever see the light. Thus, in writing winding, lyrical paragraphs through the voice of Austerlitz, and making them hard to follow and highly confessional, Sebald conveys the similarly unfathomable nature of the victims’ experiences. He distills the experiences of the Holocaust in such a personal and yet ambiguous form because no single story could fully encapsulate such an experience, but nothing objective could even begin to encapsulate that experience; in this, he attempts to pay them respect and do them justice.

Sebald also situates the story in space through his use of images, using them to contextualize the characters’ lives and lend greater believability to his poetic work. Notably, the pictures of architectural spaces—the dome at the Antwerp station (Sebald 11) or the doors of the Terezin buildings (Sebald 190)—confine the characters to specific locations and imaginations of those locations^[2]. This localization, keeping the character in a specific place at a specific point on the page, could provide a formal parallel to the characters’ various degrees of physical and emotional entrapment—in Austerlitz boxing himself in to escape his past, unable to move forward from his state of avoidance (or backward into his past), or in the collective imprisonment of the ghettoized at Terezin. Either the narrator or Austerlitz spends time in these spaces, oftentimes providing commentary rooted in architectural history and identifying motifs that recur later in the novel, such as that of the salle des pas perdus (Sebald 5) foreshadowing the “waiting room” function of Terezinstadt later on. The characters also “recur” in the same places at the end of the novel as at the beginning, the narrator once again visiting Antwerp, the gare d’Austerlitz, Breendonk (Sebald 290). This suggests that the link to architecture, to constructed or imposed space, is more than a diegetic one. The bookending of the novel formally “walls” the narrative in, “betraying the degree of [its] insecurity” (Sebald 14) and protecting the fragility and difficulty of navigation of its contents. It also alludes to the literary device of the chiasmus, wherein similar ideas occur at the beginning and at the end of a text, with subsequent similar ideas sandwiching the central or turning point of the work in the middle—in this case, Austerlitz’s breakdown and his decision to look into his past. As the interaction of these literary elements makes the work richer and more nuanced, the characters’ situation in the literal space mandated by the images provides greater dimensionality, through which the work becomes deeper in poetic meaning.

The uncanny coherence of the motifs at the beginning and at the end, as well as the highly appropriate insertion of the pictures, additionally situate the story in time. They signal the likelihood of it being a retrospective rumination embarked upon by the narrator and by Austerlitz —almost like a scrapbook of memory. This is further supported by the fact that Austerlitz takes some of the pictures as he “[makes his] first experiments with photography” (Sebald 76), later discovering some of them, like that of himself as a child (Sebald 183). The narrator only comes into contact with at least some of the pictures when Austerlitz “[sends him] a postcard copy” (Sebald 75). Together, this could insinuate that the pictures provide a visual validation of the characters’ experiences, or even that the pictures are chosen and inserted in their respective locations by the characters themselves for this end. They serve as checkpoints, “time stamps” that emphasize sights, memories, and spaces of note to both narrative and character, the dark hall Austerlitz enters in his wandering (Sebald 128) and the still of the woman who could have been Agata (Sebald 253) being particularly memorable in this sense, conveying exactly what the character perceives or imagines (this effect being further amplified by the description of the characters’ thoughts and experiences in-text). Once again, as with the meandering quality of the language, the authorial prerogative is shared between Sebald and Austerlitz, adding greater confessional quality and poetic nuance to the work.

The words that recount Austerlitz’s story and the photographs that authenticate it ultimately come together to create memory —Austerlitz’s memories as he explains and visualizes them, and the collective memory of the Holocaust victims as he gives them voice. The narrative style and the images in the story come together to create the complete shape and form of the novel, of all that constitutes it. In the same way, the language Austerlitz uses, as reclaimed from the Nazis, unifies with the time and space in which he exists, as defined by the images, to depict the essence and appearance of the memory—giving it a face, a soul, a voice. The nature of this memory parallels the nature of the book as a whole—ambiguous, nostalgic, as if blindly reaching for something in the darkness but not knowing exactly where to look or what one will happen upon. This nature is seen in the Nocturama, where the animal pierces through the darkness and attempts to ascertain its surroundings with “strikingly large eyes” and a “fixed, inquiring gaze” (Sebald 4). It is also evident in the ambiguity with which Austerlitz discusses the year of his nervous breakdown; he “cannot say exactly how [he] spent the rest of that year” and how he came to begin his quest into his past (Sebald 140). Yet it is this very nature, this distraction of memory, this refusal and yet necessity to explore it, that Sebald—and Austerlitz—attempts to capture: the destruction of the past of many people, their plunging into an incredible darkness, and their amnesiac climb back into the folds of recollection, heritage, history. The relevance of Austerlitz’s journey as Sebald’s allegory for the revival of the Holocaust’s forgotten past, as well as for the experiences of those trying to search for it even now, is validated for the reader, who comes closer to understanding this work as an attempt to redeem one of the darkest chapters of humanity. In attempting to shed light on the subject, but doing so in such a sensitive, well-considered, and heartfelt way—in telling the story through the imaginary, piercingly exploring eyes of the “small boy… Jacquot Austerlitz” (Sebald 183)—he defies both the barbarism of the Nazis’ deeds and the barbarism of being forgotten by time, presenting it with as much intended authenticity and humanity as he possibly can muster.

