Barbara Ladd--Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (2007)

In this book, Ladd undertakes, “under the rubric of gender,…an exploration of choice and agency in the modernist engagement with authorship and in the act of writing itself” (4).  Looking primarily at Faulkner, Hurston, and Welty allows Ladd to focus on a time period during which “the era of order and clear trajectories was over,” during which “the aesthetics of authorship would be formed on the breakdown of the unified subject theorized in the work of Freud and on the concurrent breakdown of empire, which challenged History” (4).  Capital-H-History is important to Ladd, as she is most interested in ways in which these authors challenged, undermined, or resisted History through their work (in particular, the ways in which their own undermined authorship functioned in this way).  History supports and is a product of empire; History excludes, and excludes primarily women.  Ladd, then, uses gender as her focus in this study because the system of empire excludes women—“only the women prove resistant, but that is because they are already ‘chained’ to what Julia Kristeva has called ‘biological fate’—interpellation doesn’t ‘take’” (3). 

Desire—especially female desire—is central to Ladd’s study.  Rejecting a Freudian/Platonic/Lacanian understanding of desire, which equates desire with “lack,” Ladd instead relies upon an understanding of desire as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, one sees desire as productive and connected to passion: “Desire always remains in close touch with the conditions of objective existence; it embraces them and follows them, shifts when they shift” (Deleuze and Guattari, quoted in Ladd 9).  Additionally, Ladd sees desire in terms of the sublime, which she defines as “the representation of something vast, overmastering, and oblivious to desire that, paradoxically, authorizes cultural agency in the West” (9). 

As Ladd discusses throughout the work, an encounter with the sublime authorizes a person to tell his story, as he has “lived to tell the tale.”  As many have pointed out, the sublime has traditionally been seen as the realm of the male; there are few stories of the feminine experience with the sublime (which is odd, Ladd notes, as one would expect, for example, pregnancy and childbirth to be perfect topics to be mined for just stories).[1]  For example, Ladd points to Edmund Burke as one influential example of this gendered view of the sublime: “While he associates the realm of the beautify with sociability and reproduction (and women), he associates the sublime with the assertion of human power, an instinct for self-preservation and self-mastery in the face of an encounter with terror” (46).  Ladd intends to “examine the sublime as a concept for feminism and an experience for women and other submerged populations to demonstrate some of the ways in which the sublime underwrites narratives of resistance to the circumstances of desire.  A confrontation with fatality can be productive” (10).  Importantly, she says that “There is something that remains after the interpellation of gender, a shared imaginary that has to do with desire, production, and exchange and is available to both male and female” (11).  She looks at these points of crossover in the authors she examines: she sees that “a female corporeal imaginary, even a maternal one, as we shall see in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, is available to a male writer, as a conduit to freedom.  A male corporeal imaginary, as we will see in Welty’s “Music from Spain” and Hurston’s Tell My Horse, is available to a female writer and is likewise a means to freedom” (11). 

Ladd looks at authors from the American South because the patriarchal and paternalistic foundations of southern ideology are not unique to the South, but they "were made explicit and instrumentalized in a slave economy that subjected southern women (black and white, rich and poor) and African American men to a disciplinary regime in which some were spiritualized and others imagined as animals, in which the only recognized options for some were to sublimate both self and body to the race or to God or to face the violation of both self and body in cruder exploitations" (13).  Further, she explains her focus on this particular time period by the emergence of the modern woman at this time: “The difference between the traditional woman and the modern one had to do with fatality….Autonomy and sovereignty had been constructed on the backs of subordinates, slaves, and women” (15).

Ladd first looks at Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying (1930).  In Addie, Ladd claims that Faulkner creates a “voice of a very different kind of woman indeed, a restless, angry, idealistic, speaking subject in possession of something that Western culture thought women could not possess, which would have been referred to at that time as ‘mind’ and which we are more likely to think of today as the desire to remake the world and the self in the mastery of language” (17).  Ladd makes important connections between Faulkner and the work of Evelyn Scott, particularly her 1923 semi-autobiographical work Escapade.  In As I Lay Dying, Ladd identifies Faulkner’s achievement as “his reimagining of the figure of the women in the scene of the sublime in a way that speaks to (and speaks back to) male anxieties as they concerned the impact of modernity on women and the impact of women on modernity” (48).

