Be Your Own Subversion (Final)

I used this exact same quote in my third blog post, and I will do the same to introduce my last: Americana folk hero Vic Chesnutt was once asked by a New York Daily News interviewer what influenced his songwriting. "Other people write about the bling and the booty," said Chesnutt. "I write about the pus and the gnats. To me, that's beautiful."

So do Danticat, Bechdel, Allison, Sapphire, Ozick, and Ensler. It, like my use of Chesnutt's quote, is cyclical, with the writing being as much forward-thinking as it is reflective, honoring past writers and experiences in a unique fashion. While the class had only reached Danticat's works by the time I wrote the third blog post, Chesnutt's quote was applicable then, and it is even more applicable now, after immersing ourselves in the ten books we've read this semester. Danticat, Bechdel, Allison, Ozick, Ensler - that "bling" means nothing to them if it isn't caked in pus and a layer of rust. The vision of women in all of the pieces we've read this semester are much less Red Book, much less stereotypically "feminine" (I'd go so far as to say that most 'real' women's literature is as far removed from stereotypical femininity as monster trucks and fly fishing, but this stereotype has yet to escape the unfortunate bra-burning trope it's been assigned since the women's rights movement) and much more in line with Chesnutt's notion of beauty. It's a baby's corpse being found on the street of Port Au Prince and treated like a real child by a cuckold wife. It's in a closeted funeral director slash English teacher and occasional pedarest getting run over by a truck while bringing lumber to the other side of the street. It's in the predestined wide hips of beaten Southern women. And it's in a thirteen year old black girl getting raped by a twentysomething year old woman but interpreting her rape as empowering and an act of romance and self-discovery. The rape "raised her little coochie snorcher to some kind of heaven" in the same way these authors, through playing with and distorting and subverting tropes of fiction, expand the reader's minds and contort whatever our preconceived notions of "women's literature" are into something else entirely.

What do men think of when women's literature is mentioned? What about women? People who don't identify as either gender? The correct answer should be "anything." Take, for example, the depiction of flight in the works of both Danticat and Ozick. Like I mentioned in my last Ozick blog post, flight - birds, angels, even winged insects - are almost always viewed in grand, majestic, empowering terms. Not here. The dead baby in Between the Pool & The Gardenias "wears a butterfly collar," and though she has found life after death through the care of a woman who found her corpse, the fact that she has already died, in addition to having had absolutely no opportunities or mobility in her initial life, equals one poetically bitter medicine for both the audience and characters to choke down. Wings are supposed to be give someone mobility, but these wings from the "butterfly collar" are only granted to the child after she has passed away. It's black humor at its most morbid, although the reference to the 'angel getting their wings' after their humanity has died, while cliche, is not lost here. This also ties into the concept of predestination. Was the baby's fate sealed even before birth? We can only guess with our own individual faith and beliefs, but we know for certain that the child was dealt a heavy hand even before she was born, considering her station in life. Danticat does not explicitly mention destiny in Between The Pool & The Gardenias, but destiny is brought strongly into question in another Krik-Krak story, Children of the Sea.

The male's boat has "white sheets with bright red spots float as our sail." White is a loaded color, as loaded as the sensual, highly sexualized "bright red spots" guiding the Haitians away from oppression, and a reference to the purity and unbending nature of fate and faith. Regardless of whether the couple's life is intended to play out the way it does, the color symbolism Danticat uses connotates the finality, the out-of-handedness, of their situation. Predestination appears even more bluntly in Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. When most of the female characters are "wide-hipped vehicles of predestination," the audience tends to take notice of the author's opinions on fate. In this case, Allison believed fate to be an all-encompassing force which binded her community together, as well as tore them apart, in much the same way fate essentially tore apart the couple in Danticat's short story. While the ideas here are similar, the two authors adopt totally difference tones of voices and approaches, with one being blatant and the other sticking to relative subtletly.

