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.
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