In the end, the very existence of a work such as Austerlitz signals redemption, a first step towards reclamation of a past that is untraceable, that can no longer be discovered, but is so integral to the identity of the world that such a discovery must be attempted. Sebald, regardless of his position or his right to tell such a story, attempts nonetheless to do so; so long as voices like his are there to cast light into the darkness, atrocities of humanity such as the Holocaust will never be forgotten, and the spirit of humanity to bring about a better world, never extinguished^[3].

Notes

^[1] “Story” refers not only to the words in the text, but also the pictures as used to punctuate what the text is discussing. In most instances, the subject of the pictures is mentioned two or three lines prior to the picture appearing; this level of integration reflects the essential nature of the pictures to the “story”.

^[2] Even though it is necessary to localize characters in a specific place and time in a narrative, the photographs do so in a slightly different way by providing the exact rendition of the mentioned time, place, item, etc. that Sebald desires. It memorializes the details of the subject, thus preventing it from being imagined by the reader in any other way; it also makes fixed the perspective from which the subject is surveyed, so that the reader cannot imagine the narrating character surveying the subject from any angle or location other than what the photographer has chosen. In these ways, the photographs entrap and limit the movement of the characters.

^[3] At Jewish wedding ceremonies, the bride and groom both break wine glasses to signify the brokenness of the world they live in, and to recognize God’s mandate for them to repair it together.

Works Cited

Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.

The NIV Study Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1995. Print.

Frontispiece to Hobbes’ Leviathan (detail), public domain on Wikimedia Commons

by Cora Hermary

The Hobbesian state of nature both begins and ends with human nature. While Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is widely regarded as advocating a pessimistic view of human nature, Hobbes’ pessimism is not directed towards human nature, but towards the state of nature. Nevertheless, Hobbes tempers his pessimism for the state of nature with a subtle yet equal optimism for humanity, whose status as a creation under God guides his solution to the state of nature: art. Due to its intrinsic artificiality, this solution may seem to indicate that Hobbes believes human nature to be inherently flawed, since it can only be put right with the unnatural. But while the artificial and the natural seem on the surface to be at odds, a closer inspection of the way Hobbes uses these terms reveals that they are both instantiations of the greater, divine quality of order, which guides not only the tone of Hobbes’ argument, but the form of human nature and, consequently, his solution to the state of nature.

For Hobbes, there is only an instrumental difference between nature and art: whereas nature is reality, art is merely a reordered version of that reality. While art may be taken prima facie to mean a mere simulation of nature, this definition is inconsistent with Hobbes’ usage since he defines nature in his introduction as an art unto itself—“the art whereby God hath made and governs the world” (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 3.1). Since nature itself is an art, Hobbes must not conceive of art as a simulation of nature but as a system of order whose principles manifest in nature. Under this new understanding of art as a system of order, Hobbes’ task to create an “artificial man” from the state of nature becomes no less natural than God’s creation of Adam from dust (Leviathan, 3.1). Because Hobbes regards art as order, this “artificial man” is simply a product of the organization of persons into society, akin to the pronouncements “by God in the Creation” where God’s “art”, nature, organized phenomena into the bearings of the world (Leviathan, 4.1). For the mechanistic Hobbes, to whom “life is but a motion of limbs”, the natural and artificial are only nominally distinct—if anything, the artificial is “of greater stature and strength than the natural” because of its ability to optimize itself through order (Leviathan, 3.1).

By uniting nature and art through order, Hobbes portrays art as both natural and divine, allowing human nature tamed by art to still be considered human nature since the product—the Commonwealth, “which is but an artificial man”—is not constituently different from the state of nature, only compositionally (Leviathan, 3.1). In other words, the “ill condition” that is the state of nature is not the fault of the individuals within it—who, being “that most rational and excellent work of Nature”, already bear the trademark of their “Artificer”, God—but of their arrangement, which has yet to be ordered through art to yield the Commonwealth (Leviathan, 78.13; 3.1). As such, the sovereign’s body on Leviathan’s frontispiece is the mass of his citizens, who would otherwise be in the state of nature but, because of their specific arrangement, are able to become as one to form an “artificial man” (Leviathan, 3.1).