Going beyond predestination's presentation complexities, sexuality pulsed through nearly everything we read this semester. When The Emperor Was Divine, easily the most sterilized book featured over the past few months, was loaded with homoeroticism in the form of horses and stallions and the boy's conflict between becoming a slim jockey or a "big American boy." These are veiled euphemisms for feminity and masculinity, with little room for an androgynous alternative offered to the child. Sexuality was even the focal point in Fun Home, with her father's homosexuality or bisexuality acting as the catalyst for much of his life and his death (or at least by Bechdel's estimation - the audience only knows Allison's perspective on family events, in and of itself another device encountered frequently this term, the unreliable narrator, from Fun Home, The Shawl, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, and individual characters in The Vagina Monologues). Though Bechdel focuses primarily on the darker aspects of sexuality - pedophilia - along with Dorothy Allison, who shined a light on incest, Danticat and Ensler primarily tackled the divisions and cohesiveness between love and sex. For example, Danticat's Night Women hits the audience with the main character's extreme love for her son as well as her unhappy life as a prostitute. It's obvious the mother hates her profession, which is sex just for the sake of sex (and the primary motivation of getting paid). There is no love involved here. Just nerves, science, and organs. While a character in Ensler's The Vagina Monologues says the clitoris is the "only organ in the body designed for pleasure," it is just as capable of feeling pain as any other organ of the body is, which is exactly what the prostitute in Night Women feels every night. Ensler further tackles this idea in I Am An Emotional Creature with the poem "Bad Boys." "He is not the most handsome boy," closes the poem's narrator, "but he's troubled like me." Though the narrator recognizes her boyfriend's looks, his appearance doesn't influence her love for him, showcasing a more mature opinion on romance and sexuality. She does not need him to be "handsome" for her to love him or, presumably, have sex. The same can be said for Sapphire's Precious character. Precious never comments on the looks of the male characters she comes in contact with, and fantasizes about marrying her math teacher, a person most teenage girls probably wouldn't want to ever be associated with beyond class (and sometimes not even then). When she talks about her future husband, all she ever mentions is being happy with him, and leading a romantic life together. Though this will include sex, she doesn't seem to care much for the appearance of her husband; love is one of her primary life motivations. Tying in Bad Boys and Push, the character Marie from Danticat's Between The Pool and The Gardenias says "it's so easy to love somebody, I tell you, when there's nothing else around." Precious, the narrator in Bad Boys - neither of them have parents they can relate to, nor peers they connect deeply with, at least in the beginning. They're looking for love more than anything else. The differences between fucking, sex, and 'making love' are not crystalline truths in our world, they certainly are in the worlds of many of the works we've read this semester.

Destined for Unfulfillment

Unfulfilled destinies are poised like an electric spiderweb over the characters in The Shawl and Two or Three Things I Know For Sure.

Though the characters in these books could not come from more divergent backstories, the end is always the same: they are predestined to live unfulfilling lives in the service of cruel monotony or crippling suppression. It binds them together when they normally would care to live apart. "She knew little about Magda's mind at this age, or whether she had any talents - even what her intelligence toward," says Rosa, imagining what her daughter's personality might have been like had she survived the concentration camps. While Rosa was quick to initially point out "there might be something amiss with her intelligence" when Magda lacked a voice in the camps, this does not stop the mother from speculating - wishing, really - that her child grew into success later on in life. Her speculation could be seen as a direct challenge to predestination - was Magda genuinely as unintelligent or as stunted as she seemed, and could her early death be seen as a fulfillment of her destiny to die young before she realizes her handicap, as people who have handicaps often due later in life, an act of mercy? - or is a paeon to a destiny that was ultimately sideswiped by the Nazis, outside forces? Destiny is usually portrayed as immutable, but Ozick's vision of destiny seems to be fragile, as fragile and as malleable and as symbolic as the lettuce carried by the woman on the train. Ozick wants us to continually question the role destiny does, or does not, play in The Shawl and life itself, in much the same way Rosa butts heads with predestination every time she writes a letter to her dead daughter. Men and tradition, as well the women themselves, serve the same purpose as the Nazis do in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. However, Allison's vision of destiny is much less ambiguous and much less open to the idea of change in comparison to Ozick's.

Destiny is, perhaps, a product of the environment in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. "We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly," says Allison. Allison's interpretation of southern tradition is less than comforting. It's a good ol' boys club and the women aren't even afforded the luxury of fluidity. They can't bend nor exaggerate , or create their own path in life because everything - life, men, preformed, long-held ideas - are so stacked against these women. Women in Allison's world are indoctrinated the moment they are born into the community. Opportunities outside the beaten path are virtually non-existent, and if they do exist, the resistance must seem damning. Hardness and toughness and virtousness and tenacity are beautiful traits (I mean, the era of the wilting flower is over, right?), but not when they are essentially forced upon an entire subsect of people, as they are in Allison's neighborhood. Allison's more explicitly physical description of the women in her community furthers this idea. "Solid, stolid, wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined," says Allison. The emphasis placed on "wide-hipped," as well as "predestined," juxtaposes the physical with the metaphysical, suggesting destiny is as much 'written in the stars' as it is written in the village and in the heart.

Lie

String theory doesn't always have to be mired in quantum physics or relativity. Sometimes the simplest of concepts - suppression, imprisonment - are just as relevant to the theory than anything more scientific.

