Silence, Style and Self

Silence, Style, Self

Notes for the session "Interpretation and Discourse" of the CLAGS conference at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY April 29 -30, 1988

Transforming the Categories: Lesbian and Gay Studies

Tucker Pamella Farley

Language reveals and conceals simultaneously; what can be revealed? --and how? --to whom? --and under what conditions? Early lesbian literature allows us to look (in English) at a process of voices emerging from silence and erasure, coding and doubleness, to scholarship and song.

This move contributed to and was made increasingly possible by social activities that made the space into which these writers must speak a little safer --what the listening/reading space looks like has a lot to do with what the speaking/writing space looks like; the clarity of style and the possibility of speaking --and surviving in your world --were closely coupled interactions. The less safe, to the writer, the more silence, coding, and layering went into the text (an effect we call style).

And readers participate, from their various discourses, in determining meaning, by their various interpretations. Meaning no longer lives simply in the text. Readings, like writings, have been forced into silence or obscurity, erasure or codes. In looking at concealing, then, what can be revealed?

A 19th century poet whom we have heard was slightly mad teaches us to look beneath silence. Emily Dickinson left her poems tied up in her drawer. When I was able to read them in less edited and changed form, and read the remains of her journals and letters which had been mutilated by well-wishers after her death, I could understand why the passionate addresses to Sue Gilbert might not have survived a more public exposure. As a wasp I am powerfully aware of the constraints concerning what "is" and "is not" said. Even the unpublished poems were circumscribed. Longing, passion and rejection are explored as her "calvaries of love." Critics happily discuss "the imagery of circumference" (like a thing, outside a world of concern), and interpret the metaphor of calvary as a sure sign she was secretly in love with a minister whom she had barely ever met). The heterosexual plot narrates the biographical and critical text, like all texts. "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant," she wrote. But if even Sue Gilbert couldn't sustain the romantic attachment between the two women, what could Emily Dickinson do? Plead her case in public against her own brother?

Another kind of silencing can be read in the studies of missionaries and traders and doctors who made up their own representations of what they saw. Imagine what might have been the story had the native American women, the passing women, the medical students, studied by alienists and neurologists and pathologists, been able to tell their stories in their own words. This was a pervasive kind of silence, even erasure. Dr. J. Allen Gilbert, Katz reports, in writing his case study for a medical journal of Alberta Lucille Hart, appropriated her autobiographical writings. Her voice disappears. Gilbert writes that H met a woman in college to whom she was attracted, and finally made her acquaintance in the spring.

“During the last five weeks of this year, H was with her almost constantly, although nothing more than ordinary love-making and kisses passed between them” (267).

That "nothing more than" and that "ordinary" illuminated that landscape anew! In their second year of college when H spent at least a night every week with E.C., the doctor says, Their relationship progressed to more intimacy --there was much kissing and love-making, and also some actual sexual experiences, during which H had E.C. manipulate her. Mutual masturbation was resorted to at times. There was no thought of shame on either side (267). I was fascinated to learn the 19th century distinction between "much kissing and love-making, on one hand (so to speak), and "actual sexual experience" on the other. Apparently a penis or penis-substitute was required for "actual sex" to occur. Whatever the women in the 19th century were or weren't doing (and this reading opened up new worlds of possibility!), it was not assessed as being "sex."

That historical discourse has shifted, but in the transition period, what was said was highly coded in response to the development of a medical taboo and increasingly negative social assessment of the "ordinary kisses and lovemaking" which had comprised the normal sentiments between girls and women. Gilbert reports that H "did not realize that her own condition was abnormal." And while "idealizing" a woman on the faculty in secret, that never came to light, and otherwise her relations were normal. As he says, “For her other friends, H had a genuine unsentimental affection. Her relations with the men of the college were frank, friendly and unsentimental” (268[emphasis added]).

Reading that text however gave me a clearer understanding of why the sentimental, and sentimentality, came to be used as "bad," "womanish" --especially as women became more independent of men by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, generating a backlash to rescue the institution of (white) male supremacy as "the foundations of social order and civilization." After the turn of the century, the sentimental was highly coded; fiction hinted at, played with, omitted crucial pieces, or changed them around so as to say something, but be basically unrecognizable to most readers. Gertrude Stein and later Virginia Woolf were only two of the women writers who cast their own experience in male characters for protection.

