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Posted on November 27th, 2007 by mdonahue.
Categories: MathurResponse8, Uncategorized.
What is appears as natural, regular, inherent. This “normative” state, however, spawns from the instilling of hegemonic ideology. The process of socialization ensures the persistence of values and constructs through the use of positive and negative sanctions. Therefore, under this shroud of normalcy, the hegemonic ideology reproduces itself through the parent/child relationship, extending its reach and influence to neo-colonialist proportions. Jonathan Swift utilizes his Gulliver’s Travels in order to demonstrate how a hegemonic force manages to conceal its fallacies and shortcomings through its use of normalizing judgment.
While in Brobdingnag, Gulliver tells the Prince of the politics and life of Europe, to which the Prince replies, “‘. . . they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray’” and Gulliver responds, “while my color came and went several times with indignation to hear our noble country, the mistress of arts and arms . . . the seat of virtue, piety, honor, and truth, the pride and envy of the world, so contemptuously treated” (2379). British society has indoctrinated Gulliver into a state in which he cannot perceive the truth about England. His sense of pride, or patriotism, prevents him from judging his culture and country through an objective lens. Although the Prince criticizes Gulliver’s homeland, he responds to Gulliver’s description with uninfluenced judgment.
After some time, however, in the company of the “giants,” Gulliver has the opportunity to become unindoctrinated, a process in which he unlearns the normative state of England and realizes the possibilities of alternative existences. Swift writes of Gulliver, “I looked down upon the servants and one or two friends who were in the house, as if they were pygmies and I a giant” (2405). Since Gulliver and his family and friends occupy relatively the same space and his company with the “giants” forced Gulliver to realize a size difference, his viewpoint back with his family demonstrates not a perception of size but his change in world view, his perception of the hegemonic ideology governing England. Gulliver’s removal from England’s normative state made cleared the arbitrariness of his condition as a British citizen. Gulliver now understands that what used to be Truth merely represents the enforcement of ideology.
Posted on November 19th, 2007 by mdonahue.
Categories: MathurResponse7.
Margaret Cavendish utilizes her comedy The Convent of Pleasure as a canvas on which to deconstruct sex and reconfigure normative gender performances. Cavendish recognizes that gender constructs constrain female sexuality and offers an alternative gender, a third sex that allows the woman greater mobility for self-sexuality. However, because of the nature of comedy, Cavendish must return social order upright, but her readership must not ignore or disregard the content of the play and must question her “happy ending.”
Lady Happy creates a convent only for unmarried women of mediocre means. Her escape from society, however, does not reflect her condemnation for men, but rather what men represent and the power that society authorizes them. Lady Happy asserts, “. . . Men, who make the Female sex their slaves; but I will not be so inslaved, but will live retired from their Company . . . with these [women] I mean to live incloister’d . . . My cloister shall not be a Cloister of restraint, but a place for freedom . . .” (220) Cavendish, through Lady Happy, identifies Males as the colonizers. Although the possessors of power, men, like women, must endure a process of socialization. Hegemonic ideology shapes women’s roles as well as those of men. Lady Happy, although retreating from men, really liberates herself from gender constructs that position females as inferior.
While in the convent the Princess courts Lady Happy to which she responds, “. . . But why may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man? No, no, Nature is Nature, and still will be . . .” (234). Cavendish later reveals the the Princess is in fact the Prince. Yet, Lady Happy falls for the cross-dressed Prince. Lady Happy, however, desires the man that bends gender performance. While a woman, the Prince(ss) woos Lady Happy and does not resort to force or authority. This gives Lady Happy freedom of self-sexuality, to define herself without the domination of the socialized male. The Prince/Princess represents a hermaphroditic, an individual mixing gender constructs and forming a third unique sex.