When The Emperor Was Divine and The Shawl are spiritual companions; there is no doubt in my mind that these two novels were chosen one after the other for this exact reason. However, while Otsuka covers forced imprisonment, Ozick covers something significantly more complicated than that. Rosa's state can't be limited to just one, or two, or even multiple reasons. It's a combination, perhaps - of both forced suppresion and freely willed stiflement - as well as guilt, transference, revenge, anger, exasperation, and hatred. Rosa's Florida is as much an internment camp as the Japanese-Americans had to endure, although of an entirely different nature, one which goes well beyond the fact that Rosa has the illusion of choice and the Japanese family did not. While Japanese prisoners could not speak because of the desert's "chalky white dust," the same can be said for Florida. "In Florida there is no air," says Rosa. "There is only thin syrup seeping into the esophagus." Rosa may not speak for everyone else in Florida, but her assertion that Florida's air flows as thick as syrup and can obstruct the voice by the very virtue of its existence is a ghoulish way of describing muteness, as well as acting as a throwback to Rosa's tenure as a prisoner. Of course, unlike the camps, where the Nazis were responsible for stifling dissention and the voices of others, nature is the sole catalyst in Florida. Is Rosa directly comparing nature to Nazis, where both exert pressures onto others, or is this comparison meant to be an even wider claim? Nazis, too, were at the whims of nature (their march into Russia solidifies this), and it is a remarkably mature - as well as a remarkably sane - way for Rosa to think when the Nazis are the easiest face to blame for her problems. As someone who feels "a lock removed from the tongue" at all times, Rosa's 'unlocked' mouth is still unable to voice her concerns to understanding ears. She may have a loose tongue, but how loose is it really? Rosa obviously has no trouble telling Persky off. Nature - the air, the nature of people, reality - has caused Rosa's voice to be disembodied completely even while she remains an intelligent, thought-provoked, and thought-provoking woman with a contradictory and inverted facade. Though her "tongue is chained to the teeth and the palate," her mind, and therefore the guiding light behind her speech, is so far removed from the mouth that her inner thoughts are the only vehicle by which she even has a voice to speak, ears to listen, and a heart to understand. Magda, with her gleaming, developing teeth, isn't so different from her mother afterall.They have mouths, tongues, teeth - but no voice to share between them. The shawl and the air have taken this away from the mother and daughter, and as the shawl suppressed Magda's voice, it too has developed into an oppresor for Rosa's inner feelings.

Magda, however, differs from Rosa in one substantial way. Rosa can lie. "To retrieve, to reprieve, to lie," says Rosa while she stumbles through a hotel's backyard. Though said in "vile" reference to the two men Mr. Finkelstein "harbors" on the beach, Rosa's statement has much wider implications. For example, "to lie" can just as easily relate to "men laying with other men" - a stark if relatively ambiguous reference to the Nazi parties' substantial number of gay men in their upper ranks - as it can to Rosa's memory playing tricks on her, or to her obtuse behavior towards Stella (justifiable or not), or to an even grander comment on the illusions retrospection plays in determining how a given event affects a life. It's most likely intended to be a combination. Ozick loves to play with words as much as she loves to play with the audience, and it wouldn't surprise me if Rosa has created her own memories just as easily as she may have forgotten some. Afterall, she mentions nothing of her rapes beyond one brief but straightforward sentence saying Germans "forced" her, while the topic of Magda is constantly mulled over in her head time and time again. Rosa seems to care more for the /end result/ of actions, rather than for the actions which /caused/ the result, hence why Stella is subjected to her anger rather than the Nazis. It's just the way her mind functions, although we have no idea if she was like this prior to being imprisoned. Regardless, to the audience, Rosa's memory is increasingly selective and unreliable. Likewise, Rosa is also something of a contradictory character. Though decrying Dr. Tree to "drop in a hole" for the sterile, emotionally distant language he uses in his letters to her, Rosa is quite the prude herself, as seen by her reactions to the men on the beach. Of course, all illusions of Rosa's prudishness are totally shattered every time she picks up a pen to address Magda, in which she utilizes flowery, evocative words to indulge her fantasies.

Fantasy is bolstered by disconnect, and Ozick blames Rosa's problems on disconnection. "She was unconnected to anything," says Ozick's blunt narration, in typical tense-switching fashion (I wonder if Rosa would agree with Ozick's statement that she is unconnected to anything; what about Magda's ghost? Does Magda's ghost even count, or is that just an extension of Rosa herself?). Shortly after this point Rosa comes to a gate which "belongs to one of the big hotels." Even something as inconsequential as a gate /belongs/ (this word is used explicitly here, and with good reason) somewhere. It's a cruel but striking depiction of Rosa's situation. If she doesn't feel connected to anything, or anyone, should Rosa even have any obligations to "join a club or something" like Stella says? To our knowledge, no one beyond Persky has gone the extra distance to bring Rosa down to a more relatable level, and it is for this reason that the audience has difficulty faulting Rosa for any of her behaviors, regardless of how foreign they may seem. Matters only grow more distressing for Rosa. Upon entering the hotel, Rosa's dress and mannerisms should cause her to stick out, yet even while "she hears their yells" - cooks, men laying with men, hotel staff, everyone - "it has nothing to do with her." Rosa is invisible to all but Persky, even at her most deviant, suggesting Persky may not be as entirely "normal" as Rosa believes.

