Feminist literary theory is a kind of re-colonisation or de-colonisation of the objectified and female body. It is also a tool by which to interrogate the repressive and performative situations of feminity both in society and syntax. To quote from Virginia Woolf,
Women have served all these years as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. (A Room of One’s Own )
Certainly, this ‘looking-glass’ image is integral for feminist theory. The ‘looking-glass’ reads as both a pane through which an image can be seen, as well as a surface merely reconstructing the ‘see-er’. The ‘through’ (glass) method can offer some sort of resistance, a return scrutiny of the viewer and two-way sight, whereas the latter position only allows limited mimetic reflection. ‘Women’ oscillate between the two potentialities.
To be relegated into such a looking-glass location means the diffusion of active agency. Femininity takes up the role of reproducer, always in bodily reproduction. Juliet Mitchell continues in this context, ‘The woman’s task is to reproduce society, the man’s to go and produce new developments’. The feminine-mirror represents and embodies the negative of creation, the negative and inverted appearance of selfhood. Femininity is forced into the very reflection which articulates being, and thus ‘women’ must become machines for identity rather than a controllers of identity. As Luce Irigaray argues in The Newly Born Woman , ‘there is no mirror that copies [femininity] so that it may be at once itself and its “own” reflection’. Instead, she continues, woman is internalised as a ‘fabricated character’ parodying that of exchangeable commodities, ‘yeild[ing] to [men] ... natural and social value as a locus of imprints, marks, and mirage of his activity’. Femininity, both separated from and posited as ‘image’/‘object’, becomes a phantom banished to the marginal outside, underneath and in between speaking and authorial jurisdiction.
Yet, this vascillitating role, like the role of the ‘looking-glass’, is one of both debilitation as well as ‘delicious power’, to return to Virginia Woolf’s image. Indeed, the ‘swamp and jungle’ upon which patriarchy is built, is connotes the watery and resistant underside of enunciation. In Kristeva’s terms, this is the chora, a pre-Oedipal, pre-subject ‘swamp’ or state within social systems of thought and literature––‘a rhythmic pulsion ... [which] constitutes, the heterogeneous, disruptive dimension of language’.
Irigaray, on the other hand, centres the thesis around her idea of the speculum, an instrument and mechanism of mirrors used for sight-orientated inspection into the human body. Particular to women, the tool becomes a metaphorical and masculine apparatus which enters and illuminates the vagina. Similar to Woolf’s ‘looking-glass’, the speculum makes ‘see-able’ the dark orifices and mysteries of the female sex. Yet, the very fact that the speculum must inavde and illuminate, the female body also symbolises a dangerous ‘“hole” in the [masculine] scoptophilic lens’ (This Sex Which Is Not One )––a flaw in ‘seeing’ to be survailled. Thus femininity is always just ‘behind the screen of representation’, always slightly out of view.
From underneath masculine gaze, Virginia Woolf describes femininity’s indiscriminate presence:
[A] shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’. One began dodging this way and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it ... all is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No it is a woman. But ... she has not a bone in her body. (A Room of One’s Own )
Here ‘woman’ is not only cast in the shadow, she also becomes the shadow, thus making the male-constructed ‘I’/being opaque, constituting his solidity and presence just like the ‘looking-glass’. When woman attempts to write this ‘I’ she is unable to cast the same shadow and posit a concrete presence. Irigaray echoes this consequence, ‘Because “I” am not “I”, I am not, I am not one’ (p. 120). Without subjectivity then, woman is denied a concrete unity of character, but also enabled, to a certain extent, a paradoxical invisible visibility. ‘I am spacious singing Flesh’, Cixous announces aptly, ‘onto which is grafted no one knows which I––which masculine of feminine, more or less human but above all living, because changing I’ (The Newly Born Woman ).
What Feminist theory recognizes and critiques is they way in which ‘woman’, as a visual and textual construct, is de-valued from subject to object, from writer to a thing that is only written. Within the mirror, at the end of the speculum, behind the ‘I’, the female body is de-materialised––made to be merely words, a readable image. The female being in this case, becomes simply ‘a writing-effect instead of an origin’ (Mary Jacobus, Reading Women ).
Jacobus states further: ‘feminity-heterogeneity, otherness––becomes the repressed term by which discourse is made possible’. In other words, femininity acts as a sort of lubricant and surface for language circulation, a commodified being frozen within lexical structures. And under the present situation of phallogocentrism, Irigaray concludes, ‘words will pass through our bodies ... we’ll be spoken machines, speaking machines. Enveloped in proper skins, but not our own’ (This Sex Which Is Not One ). Feminist theory seeks to restore this abstracted and annexed ownership and substance which becomes separated in the ‘speaking machines’ of our gendered social systems, texts and self-perceptions. It is a re-building of the body only ever made present in syntax, a material re-positing under ‘one’s own’ control. For as Virginia Woolf was to realise very early on, materialist foundations and possession means power; ‘the power to contemplate, ... the power to think for oneself’. ‘Write yourself’, Cixous urges, ‘your body must make itself heard’.
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This is a really interesting topic that raises some questions for me. I enjoy reading Irigaray and Cixous, but I wonder how helpful some of their theories are. For one thing, Irigaray's essentialism is really irritating to me.
Beyond that, her (Lacanian) view of language as inherently patriarchal (to be initiated into language is to be initiated into the patriarchy, and thus essentially erased if you're female...) is troubling. I have no problem agreeing that women are socialized to view themselves as passive while men are taught to see themselves as acting agents. However, I'm not sure this is a problem with the language itself. No doubt the language reflects and reproduces our gender assumptions, and many words and phrases need to be reclaimed or rejected. But it seems that socializing girls to claim the subject and think of themselves as acting agents in the world would resolve this without making any structural language changes. Of course, the way we use the language regarding girls, and the way we teach them to use it has a lot to do with how they view themselves, so this issue does need a lot of attention. But I think that the language will change over time (and already is changing) as women's self-conceptions, and men's perceptions of them, gradually change. This may be different in French - I couldn't say.
Nice post!