Important to my work, Ladd identifies the sublime experience as “a crisis of gender typically represented by the male writer as a feminizing as well as authorizing moment in the portrait of the artist as a young man….the sublime disfigures and disables masculinity in order to refigure and enable it.  Whether that disfiguration takes the form of a physical hurt (blindness or maiming) or a mental one exhibited in the form of cognitive, emotional, or psychic ‘impairment’ or ‘distortion,’ it will be visible” (48).  I think this speaks to my understanding of the Medusa interaction in Welty in some way.

Ladd’s consideration of Welty is primarily concerned with the ways in which “Welty instrumentalizes gender, embracing in a spirit of comic undoing the masculinist economy of History in its hostility to women” (52-3).  By comparing Welty’s “A Worn Path” with the characters of Clytie and Jim Bond in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Ladd shows that Welty’s story “shifts the perspective to foreground the experiential reality of a black and female figure, the kind of figure who, in Faulkner’s story as in official History, is hardly more than the decentered guardian of the remains of the white male body” (55).  She further compares the female listeners in Welty’s stories to the male ones in Faulkner’s work: “It is the indifference of Welty’s women and girls, the possibility that at any moment a certain character might fly off in another direction, not ‘hear’ the rest of the story, escape History if only for a moment, that constitutes one of the ‘obstructions’ upon which Welty her constructs her very historical stories” (58).  Such “indifference,” as Ladd characterizes it, is very different from, say Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses (or even Quentin Compson), for whom listening is necessary to discovering his identity.  Ladd’s distinction of Welty’s characters to those of Faulkner continues, as she describes the ways in which Welty characters differ in their approach to History, which she characterizes as “a satirical displacement of Faulknerian History from the constitutive to the ornamental.  The representation of History as something worn upon the body rather than as something that constitutes the body is shaped by race and gender” (59).  In other words, it seems that perhaps Welty’s characters are aware of their own interpellation because of their marginalization in ways that Faulkner’s characters are not.

I am intrigued by Ladd’s analysis of the idea of “indifference,” which she says “pertains to a specific conceptualization of freedom: the freedom of indifference is defined as the power to choose to act altogether differently from the way one chose to act” (59).  I wonder if it’s possible to apply this definition of indifference vis-á-vis freedom to appearance, to women who are regarded as ugly because of indifference (I’m thinking of the woman in “Curtain of Green,” for example).  Further, Ladd talks about women who are invisible in their world, but visible in Welty’s stories because they are “clearly in the sights of the reader” (62): “for a woman, who is so often more aware of being looked at than of herself looking, ‘looking about’ is a rare privilege.  That kind of invisibility is freedom, a freedom of indifference wherein other choices are possible, and is associated with authorship in Welt’s work” (62).  Again, I think this may have some bearing on my understanding of the interactive nature of ugliness, especially (but not only) in Welty’s work.  Further, Ladd directly addresses those characters who are associated with Medusa, noting that the “real problem is not so much that the heroines see themselves as monstrous as that the patriarchal narrative constructs them in such terms, leaving them with only two choices—to concur in their immersion into the repetitive regime of the everyday or to resist, to embrace their ‘contrariety’” (64).  Again, I think this has real bearing on the seeming ubiquity of the ugly woman in this work.

Ladd goes on to consider Faulkner’s A Fable and Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse in terms of gender reversal in authorship.  She sees Faulkner relying upon a “feminized semiotics of discourse” (81) in A Fable which is similar to that of As I Lay Dying, and she sees Hurston using a particularly performative identity (one which might almost be considered as pseudonymous as that of Mark Twain) in order to gain access to the privileged position of a white male voice (129).  These are interesting discussions, but not nearly as central to my work as her first two chapters.

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[1] What about the Gothic novel?  Isn’t that a textbook example of the feminine encounter with the sublime?  Or perhaps Ladd would argue that the “feminine Gothic,” with its mysteries explained, falls into the Hegelian paradigm that women encounter beauty, and only men the sublime (in terms of the “masculine Gothic” which features real mystery).