While Hobbes deems the organization of people into the Commonwealth an artificial process, he sees this organization as no different than Creation, in which God arranged otherwise disordered phenomena into the natural world. The establishment of the Commonwealth is therefore a second (and to Hobbes, necessary) act of creation, where the disordered state of nature is restructured into an ordered whole, the State. Since the state of nature stands no hope of peace without this restructuring, it may be tempting to believe that Hobbes sees human nature—the supposed cause of the state of nature—as fundamentally corrupt. However, Hobbes does not intend the state of nature to illustrate an underlying human disposition. Rather, the state of nature, often called by Hobbes the “state of mere nature” (emphasis mine), is the particular arrangement of humanity when it is in a state of nature alone, that is, without a trace of divine order. Just as the universe is often religiously conceived as a dark, chaotic nothingness before God works his hand upon it, Hobbes’ anarchic state of nature is not just the human condition sans sovereignty, but more broadly the human condition devoid of art and, by extension, order. Therefore, to escape the inherently disorganized state of nature, humanity must impose order on itself, imitating nature through art to proceed from anarchy, the state of nature, to Commonwealth, the state of art.

While Hobbes suggests that human passions are the cause of the state of nature, these passions, when combined with reason, also form the backbone of the laws of nature. These laws promise order, presenting the “possibility to come out of” the state of nature, and though “found out by reason”, they reckon with the “passions that incline men to peace”: “fear of death”, and desire for the means and ends to survival (Leviathan, 78.13; 79.3; 78.14). Against his portrait of the passions as inciting the state of nature, Hobbes shows here how the passions may be arranged for peace, provided that the art of reason is used to tame them. Because the same interests of self-preservation that encourage peace also drive the human conflicts which are to blame for the state of nature, this provision of reason does not change the passions of human nature, only rearrange them such that they conduce to peace rather than war.

Peace, then, relies upon not only the passions of human nature, but the human art of reason as well. But while reason can suggest “convenient articles of peace upon which men may be drawn to agreement”, it is not until right reason—a settled, universal approach to ratiocination—is established by covenant that reason can begin to bring people to consensus (Leviathan, 78.14). Until then, the “notable multiplying glasses” of which people “are by nature provided” cause them to “see their own wit at hand” and regard their own reason as right reason (Leviathan, 118.20; 75.2). It is not that Hobbes believes people are so disagreeable or ignorant that they take to fighting over trifles, but that right reason is sufficiently ambiguous, and human perspective sufficiently limited, that nobody has the capacity to distrust their own judgements. While all individuals have ultimate trust in themselves, they cannot manage the same trust for anyone else, partly due to the solitary nature of mind and partly due to natural diffidence. Accounting for these limitations, Hobbes’ subjectivist perspective upholds that humanity’s egocentric approach to reasoning is not the fault of its reasoners, but is merely the natural state of thought, which God has taken such efforts as to make orderly within each individual but which remains disorderly between individuals. The solution Hobbes sees, then, is to extrapolate the God-given orderliness of the individual to all individuals in society by establishing a common standard of right reason. Because right reason is not natural and must be established, Hobbes sees it too as an art, for “by art is created” not only “that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth”, but the agreed-upon instruments of reason necessary for the establishment and maintenance thereof (Leviathan, 3.1).

For “want of a right reason constituted by Nature”, Hobbes sees no objective way to ratify reason, and instead seeks to establish a right reason constituted by art (Leviathan, 23.3). If right reason were merely natural, then it would be apparent to all and there would be no need to artificially encode it into law, but “no one [person’s] reason […] makes the certainty”, and absent this certainty, each seeks that “things should be determined by no [other] reason but their own” (Leviathan, 23.3). While each person’s reliance on their own subjectivity is a result of human nature, Hobbes recognizes that this reliance only poses a problem in the state of nature, where the divine order of individual reason is challenged not by the human nature from which it arises, but by the human natures with which it conflicts. Hobbes’ goal is to remove the possibility of such conflicts from human interaction, which requires reestablishing the certainty of individual reason among all members of a social collective such that their multifarious human natures consolidate into a single model of human nature. Constituting an “artificial man”, this model of human nature requires the equally artificial foundations of right reason, and just as disagreeing individuals make peace by setting up “for right reason the reason of some arbitrator”, Hobbes advocates for a single arbitrator—the sovereign—to act as right reason on behalf of all people (Leviathan, 3.1; 23.3). As the sovereign’s reason is imposed onto all people, the God-given orderliness of individual reason, borne from human nature, extends across society until this orderliness exists artificially between all individuals. To impose the sovereign’s reason in this way is not to indoctrinate the citizens or deny them freedom of thought, but rather to establish a consistent, grounded procedure of thought among people so that they can act in agreement, just as a dictionary collectively defines the words in a language so that all its speakers may understand one another.