Birds of a Feather Hate Alone

Free as a bird. From The Beatles to Lynyrd Skynyrd, American nomenclature to artistic symbolism, this birds equal freedom mentality has been shoved down our collective consciousness to the point where most of us probably want to shoot the bird down instead of fly away with it.

Not here. Ozick, in a dramatic subversion of common cliches, equates birds to ugliness. "The big gold mirror, you look in it at your bitter face," begins Rosa as she describes Stella from her point of view. "I don't care how pretty, even so it's bitter - and your forget who gave you presents." Though Stella may be considered an attractive woman to all but Rosa, Rosa still looks upon her niece with the same birdishness she presented in the internment camp. Between using words like "knobbiness" and "gawkishness" to describe Stella's appearance as a child, as well as the juxtaposition of the family's hopeless situation against birds usually flying united and without ties, birds are not beautiful in Rosa's perspective. They are fragile, loud, ugly, and dependent creatures. For example, swans may be beautiful to look at, but they're also amongst the most violent and territorial creatures in the animal kingdom. Ozick gives dualities to normally glazed-over symbols when no one else cares to indulge realism in favor of their own vision. These are the negative and wholly realistic aspects of birds which are never given a voice outside Audobon journals and National Geographic editions. Allegorically, the realistic depiction of birds versus the sensationalized, culturally-infused view of the animals mirrors Ozick's damning look at what it means to be a "survivor" of the Holocaust brought in direct opposition to whatever Hollywood or less forward-thinking authors could think up about the same topic.

The bird comparison is not aimed at just Stella. Not even Magda escapes Rosa's subversive damning of these creatures - or, rather, the inaccurately flattering portrayals of these creatures. In words which sound more like a scared fledgling leaving a nest for the first time, rather than a young child escaping from their mother's watchfulness, Magda hobbles or lopes or skitters away from whatever safety she may have had to "howl" for her mother. Magda is mute, may be deaf, and might be dumb (at least from Rosa's unreliable perspective), much like a newborn hatchling. Children don't behave this way, but Ozick's metaphor is so elaborately constructed that the audience can virtually imagine Magda, long-necked, beaked, and strident, crying out for the comfort of her mother in a comfortless situation. Anthropomorphisizing a character who has more in common with another species than their own humanity is not only a brilliant way for Ozick to subvert commonly held beliefs, but to reinforce others - that it's sometimes easier or less emotionally trying to relate to animals than it is to humanity - as well.

With so much breath given to crucifying Stella the audience . This is intentional. Ozick wants us to blame Stella to prove Rosa's point - that "my Warsaw is not your Warsaw." That no one can understand Rosa unless "thieves took it," 'it' being the essence of your purpose. It's a direct challenge to the audience. Since Rosa never outright blames the Nazis for her troubles, Stella is the closest target. She is the subject of Rosa's revenge. Though Rosa may be an unreliable narrator cut from the same cloth of other famous examples like Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye or Alex from A Clockwork Orange, readers often take the relationship between themselves and the protaganist at face value. Ozick could very easily have made the audience feel betrayal - build up trust with the audience and swiftly turn the protanist into the antagonist as the story progresses to some kind of climax - but she ultimately never does because we are never intended to fully trust Rosa, even from the beginning of The Shawl. The fact that the story never officially ends also has something to do with this ambiguity. "Her Polish was very dense," says Ozick when describing Rosa's speech. "You had to open it out like a fan to get at all the meanings." This description applies not only to Rosa's character, but also to Ozick's writing style, as well. Since we can not hear Rosa actually speaking, Ozick's writing style is the closest example we have to "very dense" Polish. It's elaborate, intellectual, and vastly layered to the point where multiple readings are necessary to dissect the novella.

Even close dissections, however, do not reveal a definitive reason for why Rosa never outright blames the Nazis - the only party responsible - for her hardships in Poland. "In Poland there used to be justice," muses Rosa to Persky. Not when the Holocaust came around. Referring to Nazis only as "Germans" or "S.S. men" in both pieces, these are abnormally kind euphemisms coming from a woman who "was forced by a German (there's that euphemism again), it's true, and more than once." Rosa turns whatever hatred she should 'probably' feel for the Nazis into revenge against Stella and contempt against a Jewish hotel owner, referring to Mr. Finkelstein only as "the red wig," a title suggesting clownishness or, at an even more extreme level, transsexuality or crossdressing. It's I against I from Rosa's perspective, and it's a striking subversion against the 'birds of a feather flock together' mentality that is toyed with and twisted by Ozick's cleverness earlier in The Shawl.