To make it publishable, Gertrude Stein made her relationship with May Bookstaver into a story about "how the Negro race should behave," how a girl should behave. Only by tracing in language patterns of association, context and repetition in "Melanctha" can one begin to see that Stein is talking about eroticism, sexual excitement and passion when she speaks in the text of wandering, wisdom, understanding. Jeff finds out from Jane Harden that Melanctha didn't used to have understanding.

Jane began to explain to Jeff Campbell how in every way, she Jane, had taught Melanctha. Jane then began to explain how eager Melanctha had always been for all that kind of learning. Jane Haren began to tell how they had wandered. Jane began to tell how Melanctha once had loved her, Jane Harden. He realized that she used "all the understanding ways that Jane had taught her." "Jeff Campbell was beginning now to see very clearly. He was beginning to feel very sick inside him." Echoing Jeff, Rose provides the final epitaph: "I ain't no ways ever against any girl having any kind of a way, to have a good time like she wants it, but not that kind of a way Melanctha always had to do it."

Virginia Woolf's hints and codes reveal the textual nuances of one maintaining propriety as sanity. Virginia Woolf transposed her experience with the medical profession into that of a male character, Septimus Smith, in love with his male officer during the war but married, needing to spread the message there is "no crime in love" to a world that neither wanted to hear it nor was willing to make space to try, a world where what Woolf calls "the Twin Goddesses of Conformity and Conversion" bent even the Clarissa Dalloways to their will --Mrs. Dallowav reveals her knowing, and denying, "the most exquisite moment of her whole life," when, walking on the terrace at Burton, Sally Seton kissed her on the lips. Her self-protective alliance with the doctors leaves Septimus vulnerable. Loving life too much to submit to the doctors, he leaps to his death to escape them. She, hearing about it at her party, understands what has happened, and is ashamed. But she pulls her self together and returns to her party: silent.

A hostess of Virginia's named Sybil was the model for Clarissa, a woman with whom Woolf always felt excluded, on the "outside." How write what she saw for some of the very readers she was writing about? Look at the scene in Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa remembers her love for Sally Seton. After some denial, the old memories come floating back, taking over the scene finally for a few moments. There is the most exquisite moment of her life: when Sally plucked some flowers from a stone urn as they walked on the terrace at Burton, paused, and kissed her on the lips! It is Peter who interrupts and sneers, Peter who fulfills the horrible presentiment that her happiness would be interrupted, and Peter to whom, in a move to discontinue that line of thinking and switch to safer turf, she immediately expresses gratitude for how much he has given her. Or rather, "how much she owed to him later." This indebtedness at first appears as a positive act or gift from Peter to Clarissa, functioning to atone for the old horror she had experienced at his breaking in upon the kiss. "Oh this horror!" she said to herself, as if she had known all along that something would interrupt, would embitter the moment of happiness. Yet, after all, how much she owed to him later.

Here most readers would agree in interpreting the text to be narrating a moment of bitterness as a consequence of Peter's hostility to Sally and Clarissa's romance, followed by forgiveness and even gratitude for how much he done for her since. But the next sentence begins to introduce two possible interpretations. Always when she thought of him she thought of their quarrels for some reason -- One audience -- perhaps the one who has not gotten so quickly over the horror and bitterness which may still be resonating in the bloodstream (where language lives) – hears: ah! He continues to be a friction for her. Another reader, whose bloodstream may not have been so stirred by Peter’s interruption of the kiss, or by the kiss, may in fact be saying to himself, really, what is she so upset about? He didn’t do anything that bad! Let us pose a different readership at this point, and watch how Woolf keeps both in mind now. For the two readers might be the sister of Clarissa and the brother of Peter, both of whom Virginia would have been keeping in mind as she wrote. And what she wrote next appears to appease him. If any suspicion had been raised by the beginning of the sentence, the end of the sentence might disarm it. She goes on -- because she wanted his good opinion so much, perhaps. Now the former reader is given pause. She has been ready to maintain her suspicion of Peter, roused when he did not respect her/Clarissa's happiness on the terrace at Burton, on guard against his cruelty. This reader has absorbed the young Clarissa’s charges above:

She felt only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated; she felt his hostility; his jealousy; his determination to break into their companionship. Perhaps this reader has been seduced with Clarissa to the romance. "The horror" does not strike her so lightly, then. The scene is plausible, to her. Clarissa's young voice appears authoritative, to this reader. So the quarrels would be significant ones, and might reflect this dynamic, this being in different worlds. Saying she remembers their quarrels is a way of saying they matter. Why, she can't say. She can say only "for some reason," but that vagueness is a slight alarm, now that the voice is withholding the reason.