Although lay interpretations of Leviathan often characterize Hobbes’ understanding of human nature as pessimistic, these interpretations ultimately mischaracterize Hobbes, who conceives of his ideal ruler, the sovereign, as an embodiment of human nature. Because the sovereign “must read in himself, not this, or that particular man; but mankind”, he is taken to represent not only his particular self, but all of humanity, and therefore serves as a model of human nature (Leviathan, 5.4). The sovereign’s role as such a model proves Hobbes’ underlying optimism for human nature, which both exemplifies the divine order within individuals and serves as an additional model for artificial order between individuals. Further, despite modern critics’ concerns that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, Hobbes largely evades the possibility of a tyrannical sovereign, suggesting that a ruler wholly in touch with human nature would be the least inclined to cruelty precisely because of his insight into all of humanity.

Although the famously dismal Hobbesian state of nature is inescapable with mere nature, the artificial solution Hobbes offers does not imply that he deems humanity irredeemable. The state of nature is not the fault of humanity, only its disorderly arrangement, which has yet to imitate nature through art. Since Hobbes equates art with order, his solution does not entail fundamentally changing human nature, only rearranging individual human natures through the sovereign’s artificial right reason to establish the “that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth” (Leviathan, 3.1). Deriving his solutions from God’s art, nature, Hobbes advocates applying the divine order of creation onto the disorderly state of nature so that humanity may evolve from natural men into an “artificial man”, progressing from the state of mere nature to a state of more than nature—the state of art (Leviathan, 3.1).

Works cited:

Hobbes, Thomas, and E. M. Curley. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 1994. Print.

Women’s party dresses in 1956, Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-37027-0013, by Salzbrenner, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 Germany

by Tati Chavitage

The ability to embrace femininity has always been a uphill battle in relation to the issues women have dealt with in Western society: in recent years, liberating ourselves through our sexuality has become apparent through movements like “SlutWalk”, a march that demands an end to rape culture, or even “free bleeding”, in which women refuse to hide their menstruation by allowing themselves to bleed without the help of tampons or other methods of concealment. Whether or not one agrees with these radical movements, most would agree that feminine bodies still lack complete autonomy and are often the site of blame and disgust by the infamous patriarchy. In her one and only novel, The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath gives clear definitions of the societal expectations placed upon the characters of the novel, by proxy defining issues American women dealt with in the 1950s. This is done largely through the male characters of the novel: Marco, Buddy Willard, and Irwin clearly place certain roles and expectations upon Esther, the protagonist, forcing her to either comply with or reject certain ideals of femininity. Although certain women in the novel also place expectations upon her, especially her mother, the men of the story are the ones who most directly coerce Esther to act certain ways; thus, by rejecting these advances and expectations, Esther comes closer to being an independent feminine being, beyond what 1950s Western society deemed to be ‘okay.’ Because of Esther’s choice to reject these three characters who symbolize and act through patriarchal values, she alienates herself from the norm, coming closer and closer to who she actually is as she rejects more and more people who oppress her desires. This also leads to her increasing self-alienation, which, although mainly attributed to her depression, can also be linked to a desire to distance herself from traditional ideals of femininity. As Esther becomes more isolated, her true self shines through more brightly, resulting in a much stronger character emerging at the end of the novel.