Nella Larsen--Quicksand (1928)

Larsen’s first novel, this largely autobiographical novel was well-received by critics.  To a certain extent, it can be considered to fall under the rubric of naturalism, though it also is considered an exemplar of modernism as well as a racial uplift novel.  In the novel, Helga Crane is the lovely and refined mixed-race daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father. He abandoned her mother and Helga soon after the girl was born. Unable to feel comfortable with her European-American relatives, Crane lives in various places in the United States and visits Denmark, searching for people among whom she feels at home.

In her travels she encounters many of the communities which Larsen knew. For example, Crane teaches at Naxos, a Southern Negro boarding school (based on Tuskegee University), where she becomes dissatisfied with its philosophy. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher, who advocates the segregation of blacks into separate schools, and says their striving for social equality would lead blacks to become avaricious. Crane quits teaching and moves to Chicago. Her white maternal uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. Crane moves to Harlem, New York, where she finds a refined but often hypocritical black middle class obsessed with the "race problem."

Taking her uncle's legacy, Crane visits her maternal aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic (as with many racial uplift narratives, a trip to Europe allows the protagonist a different way to experience her racial identity).  Missing black people, she returns to New York City. Experiencing a near mental breakdown, Crane happens onto a store-front revival and a charismatic religious experience. After marrying the preacher who converts her, she moves with him to the rural Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for more than how to integrate her mixed ancestry. She expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends consider genetic differences between races.  At the historical moment of the novel, the question of racial uplift was a problematic one, as everyone, it seemed, was invested in a discourse of racial uplift, from Nazi propagandists to W.E.B. Dubois.  This logic was one of improvement, whether through breeding or gene manipulation.

The novel develops Crane's search for a marriage partner. As it opens, she has become engaged to marry a prominent Southern Negro man, whom she does not really love, but with whom she can gain social benefits. In Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist for similar reasons. By the final chapters, Crane has married a typical black Southern preacher. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic. Crane had hoped to find sexual fulfillment in marriage and some success in helping the poor southern blacks she lives among, but instead she has frequent pregnancies and suffering. Disillusioned with religion, her husband, and her life, Crane fantasizes about leaving her husband, but never does.

Jean Toomer--Cane (1923)

An exemplar of experimental high modernism from the Harlem Renaissance, Cane moves from the South to the North and back again.  In a collection of loosely related sketches and poetry, the text unfolds in three sections: the first section focuses on southern folk culture; the second section focuses on urban life in Washington D.C.; and the third section is about the racial conflicts experienced by a black Northerner living in the South.  As the text is considered to be loosely autobiographical, critics disagree how the fragmented nature should be read: as either a process of self-discovery, or as a fragmentation of self and subsequent failure of discovery in the form.  Cane is important in that it claims a distinctly modernist genealogy for the Harlem Renaissance, while incorporating blues structure—the A A’ B structure is reflected in the three-part structure of the novel, and the blues call and response and repetitive structure can be seen in the repetition of the text.  The second section, in particular, moves the narrative to the periphery as it puts poetry at the center of the text.  Such a fragmentation of the subject demonstrates how no one central vision can be held together. 

Ellen Glasgow--Barren Ground (1925)

This beautiful novels follows the life of protagonist Dorinda Oakley, a woman from very rural Virginia, for thirty years.  Dorinda, daughter of a land‐poor farmer in Virginia, at 20 goes to work in Nathan Pedlar's store. She falls in love with Jason Greylock, weak‐willed son of the village doctor, and forgets her purpose of helping her father to rebuild the farm.  However, the day before their planned wedding Jason instead marries a former fiancée, later claiming that he was forced to marry her. Bitterly disillusioned and pregnant, Dorinda seeks work in New York, where she is injured and miscarries after being hit by a taxi. She is attended by Dr. Faraday, who later employs her as a nurse for his children. 

Dorinda returns to the family farm as her father is dying, finding the farm impoverished and overgrown with broomsedge. Having studied scientific agriculture in New York, she introduces progressive methods, gradually returning the “barren ground” to fertility and creating a prosperous dairy farm. Her mother becomes an invalid, after her brother Rufus is questioned for murder, so that Dorinda must carry on with only the aid of a few farm laborers. After her mother's death she marries Nathan Pedlar, to provide a home for his children.  Though she doesn’t love Nathan with the same romance with which he loves her, she has real respect for Nathan which allows the two of them to have a rather stable and financially successful marriage.  Nathan, often overlooked because of his lack of looks and quiet ways, dies a hero’s death after rescuing people from a train accident.  After he dies she shelters Jason, now penniless and ill from excessive drinking. He soon dies.  The novel ends with Dorinda taking to her own bed, echoing her own mother’s final admission of exhaustion.  