The other reader, however, reads right on to the end of the sentence, untroubled --perhaps even soothed by --the assurance implied by that "for some reason." The reason is unimportant, and the phrase functions to reduce the import of the whole. This reader is also assured by the conjecture offered that the reason might be Clarissa's wanting his good opinion. Surely that is a good sign that the trouble is not serious; or at least that if she wants his good opinion she will work to get it, and this will reduce the friction, so everything will work out in the end. This reader can count on most of the readers he knows to make a similar interpretation. Indeed, this is the understanding in our culture of the proper role of woman; it is the heterosexual presumption, so pervasive that it generally appears invisible. This reader goes confidently on to the next sentence.

She owed him and here in my paperback copy I must turn the page. As I do, I reflect that the first reader has been challenged by this protestation of the adult Clarissa, the one speaking now in the text, speaking directly to the reader, not indirectly, as the one recalling the past. For the past had taken over the text for a moment; its immediacy had been compelling, and Clarissa's older storytelling voice was consistent with the experience of the younger Clarissa. The two had joined in making the narrative more coherent and authoritative when the teller had cajoled the reader: But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people. But now the Older Clarissa is shifting her stance. Having been unable in the past when her world was shattered to be "gallant" and "unvanquished" like Sally, Clarissa ha-s retreated. Wanting Peter's good opinion, and vulnerable to his determination to break into their companionship, his cruelty in mocking' their kiss, his insistence in shattering the world in which she found happiness (and bitterness), she has had to acknowledge that his interpretation has more power than hers to be sustained by others, notably Sally. Sally had accommodated by giving up the vast significance of their kiss. By refusing to defend it. By "gallantly" giving ground and playing the game of the interrupter. While "She felt only how Sally was being mauled already, maltreated," et cetera. This interpretation is given a form of validation as insight in the metaphor of lightening Woolf uses here, making Clarissa'a vision authoritative. "All this she saw as one sees a landscape in a flash of lightening--" this vision is nonetheless not shared by Sally. --and Sally (never had she admired her so much!) gallantly taking her way unvanquished. She laughed. She made old Joseph tell her the names of stars, which he liked doing very seriously. She stood there: she listened. She heard the names of the stars. "Oh this horror!" she said to herself. Our first reader had been put on guard by Clarissa's reaction to Peter's interruption of the kiss --her loss of a world inhabited fully, if briefly. "Star-gazing?" said Peter. It was like running one's face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible! The reader who inhabited the world of the kiss with the young Clarissa, moved to remove the granite walls from a disrespectful world, concerned to allow them to coexist, has by now had to identify that world as commanding the attention of the speaker here. The speaking voice is speaking to her, but is also speaking tOI ~ him. She must now in her reading read the text as the averag{~ reader will, and at the same time continue to see if her own-- reading can be sustained. I turn the page, watching my two readers as they move from "She owed him" to "words." She owed him words: "sentimental," "civilized"; they started up every day out of her life as if he guarded her. Ha! My lesbian reader crows. She IS being guarded! Ah, my other reader beams; he is helping her, educating her, protecting her. Teaching her the way of the world: its standards. The two readers themselves begin to quarrel, now. LR is / concerned about this smashed face. Patern-altstic, she accuses OR of being. Condescending. He trots out Sally Seton's sister as a reader; she laughs and plays his game. Which reading will become the authoritative reading? Where indeed does "meaning" lie? Clarissa goes on. A book was sentimental; an attitude to life sentimental. "sentimental," perhaps she was to be thinking of the past. What would he think, she wondered, when he came back? In the minority, LR sets out to learn these "words," that start up every day as if he guards her." LR sees the narrator as guarded, now. Everything will have to be read with this in mind. Clues she will find: hints. But not everyone will "see" them. She herself may be on guard as she reads, now; she must read for herself, must read for the other reader, OR. The text is a strategy for speaking with both. OR, on the other hand, sees the narrator as acknowledging she had gotten a bit sentimental, there, and now was ready to move on. Indeed, he finds, reading on, the subject has been changed. She wonders what he would think? My LR wonders what CS will think --how will the contest for meaning be determined? Who would, after the above, be thinking That she had grown older? Would he say that, or would she see him thinking when he came back, that she had grown older?