In the narrative, women are meant to fit into a certain ideal of what they aspire to be: Esther’s mother constantly wants her to take shorthand (a female-dominated ‘practical’ skill that requires all thought and innovation to, ironically, come from a man), motherhood and marriage are expected of all the female characters, and in Esther’s specific case, marrying Buddy Willard is the expected and ‘sensible’ thing for her to do. Although the women in the story are allowed to lead more progressive and independent lives (attending university, having their own career, etc.), they’re only permitted to do so within certain patriarchal constraints; for example, you can attend university, but you still do have to raise multiple children and know how to cook and clean (in other words, serving men should still be a main priority). This is shown especially well through Buddy Willard’s mother, who Esther describes with disdain: “I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself” (80). Although Esther acknowledges that Buddy’s mother is an educated woman, she still follows through with the classic stay-at-home-mom trope, evidently not using her intellect for anything other than to serve her husband. This is not to say that being a stay-at-home-mom is necessarily a bad thing: what is inherently sexist is the fact that Buddy’s mother most likely lacked the option to be anything but that, and it’s this inability to choose that disgusts Esther. The belief that intellect is lost after marriage is also reinforced by Buddy, who, wanting to marry Esther, tells her that “after [she] had children [she] would feel differently… [and] wouldn’t want to write poems any more” (81), reinforcing the idea that if Esther were to follow through with what is desired of her (marrying a ‘good’ man), she would become “numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state” (81). The more that Esther comes to realize this, the more she wishes to distance herself from this traditional lifestyle. Her awareness of other forms of sexism present in her world are hinted at throughout the narrative; she comments on the unfair double standards concerning virginity by stating that “[she] couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not” (77), and early in the novel goes on to say that “[she] hated the idea of serving men in any way” (72), as well as establishing the fact that “[she] never intended to get married” (24). Although she clearly realizes the unfair standards placed upon her and has a desire to break away from them, one could argue that she isn’t able to completely alienate herself from that lifestyle until she breaks off her relationships with the characters who impose this sexism on her the most: Marco, Buddy, and Irwin. The personalities and actions of these three men symbolize three distinct but related spheres of oppression that affect all women, so that as she rejects these three men, she correspondingly rejects these ideals.

Her first rejection of the patriarchy involves her direct combat and eventual triumph over an instance of sexual assault. This instance includes one of the most domineering characters of the novel: Marco, a man Doreen sets her up with who Esther describes as a “woman-hater” (102). It’s important to note that although Esther clearly despises him, she also finds him to be quite tempting: she even refers to him as a “snake” (101), which immediately brings to mind the the temptation of sin brought forth by the serpent in the Garden of Eden; Like the snake tempting Eve, Marco seeks to bring Esther down to a position of suffering. It becomes apparent early on that he sees no value in women other than their sexuality, which he believes is something that can be taken without consent. It’s clear that Marco doesn’t care about Esther’s mental and physical well-being: Esther describes how, “Marco gripped my hand in such a way I had to choose between following him on to the floor or having my arm torn off” (102), his tight grip paralleling the constriction many snakes use to kill their prey. Almost unexpectedly, he attempts to rape her that same night. When the assault begins, she initially thinks “It’s happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it will happen” (104), which is what she first does—nothing. Yet, as he repeatedly begins so call her a “slut”, she takes matters into her own hands and kicks him in the leg and “fist[s her] fingers together and smashe[s] them at his nose” (105). Within a matter of seconds, Esther undergoes a crucial transformation; although at first she sees herself as a mere victim, by the end of the incident she refers to it as a “battle” (105), engaging in combat herself and fighting the often one-sided violent actions of rape. After the incident, she almost literally sheds her old skin by throwing all her lavish clothes out of the window, implying that she no longer cares about her external sexuality in relation to the ‘male-gaze’ by ridding herself of clothes that make her appealing to men like Marco: “Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York” (107). The next day, she reflects that “I hadn’t… felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like a relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord” (108). She carries around her battle wounds proudly, which not only reveals that she’s proud of her act of self-defense, but also that she doesn’t care that she doesn’t look as pristine as she is expected to. The presence of blood also foreshadows a later instance of oppression again concerning her sexuality, which reflects that within the novel, her own body is almost a literal battleground, garnering wounds, blood, and scars as the story continues. Following the bloodshed, she emerges a much stronger character, by ideologically and physically by saying ‘no’ to something she doesn’t want. This drastic change is observable in comparing her attitudes just a few pages earlier, when Buddy teaches her to ski even though she could care less for the sport. In this instance, Esther notes that “it never occurred to me to say no” (91), which reflects upon the idea that in general, women are taught to only say ‘yes’ and are only desirable when they’re docile. By learning to say ‘no’ in the instance with Marco, Esther begins to reject the negative standards related to femininity, increasing her own autonomy.