Throughout the novel, Dorinda struggles with desire for happiness, contentment, and ease of mind: they seem to be incompatible.  After her young romance with Jason which leaves her emotionally (and physically) scarred, Dorinda is insistent on putting such sentimental nonsense behind her.  This struggle between sentiment and pragmatism is an overarching throughout the novel: not just in relationships between people, but also in the relationship between people and the land.  While Dorinda may (mostly) be able to keep her feelings for other people outside the realm of the sentimental, her attachment to the land and her family farm is another story.  Certainly, the hard work which Dorinda invests in her family farm does pay off, but also reveals what emotional attachments are beyond her control.  Even the sections of the novel—“Broomsedge,” “Pine,” and “Life Everlasting”—are plant names used as metaphors to illustrate Dorinda’s relationship to herself and the land.  

This is a beautifully written and moving novel.  Pre-dating both Tobacco Road and Gone with the Wind (and even Cold Mountain), it seems to be to have been a strong influence on both of them.  My only complaint is the rather uneven treatment of race throughout.  African Americans throughout the novel are consistently characterized as an inferior and lazy race, despite the outstanding individuals such as Fluvella, without whose support Dorinda simply wouldn’t have survived.  Compared to others in the novel, Dorinda’s racism is perhaps a more benevolent form, but her failure to grasp the real-life conditions of the African Americans on whose labor her own survival depends is a weakness in an otherwise sensitive depiction of a life struggling against rural poverty.

Houston Baker, Jr.--Turning South Again (2001)

Generally, Baker’s text is a reconsideration of the South from the perspective of an African American academic: “a black southern mind navigating oceans and landfalls of memory, ineradicable dilemmas of black modernism, protocols of black male subject formation” (2).  By focusing on the ideas of Booker T. Washington specifically in relation to the ideas of black modernism, Baker performs a highly critical analysis of the effects of Washington’s ideas, particularly those which resulted in the stasis and ultimate immobilization of blacks in America.  Starting with chattel slavery, though the convict-leasing program, sharecropping, and the penal system today, Baker contends that the story of blacks in America is one of immobilization, one which needs access to modernity in order to escape.  Through discussions of traditional images of modernity—in particular, Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s description of the flaneur figure—Baker highlights how the mobility characteristic of these images were not available to blacks in America.

For my purposes, Baker’s occasional discussions of physical appearance in the literature he discusses is quite enlightening.  For example, he points to “The all-American caricature of the “Yankee” schoolmarm paints her as a crabbed, aged, old maid fiddling with books, cats, and outcasts.  W. J. Cash captures this stereotype when he writes in The Mind of the South as follows: ‘Generally horsefaced, bespectacled, and spare of frame, she was, of course, no proper intellectual, but at best a comic character, at worst a dangerous fool, playing with explosive forces which she did not understand’ (140).  Contrary to stereotype and caricature, however, the ‘Yankee’ womanhood that made its way South after the War was often young, literate, predominantly white, and in the age range of twenty to thirty years old” (45).  More importantly, he points out, “Nothing is more threatening to the southern real than the critical, informed, articulate, healthy black-mass body, en proper personne” (76).  In this way, the non-conforming body (particularly, the black female body) poses a threat by its very existence to the status quo.

Henry James--The Ambassadors (1903)

James’s The Ambassadors bridges the gap between Fin de Siecle literature and modernism.  As a master of Realism in his early work, James reaches toward modernism in his later novels.  The novel presents Paris as Paternian image of a liquid jewel—or some even go so far as to say that it is a Paternian universe, a world tending toward entropy.  In the novel, follows the trip of protagonist, middle-aged Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad, his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son; he is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view.