Outside of the convent and after the Prince deserts his facade, he returns as the domineering male, a tyrant authorized by society. Notably, Lady Happy also fades into the background after the Prince has resumed his role as male and dictator; he says, “. . . I ask [the women's] leave I may marry this Lady; otherwise, tell them I will have her by force of Arms” (244). Cavendish “rights” the play, or more accurately, aligns the conclusion with societal expectations. Yet, the abrupt ending does not replace the greater message that Cavendish emphasizes throughout the play. Society trains women to bind their expression and sexuality and men to take the reigns. This paradigm, however, restrains women and handicaps the potential growth that males and females may possess together, mutually constructing their relationship.
Posted on November 10th, 2007 by mdonahue.
Categories: MathurResponse6.
God’s Paradise, his gift to Adam, acts instead as a prison. The Garden’s walls function not as protective barriers but as containment, a restriction of choices, freedoms, and identity. Adam, supposedly a creature of Free Will, exists as a companion-creature for the “Almighty Creator.” Yet, Adam’s free will occurs only as an limited after-thought of debt and servitude. God markedly positions himself as superior to Adam, similarly to how he constructs the power dynamics of Adam’s relationship with Eve.
Adam is Eve’s Demi-God. Whereas Adam serves God, Eve must serve God and Adam. God creates Eve from Adam’s body; therefore, Eve’s existence begins indebted to Adam; the “crooked rib” operates as a loan of which Eve must eternally repay with interest. Eve expresses her awareness that the dependence on Adam suffocates any freedom she might possess, “. . . for inferior who is free?” (9.825) Unlike the other creatures in the Garden, Eve does engage will.
Her attentiveness to power enables her to note her own situation and position in relation to God and Adam. This keenness allows Eve to engage methods to alter this power, but also makes her vulnerable to Satan’s attention and option to achieve knowledge and equality. The silence and inequality between Eve and God and the Angels, motivates Eve’s assertion for power. Eve restructures her marginalized status in order to access agency, utilize will, and reverse her inequality. She reasons, “Shall I to [Adam] make known / As yet my change, and give him to partake / Full happiness with me, or rather not, but keep the [advantage] of knowledge in my power / Without copartner?” (9.816-21). Eve realizes that she has managed to gain an advantage over Adam. However, unlike Adam, who continues the inequality created by God, Eve chooses to share with Adam her knowledge, her experience. She chooses to offer Adam anti-ignorance. As a result, God punishes Adam and Eve for their rebelliousness. Yet, their condemnation becomes freedom. It is Eve who understands the tyranny of God, of Adam and chooses to counteract the imposed dictatorship. It is Eve that initiates the overthrow of the tyrannical God and the breaking of the prison walls, of their ignorance and forced servitude. It is Eve that is the ultimate Crusader.
Posted on October 28th, 2007 by mdonahue.
Categories: MathurResponse5.
On his Christian quest, his crusade, Redcrosse wars with various evils that hinder his quest for holiness. Edmund Spenser creates Error and Archimago as the first two threats who Redcrosse must battle. Although both villains function as temptations, impediments to the one true church, to “Una,” Spenser positions Error and Archimago within gendered spheres; each monster engendering contrasting threats, wits, and descriptions.
Spenser constructs Error as an imposing female presence. With his short description and his refusal to endow the female monster with dialogue, Spenser contains Error’s existence and threat within physicality. Spenser writes: “And as she lay upon the durtie ground, / Her huge long taile her den all overspread, / Yet was in knots and many boughtes upwound, / Pointed with mortall sting” (127-30). His description of a monster within its layer, connotes a prostitute within a harem. Error relies upon appetites and instinct rather than wit or intellect. Redcrosse’s encounter with Error encompasses his internal battle with carnal desires.
Constrastingly, Archimago, a male threat, engages the art of illusion, of cleverness, not his own physicalness or movement. Spenser describes, “And forth he cald out of deepe darknesse dred / Legions of Sprights, the which like little flyes / Fluttring about his ever damned hed, / A-waite whereto their service he applyes” (334-7). Archimago commands two sprites to do his bidding. In comparison with Error, Spenser endows Archimago with more power, cleverness, and humanness. Archimago’s threat extends beyond instinctual physical responses and engages more cunning, positioning his male threat on more equal ground with that of Redcrosse. Error is a monster–physical, sexual, beastly–while Archimago is a villain: clever, conspiratorial, deliberate, and calculative.