The second major positive rejection Esther initiates deals with the casual sexism that men impose on women, a subtle form of oppression that seeks to place women in a secondary role in which serving men is a first priority. This issue finds itself embedded in Buddy Willard, a man who she could have easily married had she not taken charge of her own desires and needs. Esther never seems to actually like Buddy, which seems strange given her drawn-out romance with him. When they kiss for the first time, she “kept [her] eyes open and tried to memorize the spacing of the house lights” (57), revealing a striking emotional detachment from him even from the beginning. Perhaps she only continued her affair with him because he was exactly what any respectable woman at the time should have wanted in a man. She notes that “he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for” (64), acknowledging that he was such a ‘good guy’ that societal norms dictated that it was worth keeping her virginity intact just for him. Yet, even though he is considered the perfect man by most, she finds him dull and doesn’t seem to like the idea of being with him—as mentioned previously, he clearly believes in very traditional marriage values, including the cooking-and-cleaning-wife-and-mother stereotype that his own mother was forced to abide by (and that he wants for Esther). Esther observes this same issue early on with her own mother, who, immediately after marrying Esther’s father, was told by him, “‘now we can stop pretending and be ourselves’” (81), Esther observing consequently that “from that day on my mother never had a minute’s peace” (81). This implies that the fantasy of romance disappears once marriage has imprisoned the woman into a state of service for her husband. Negatively reacting to this issue, Esther tells Buddy “I’m never going to get married” (89), to which he replies “you’re crazy” (ibid.), revealing that he doesn’t understand how a woman could possibly not want to marry, remaining independent. After many encounters with him, most of them quasi-robotic, she receives a letter from him notifying her that he fell in love with another woman. She almost unfeelingly replies to the letter and rejects him in return, finally leaving behind a man who could have given her an extremely patriarchal life:

I turned the letter paper over and on the opposite side wrote that I was engaged to a simultaneous interpreter and never wanted to see Buddy again…. I stuck the letter back in the envelope, scotch-taped it together, and readdressed it to Buddy, without putting on a new stamp. I thought the message was worth a good three cents. (115)

The fact that she doesn’t even write him back on a fresh sheet of paper shows just how detached she was from him, and thus, because he embodied so much of what the patriarchy stands for, just how much she doesn’t belong to that lifestyle. As previously mentioned, Esther “hated the idea of serving men in any way” (72), and because what Buddy and so many other men like him wanted was a marriage dependent on this form of service, her repulsion seems only natural. Therefore, by finally getting rid of Buddy, Esther takes part in her second male-cleansing of the narrative, learning to embody her feminine independence along the way.

The last patriarchal figure Esther rids herself of in order to gain more freedom provides a much less obvious form of liberation for her, because at this point, Esther is almost entirely free from the effects of the patriarchy on herself (or as free as she can be in her current state). In this instance she emotionally reclaims her own virginity, which demonstrates her newfound ability to take charge of her sexuality beyond the self-defense inflicted upon Marco. This instance of emotional combat is distinct from the previous two, for here she not only manages to rid herself of a form of oppression, but also reclaims a part of her own feminine identity in the process. This specific form of oppression finds itself within the character Irwin, a man who Esther “decided to seduce” (216). Even at the beginning of the anecdote, in which Esther ‘decides’ to have sex with him, she has already asserted just how far she’s come since the beginning of the novel; near the start, her encounters with men such as Buddy and Marco were much less about her making a choice and more about what the men wanted out of certain situations. However, with Irwin, we witness a new, confident woman, one who is able to make an active decision in terms of her own sexuality. When she begins talking to him, she “match[es her] stride to Irwin’s” (216), revealing that even in certain less obvious ways, she is his equal. Although Esther has clearly made great strides in her journey towards freedom from the oppressive side of femininity, she still observes that her “virginity weighed like a millstone around [her] neck” (218), revealing that she still sees her own sexuality as somehow crude or a nuisance, which is a concept that many women still grapple with as a result of sexist views towards one’s purity. Right before having sex with Irwin, she believes that a “miraculous change [will] make itself felt” (218), thinking that her entire being will transform due to the presence of a man changing who she is—an inherently sexist and problematic notion. Once she loses her virginity, she begins to bleed heavily, reflecting again the symbolic issue of her body acting as a war-zone. As Esther bleeds more and more, Irwin displays barely any signs of distress. When she asks him to grab her a towel to put between her legs, he “stroll[s] back” with it (219), his nonchalant attitude implying that he has little to no regard for her safety. Although he does drive her to Joan’s house in order to be taken care of, he still doesn’t seem very concerned for her well-being. Days later, he calls her up and asks “when am I going to see you?” (231), to which she sassily replies “never” (Ibid.). By rejecting him, she takes the power of her sexuality out of the hands of the man who ‘took’ her virginity, almost reclaiming it in a sense. Although it’s never explicitly stated, one could imply that this sort of terse rejection wouldn’t have been seen as socially acceptable, especially for a ‘proper’ woman such as Esther. By not complying with the wishes of Irwin, as well as the other aforementioned male characters, Esther finally allows herself freedom from male dominance. A few pages later, Esther states that she is “perfectly free” (232), which, as well as referring to the death of her ‘friend’ Joan, also relates to the issue that she no longer has any men controlling her and that, if any would wish to do so in the future, her newfound sense of independence would not longer allow that.