Now LR, tracing Clarissa's narrative moves, sees Woolf as having Clarissa throw OR off the scent. That answer is a cover for the charge that he guards her. LR thinks, as she reads, noting with satisfaction that Woolf has taken pains to have Clarissa make a distinction between what Peter would say, and what she would see him thinking. She reads on, catching up with OR, who had gone on ahead. It was true. Since her illness she had turned almost white. Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. Both readers can agree that Clarissa is worried about getting old, wanting to deny it and have more time left. But has Woolf pulled them back into the same world of concern, the same interpretive neighborhood? No. LR understands Clarissa to be facing death with a brief moment of happiness with another woman behind her, which she has not been able to sustain, and which she must be sentimental to be thinking of; she is on guard. OR sees her like everyone else, when looking back at the past, concerned simply with the passage of time; concerned too perhaps for Peter's good opinion, lest he should think her faded as she grew older. The third reader, Sally's sister, is acknowledging that Clarissa's kiss was important to her, more important to Clarissa than to Sally; she after all is going to grow up to be conventionally married with sons.

• • • Here I am thinking about all these readers reading this text with their various interpretations, and how to write them all in --for there is a very interesting reader coming up with Septimus Smith, the man who loved his officer but married a young Italian woman and then (trying to imagine how to convey his message to the world that there is no crime in love) begins to come unraveled, finally killing himself to avoid the medical profession that Virginia Woolf was herself subjected to. And while I am facing the multiplicity of readers, each with the experiences and fields of vision that life has embodied in them, and all the different interpretations these discourses will give rise to --glad that the lesbian and gay voices will be heard in the gatherings more and more, as this conference indicates --and wondering how we will coordinate them all so that we can hear each other respectfully --Woolf has been facing the problem of how to hold Clarissa together. For the narrative perspective is so often hers, and it is this hostess, this conventional British lady who admires Lady Bexborough, who marries a Conservative Parliamentarian after a close call with Peter, liberal administrator of the Empire in India, that Woolf is after in this novel. What holds her together? What constructs her as we say these days.

The next paragraph takes up just this question, as Clarissa looks into the mirror and purses per lips. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing room and made a meeting point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps....

No doubt? Perhaps? I begin to stop worrying about the other readers so much, and how Woolf is addressing strategies to us all, and concentrate on the text again. A combination of third person, hidden authorial narrator, and first person stream-of-conscious narrator, a text calling up the worldhood of Clarissa and Clarissa calling up her worldhood. This blended voice begins to list evidence of all that holds Mrs. Dalloway together as such, and ends by Clarissa's hymning a refrain of thanks for all the elements of her world in which she can be Mrs. Dalloway, "pausing on the landing, and assembling that diamond shape, that single person," a "mistress" "of her house." thank you, thank you, she went on saying in gratitude to her servants generally for helping her to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted.

Woolf's style is a narrative negotiation among readers of different discourses whose interpretations construct the meanings "of the text." She invents identity for the author and the readers via these negotiations, betraying a concern to conceal and reveal simultaneously, a concern (as she explains in Three Guineas) born of "our fear and your anger" so that even the daughters of educated men may not speak freely, may not write freely, yet. It would take a hundred years of women speaking freely before a poet who was a woman could walk as a genius among us, in the flesh, and speak with the voice of the age behind her.

Djuna Barnes attempts not to speak with the voice of the age behind her, but the voice of the elite. I finally deciphered the wrought iron prose that T.S. Eliot admired so much in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, which deals with a lesbian triangle and a transvestite doctor, when I realized the whole thing was wrestling with alcoholism. People still have a hard time dealing with this, and the novel remains practically unreadable for most. Was all that fancy footwork a function of not being able to speak clearly? Not being able to be confident that one will be heard, and respected, and survive? Spurred on by a long line of suiciding feminist poets, and suiciding female characters in fiction, women who had started out strong enough, who were, as Olga Broumas was to say in "Cinderella," favored, hand-picked picked, each one for her joyful heart. I wanted to know if what looked like "style" --this abstract category we all talked about in the literary critical community --might have something to do with what the writer could say at the time. How much get out. In what form and shape. Style was beginning to look an awful lot like a matter of safety to me.

@ Tucker Pamella Farley 1988 Emily Dickinson

Much madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. 'Tis the majority In this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur, --you're straigtway dangerous, And handled with a chain.

Wild Nights -Wild Nights! Were I with thee Wild Nights should be Our luxury! Futile -the Winds – To a Heart in port – Done with the Compass – Done with the Chart! Rowing in Eden – Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor – Tonight – In Thee! @1861 1891