Although both evil, Error and Archimago interact with Redcrosse in contrasting ways. Spenser constrains the female monster within her own physicalness. Her body exists as her only defense, yet her defense also serves as her weapon, the threat to Redcrosse’s successful union with Truth, with the Church, and with God. Spenser allows his male villain a human presence, providing Archimago with access to intellect and agency. The female obstructs the path to Heaven because of her sexuality, her existence even, but the male by his comparable with and intellect.
Posted on October 16th, 2007 by mdonahue.
Categories: MathurResponse4.
Shakespeare’s tragedy plays offer a complication, a problem , which must resolve itself to reestablish order and balance. Death furnishes the plot with the most absolute method of jettisoning anomalies and threats. In King Lear, Shakespeare destroys all of the characters that threaten the monarchy: Edmund, Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Gloucester, Cornwall, King Lear, and presumably Kent. Shakespeare utilizes his play King Lear to assert the dangers of female power and condemn female authority figures especially Queen Elizabeth.
King Lear attempts to separate his power among his daughters. Although his daughters’ husbands will possess the granted power, Lear’s communication and arrangements occur directly with the female. In doing so, Lear ignores the male as a power holder and authority figure. Goneril and Regan exemplify their desire for power through their flattery and deceit for their father. Cordelia, however, refuses to participate with her sisters’ and father’s exchanges, she states: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty / According to my bond [filial duty]; nor more nor less (1.1.91-3). Cordelia’s “filial duty” embodies those characteristics of a daughter: loyal, respectful, subservient to the father and the male. Cordelia, out of respect for her father’s role as a male, refuses to accept power from him; she attempts to maintain conventional power dynamics. After her father’s curses, Cordelia marries the King of France, therefore, maintaining the gender constructs demanded of a female.
Contrastingly, Goneril and Regan receive power from their father and begin to manifest masculine roles. Goneril and Regan each engage their sexuality by either committing or intending to commit adultery with Edmund, another character striving to usurp the traditional establishment. Both sisters act as military leaders, battling and “killing off” Lear’s 100 knights. Their actions define not only themselves but also their husbands and father.
After gifting his power through the unconventional matriarchal line, King Lear descends into insanity, into hysteria. Lear becomes a victim of his own emotions, he says, “O, how this mother [hysteria] swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow” (2.4.54-5). “Hysteria” describes a woman’s state of being, a weakness, a deficiency. Lear’s daughters emasculate him, forcing him into the wild, delicate, and vulnerable shell of a woman.
Goneril’s and Regan’s husbands also aid the destruction of the traditional monarchy. Cornwall’s and Albany’s compliance to their wives’ will positions the males as followers and their wives as leaders. The husband’s masculinity is further compromised by Goneril’s and Regan’s unfaithfulness. The females’ abandonment of sexual activity with their husbands suggests a failure of male dominion. Albany’s eventual uprising and recuperation of male-centered power over Goneril allows for his survival at the end of the tragedy.
Those characters who attempted to reestablish Lear as King also perished: Cornelia, Gloucester, and Kent [his diminished health and impending death]. Although King Lear once represented traditional values, he endeavored to deconstruct Divine Right and established order. Lear’s attempt to endow his daughters with power contradicted the males preordained position of power. Also Goneril’s and Regan’s ascension into power feminized their father, reducing him into a state of hysteria, weakness, and incompetence of serving as King any longer. Therefore, those characters that assisted in a reclaiming of King Lear indirectly supported female authority.
Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear discusses the dangers of female control and authority. The drama resolves itself by reestablishing male-centered rule and traditional values and ideology. Therefore, Nature purged herself of those characters that indirectly or directly challenged the monarchy or contradicted male dominion. Shakespeare’s tragedy entered the public sphere shortly after the Virgin Queen’s death, shortly after Nature “righted” England by severing the matriarchal rule and lineage.