In The Bell Jar, Plath explores common anxieties of femininity through Esther’s experiences. From the beginning, Esther clearly despises certain patriarchal ideals, yet it’s only when confronted with these issues head-on that she is forced to take action. If Esther had decided to remain docile (as she is expected to), she would have been raped, married off to a man she deemed boring, and in general, sentenced to a life of sexist values that so many women preceding her had no choice but to abide by. Yet she doesn’t allow for these events to control her, and instead fights back against patriarchal powers that seek to keep her in a state of no control. Thus, Esther becomes a beacon of hope, not only for the other women in the narrative, but also for women as a whole, demonstrating that to fight against systematic oppression can help liberate one’s femininity.

Work Cited

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. Print.

William Blake, A Surinam Planter in his Morning Dress, public domain on Wikimedia Commons

by Madeline Klintworth

David Dabydeen’s Slave Song addresses the dilemma of how to identify the ‘true’ voice of a Guayanese culture that has been clouded and corrupted historically by the voice of colonialism. Dabydeen, born in Guyana to Indian parents but having emigrated with his family to England as a young boy, expresses this conundrum in the three separate voices, all of them created by Dabydeen himself, that are intricately intertwined throughout the book: the creole voice of the poems; the historical, cultural, and at times academic voice of the introduction and notes; and the English voice found in the translation of the creole poems. These voices are, in turn, juxtaposed with the historical colonialist illustrations that accompany the creole poems throughout the book. The complex nature of the culture, and thus the text, forces the reader to constantly re-examine the authority of each given voice. Readers must piece together all they are given and form their own connections in an effort to understand Dabydeen’s attempt to imagine both his homeland and his own identity in relation to it. This is particularly evident in the textual relationships that surround the poem “Brown Skin Girl.” Here, each of the voices represented in the different sections of the book seeks to control or subvert the figure of the Guyanese woman in the text. The colonialist representation of the native woman is mimicked by her own native male counterpart in the poem, and this triangular relationship is then further complicated in Dabydeen’s notes. The glorification of the Western ‘elsewhere’ is seen through the idyllic imagery of the Americas, but is balanced by the dark desperation to escape their reality and home. The woman’s daily life is depicted by her male counterpart as violent, diseased and monotonous. This is delivered without sympathy, perhaps until the end when the speaker reflects upon the suffering behind his dreams for the girl. The only voice we are unable to identify in the work is that of the girl herself, which expresses her lack of control within the conflicting forces of ‘here’ or ‘there’. She is an object of exchange being used by both sides to affirm power over the other. Her character, and its value, does not extend past her bodily identification: “Brown Skin Girl.”

In the introduction to the book, Dabydeen begins by describing his home country in terms of its portrayal in Western literature and media, clearly aware that for many of his readers, these will be the only accessible references to Guyanese culture. Dabydeen foreshadows the frustrations present in “Brown Skin Girl,” where the black female body is used by white men as a means of expressing their own desires, including the shame or indecencies not permitted in “civilization.” Focusing on the tendency to mystify England as a sort of utopia or promised land, with whiteness symbolizing religious purity, Dabydeen explores in the introduction the “banal,” “spiritual” and “sexual” elements of this fantasy: the material gain of “civilization,” the inherent power brought on by whiteness, and the modern sexual appetite centered on the white idealization of the female. At the same time, however, that Dabydeen mercilessly parodies white colonialist attitudes, much of his characterization of the people of his homeland elsewhere in the introduction is far from flattering. His cultural biography of sorts is both gritty and disturbing. He has no qualms about passing judgement on “bush-rum” and its detrimental effects on the Guyanese people, as well as on the sordid reality of wife-beating as commonplace. The daily routines and destructive patterns are made explicitly clear. What is not quite yet entirely clear is a palpable sense of how the combination of invasive and natural forces of domination construct Dabydeen’s worldview, his identity, and his vision of his past.