Strether agrees to go to Paris and rescue Chad Newsome, his fiancée’s son, from the clutches of a presumably wicked woman.  Along the way Strether meets Maria Gostrey, an American woman who has lived in Paris for years. Her cynical wit and worldly opinions start to rattle Strether's preconceived view of the situation.  Once Strether meets Chad, he’s impressed by Chad’s sophistication and becomes sympathetic to Chad’s point of view of the situation.  Chad takes him to a garden party, where Strether meets the beautiful Marie de Vionnet and Jeanne, her daughter. Strether has trouble determining whether Chad is more attracted to the mother or the daughter.  Strether finds himself attracted to Marie de Vionnet, despite his engagement to Chad’s mother.

Strether then confides in Chad’s friend Little Bilhan that he feels he may have missed his life somehow, and begins to relish his time in Paris.  His enjoyment is cut short by new “ambassadors,” which include Sarah Pocock, Chad's sister, who dismisses Strether's impression that Chad has improved, condemns Marie as an indecent woman, and demands that Chad immediately return to the family business in America.  In his confusion, Strether takes a trip to the French countryside where he encounters Chad and Marie and realizes the extent of their romance.  After returning to Paris, he counsels Chad not to leave Marie; but Strether finds he is now uncomfortable in Europe. In the event, he declines Maria Gostrey's virtual marriage proposal and returns to America.

In the novel, all of Strether’s encounters are mediated in some way, if only through the “eternal nippers” he wears (27).  As Strether struggles to make sense of his new surroundings and encounters, he is privy to new sights and ideas; however, his Woollet background often prevents him from grasping their meanings.  Even the most perspicacious of characters sees the same scenes differently from each other, depending on their respective positions and the prejudices which block their view.  When Strether looks through the Woollett party’s shuttered window and sees “the Tuileries garden and what was beyond it...visible through the gaps” (298), this obstructed view is emblematic of the idea of blocked vision which permeates the novel.

Strether most often relies upon Marie Gostrey to help him sort out what he has seen.  Like Strether, with his “perpetual pair of glasses astride” his nose (24), Miss Gostrey also uses an “aid[] to sight” (26), which shows that she, too, is interested new views and viewpoints.  However, Miss Gostrey is much more perceptive than Strether; he even admits that “she knew things he didn't” (27).  While Strether is often confused by people, Miss Gostrey, the “mistress of a hundred cases or categories,” is particularly adept at interpreting others (26).  Strether's Woollett background often occludes his vision of reality; he is reliant upon his conversations with Miss Gostrey to provide some of the metaphorical gaps through which he can begin to grasp the true nature of events.

Over the course of the novel, Strether also comes to rely upon the viewpoint of Madame de Vionnet to supplement his knowledge, especially that which pertains to his mission to “save” Chad Newsome.  As they both have vested interests in the success of this venture, it is important to them that they are able to compare impressions.  Often, though, Madame de Vionnet, like Miss Gostrey, sees more than Strether does.  For example, when they both examine Madame de Vionnet's furnishings, “she seemed to see gaps he didn't” (319).  Here again, the novel shows that there are both obstructions to sight, as well as gaps to be seen through.

While Miss Gostrey and Madame Vionnet both signify new vistas for Strether, the obstructions in his vision are also represented by a woman: the formidable Mrs. Newsome.  She represents the Woollett values and strictures which keep Strether from fully living, a regret against which he warns Little Bilham: “it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there” (176).  Mrs. Newsome is such a heavy presence in Strether’s life that even the sight of her handwriting holds a “queer power” over him (332).  It is on her behalf that he is on his current mission in Paris, to bring back her errant son.  And, it is notable that it is from her family’s apartment that the emblematic description is made: the room for which she has financially provided both provides the access and obstructions to the view of Parisian gardens. 

The observant Miss Gostrey remarks that Strether “owe[s] more to women than any man I ever saw” (326).  It is true that much of Strether’s experiences are made possible and mediated by women, whether his understanding of the sophisticated Parisians or concerned Americans, his position as editor of the green-covered Review, or his exposure to Paris itself.  Strether’s challenge for himself is to learn to distinguish the obstructions from the gaps.  Had he never come to Paris, Strether might never have been aware of the skewed vision which Mrs. Newsome’s Woollett has given him.  In Paris, though his view is still obstructed, he can at least see the Tuileries.