Posted on September 30th, 2007 by mdonahue.
Categories: MathurResponse3.
Women cannot escape man’s tendency to objectify them, to employ verse as means of dissecting their beauty and wrapping them into small, ornate gifts to be shared and opened by men at a later time. This process of descriptive severing enables the male voice to weaken the female and to maximize his control by amputating her into manageable, colonized pieces. Even in contemporary society these tendencies persist. Cars, ships, and other traditional male “toys” often possess female names, implying that the female can be owned through deed. Songs such as “Billie Jean,” “Bobby Sue,” and “Bobby Jean” all serve as mechanisms to fit the female into male created parameters of beat, rhythm, and plot.
These ode structures claim roots centuries previous, in which male writers such as Ovid, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and John Donne (to name very few) positioned the female as the silent, still “beloved” and the male as the voice, the agent of sexuality, and the lover. William Shakespeare, however, challenges these traditional structures through his subversive, witty, and provoking sonnets. Shakespeare’s deconstruction of the lover and beloved sows the seeds for later authors, such as Ann Radcliffe, the Bronte sisters, and Mary Wollstonecraft, to challenge and offer alternatives to the imposed passive sexuality of women.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 reads as if he describes an ugly woman: “Coral is far more red than her lips’ red / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wire grow on her head” (2-4). Beneath this superficial description, however, Shakespeare empowers the female by disallowing conventional objectification. Writers such as Ovid had written on the art of wooing, of loving the female; patriarchal love does not allow the woman to embrace her own beauty or sexuality. Shakespeare hammers away at the foundation of the beloved’s pedestal and provides means for the female to be real and not a male fantasy or definition of woman. Shakespeare continues, “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare” (13-14). This ending couplet denounces the misrepresentations of the beloved by male “lovers.” The poet permits the female to exist as a female and not as an interpreted idea. Male authors employ women as art; a canvas on which to be painted, constructed to the taste of the artist, romanticized into shackles, and silenced behind a gilded framed prison. Shakespeare unmasks this subtle maneuvering of colonization of women as love and recreates love as a movement between two persons, a love closer to mutuality.
Posted on September 15th, 2007 by mdonahue.
Categories: MathurResponse2.
Geoffrey Chaucer utilizes his text The Canterbury Tales as a mechanism to criticize categories of individuals through his archetypal characters. Chaucer portrays the clergy as lustful, greedy, and glutinous. Through his characters’ penchant for sinful behavior, Chaucer attacks the clergy for abusing their positions in the church and not maintaining an ascetic lifestyle. Chaucer, however, also subtly charges society.
Incorporating humor along side his criticisms, Chaucer avoids angering his audience and manages instead to plant minute seeds of revelation. The Wife of Bath’s tale, at first glance, might seem to buttress the arguments of antifeminist theorists and writers, but the text supports the emergence of women from their marginalized shadows and from beneath the yoke of matrimony.
The texts depicts the Wife of Bath as extremely sexual, raunchy even, passing from one husband to the next. The men are conquests, and she the conquistadora. Chaucer writes of the Wife as a predator, a seductress: “I bar him on hand he hadde enchaunted me / (My dame taughte me that subtiltee) ” [I made him believe he had enchanted me / my mother taught me that trick] (581-2). The lines connote how female trickery passes from mother to daughter, that it dwells within the female blood, that it resides within the corrupt female. This characterization of women, however, does not exist as an isolated observation. Chaucer conflicts this description with examination of how society has pushed women into silence through patriarchal literature; a literary history that omits the perspective of the female.
Males claimed dominance over females and managed to establish dominion over voice, history, and “Truth.” Men function as the recorders of history which enables them to advance, enforce, and ensure the survival of their values, beliefs, and power. The Wife of Bath asserts, “By God, if wommen hadden writen stories, / as clerkes han within hir oratories, / They wolde han writen of men more wikkednesse / than al the merk of Adam may redresse” [By God, if women had written stories, / as clerks have in their oratories, / they would have written more of men's wickedness / than all of the sex of Adam can redress] (699-702). The strong, pushy female attacks men and challenges the imposed male-advantaged power dynamic. The Wife of Bath refuses to suppress her voice and instead overtly defies male power. More specifically, she denounces the established dominion of husbands over their wives.