The reader’s immediate introduction to “Brown Skin Girl” is through the poem itself, which is deceptively simple in its structure and form. The accompanying image seen alongside the poem is a late 18^th-century engraving by William Blake of a “Surinam Planter,” whose powerful stance and ornate dress occupy most of the frame. His power over the land, the women, and the depiction of the image itself are explicitly evident. To his right, standing behind him physically and just out of the range of his gaze, is a highly fetishized young black woman. She is standing topless, facing the colonialist and waiting to serve him a drink. Her body, and her service to the man in the image, perfectly complements the thematic content of the poem. As in the text of the poem, in the image the girl is depicted only in terms of what her body can do in service to this figure, who in turn will “save” her from her own identity. The primary source, the original poem, is split into two stanzas which follow a similar pattern to one another. The voice of the speaker both envies and pities the girl. His internalized racism and shame he now projects onto those whom he considers beneath him. It is startling and disturbing for the reader to encounter such Euro-centric statements presented in the creole language. This inherited cultural insecurity presents itself as the speaker urges her to escape and to adopt new ways. To say to the girl, learn to “Taak prappa” (40), is to imply an inherent wrongness in the poem’s very existence, and the existence of what the voice represents. Distinctively human qualities are assigned to the west; it is represented through its technological ‘advancements’. There she will “Laan” (40) to “dress, drive car, / Hold knike and faak in yu haan” and “Move smood, stand tall” (40). The control and order of the west is contrasted to the wild and natural depiction of her home: “De mud, de canal de canefield” (40); “Cackroach, kreketeh, / Maskita na deh- deh” (40). In her home the land represents the power and currency of the culture and is materialized and cultivated. However, in America it is she who will be altered and refined, and will serve as a tool of power in this same way. The poetic content of “Brown Skin Girl” is a voice given to reflect the delusions of elsewhere and the internal and external struggle for power with women’s bodies as currency.

While Dabydeen’s notes exist in theory to clear the reader’s confusion, they serve instead only to add to the complexity of each poem. We are given a rather unique perspective, as his cultural identity seems to defy both popular notions of “native” and “colonialist”. He includes elements of his English scholarly influence (Dabydeen was a lecturer in Caribbean studies at the University of Warwick when he wrote the book) as well as personal and political anecdotes in his notes. However, his personal and emotional biases are also ever-present due to his inevitable closeness to the “voice” he seeks to explore in this collection. There is an implied judgement in his account of Guyanese women who “‘willingly’ give themselves to the white man in a new kind of prostitution. They do so out of a deep feeling of inferiority” (68). On one level, this information is conveyed as a generalized, objective historical fact; on another level, it simultaneously hints at an expression of his own unique personal experience. The reader must again examine how the additional voice in the notes both complicates and complements the poem. The author of the notes seems, at times, to be in agreement with the dehumanizing voice of the speaker: “For the women, this quest for ‘civilization’ can only be realized though giving their bodies: what else have they to offer the white man? What else is he capable of taking from them?” (68) He simultaneously sheds light on the suffering of the women of his home, and minimizes their worth and humanity. Intentionally or not, he describes their bodies in terms of currency between the two male powers, much like the voice of the poem. And there is yet a further context to the historical roots of this ideology. Dabydeen’s “Brown Skin Girl” is an inverted revision of a folk song that originally described a native girl being made worthless and eventually abandoned by the father of her baby seeking new life in the western ‘elsewhere’. Perhaps Dabydeen is intentionally expressing this notion of male inferiority as he describes his own rendition as a “male at the receiving end of such cruel desertion and sexual disdain” (68). It is important to distinguish that even still, the female perspective has been intentionally left out. “Brown Skin Girl” is not a person, but rather a motif for a struggling male ego in a culture in which he must compete for his “rightful” honour, represented in the body of the “Brown Skin Girl.”

The final version of the text given to the reader is the English translation of the poem. Though much of the subtleties of the dialect are surely lost in translation, it certainly assists the average English reader in finding personal connections and deeper meaning within the text. However, it is important for readers to consider which factors may inform their own cultural lens, and how in turn that may affect their worldview as a whole. Unlike the original Creole poem, the English text is structured in sentences, with lines separated clearly on the page. The visual progression of each stanza leads us to two separate conclusions. The first stanza ends with the image of the speaker and a rice bowl, a physical representation of the death of the land “thinking far”(69). It is clear that it is he, and not necessarily the “girl,” who reveres the “manners and material” of the west and longs for an escape. The poem is not about the dynamic between colonialists and Guyanese women, but rather about the projection of the male’s worth onto the figure of the female. The second stanza solidifies this further with the line “Dreams like bleeding deep inside” (69). The last echo of the male speaker’s voice shows how his desires and his suffering intertwine and feed one another. He longs to have his culture’s worth validated through the westernization of “his” women, but the inferiority that such longing brings upon him is at the same time torturous.

Dabydeen’s poetry and its accompanying texts are filled with a variety of voices that must be identified and negotiated by the reader. This complicates immensely both the process of reading and the poetry itself. “Brown Skin Girl,” its English translation, and its notes exemplify how crucial this process is in order to gain a full understanding of the text. The short, repetitive poem is rather straightforward and simplistic upon first glance. This could not be further from the truth, however. Through an examination of its complex interplay of voices, it becomes clear that “Brown Skin Girl” touches on a cultural dynamics of power that extends far beyond a single or singular girl.

Works Cited

Dabydeen, David. Slave Song. Leeds, UK: Pepal Tree Press Ltd, 2005.