Women, as a result of their objectified positions in marriage and society, resort to acts of coquetry and deceit in order to possess any resources within the bounds of matrimony. The husbands and wives remain locked in a battle of wits and strengths, their interests constantly in conflict. Chaucer offers a solution. He suggests that allocating mastery to the wife will secure the female’s obedience. Ironically, this advice erases power from the equation altogether; neither the husband nor the wife will be master if they both grant the other with power and obedience. Instead, Chaucer’s solution is a recommendation for mutual existence, for a relationship where two individuals form a unified companionship and work for one another’s happiness.
Posted on September 2nd, 2007 by mdonahue.
Categories: MathurResponse1.
The Sword: Phallic and Authoritarian
Beowulf, like most literary texts, reflects the society from which it emerged. The plots, characters and attitudes within the poem parallel those beliefs that dominated the Middle Ages and formed the social constructs that governed the behaviors and values of the citizenry of the era. The text illustrates these gender constructs through the juxtaposition of female characters. The contrast between Wealhtheow and Grendel’s mother serves as a means of recognizing socially approved behaviors and qualities of females during the Middle Ages.
Within the text, the presence and symbolic nature of the sword confirms the dominion of a patriarchal society. The text clarifies: “. . . keen-edged sword, / an heirloom inherited by ancient right” (lines 2562-3). The sword here passes from father to son in order to maintain the command of the male line. Societal constructs and pressures constrict females into a role of silence and stagnation, ensuring the continuation of male domination.
Wealhtheow represents the traditional, the acceptable female of the time. Beowulf encourages the female’s silence and submission through its favorable description of Wealhtheow. The text describes, “Wealhtheow came in . . . / adorned in her gold, she graciously saluted / the men in the hall, the handed the cup / first to Hrothgar . . . / [then] offering the goblet to all ranks (lines 612-21). Wealhtheow performs the sanctioned behaviors of the female offering refreshment and kind words to the men. However, Wealhtheow offers more than the cup. Through metaphorical transference, the scene connotes a gang rape in which each man freely takes from Wealhtheow before passing her to the next male.
Grendel’s dam, however, does not live by traditional standards. Beowulf condemns Grendel’s mother’s behavior through the “monster’s” punishment as an outcast and eventual defeat. The text structures Grendel’s mother as inhuman by refusing to endow her with a name. In conjuction with her beastly descriptions, Grendel’s dam becomes an animal, something completely undesirable. Moreover, she refuses to allow society to marginalize her into a traditional female role. She insists upon activity, and avenges Grendel’s murder. As punishment for Grendel’s mother’s use of agency, patriarchal society, through Beowulf, punishes her. Beowulf attempts to use his sword, a phallic and authoritarian symbol of the established patriarchy. But the text reveals, “. . . but [Beowulf] found / his battle-torch extinguished; the shining blade refused to bite. It spared her and failed / the man in his need . . . / the fabulous powers of that heirloom failed” (lines 1522-28). Beowulf cannot dominate Grendel’s dam, because she refuses to submit. His attack on her represents his attempt to rape her, to control her through his power as a male. The text describes, however, that the “heirloom” fails. The “heirloom” refers to the institutionalized recognition of male lineage and defines the power dynamic between the male and the female. Beowulf does manage to kill, rape Grendel’s dam, but only after discovering another sword described as “. . . an ancient heirloom / . . . an ideal weapon, / one that any warrior would envy, / but so huge and heavy of itself . . .” (lines 1558-61). The language utilized connotes the description of a phallus capable of raping, destroying Grendel’s dam strength as a woman. Grendel’s mother’s blood manages to melt the sword used to kill her; she emasculates the male. Beowulf’s destruction of Grendel’s dam is the destruction of the threat to male domination.