Dystopic Bodies and Enslaved Motherhood

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Notes

1. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1962.

2. I refer here to second-wave essentialists in particular, such as Nancy Chodorow, but also to the later work of Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva.

3. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. Chodorow's work specifically aligns itself with a second-wave move to celebrate the feminine body as a locus of power. See also, ‘Being and Doing: A Cross-cultural Examination of the Socialization of Males and Females’, Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, New York: Basic Books, 1971, pp. 183–7.

4. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, 1976, pp. 875–93. First appeared in print under the French title ‘Le Rire de la Medusa’ in L'Arc, 1975. See also, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, 1981, pp. 41–55; Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Cixous represents the French feminist impulse to locate power within maternal essentialism.

5. For further discussion on late twentieth century concepts of motherhood, see also Patrice Diquinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood: Feminism, Individualism, and the Problem of Mothering, New York: Routledge, 1999.

6. The ‘mother-text’, so to speak, of second-wave feminism was released just prior to this period. See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, New York: Norton, 1963; J. Bernard, The Future of Motherhood, New York: Dial Publishers, 1974; and Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, New York: Norton Press, 1976.

7. Donna Bassin et al, Representations of Motherhood, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, p. 3.

8. Meridian has most often been read in terms of its involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as well as the feminist second-wave activists of the time. Although the issue(s) of the Movement are critical to Walker's text, this work focuses primarily on her use of feminist thought as it pertains to essentialism. For more on Meridian and activism, see Susan Danielson, ‘Alice Walker's Meridian, Feminism, and the “Movement”’, Women's Studies, vol. 16, 1989, pp. 317–30.

9. Alice Walker, Meridian, New York: Washington Square Press, 1976, p. ix.

10. Walker, Meridian, p. 1.

11. Walker, Meridian, p. 50.

12. Walker, Meridian, p. 51.

13. Walker, Meridian, p. 51.

14. Cixous, p. 880.

15. Cixous, p. 879.

16. Walker, Meridian, p. 97.

17. Walker, Meridian, pp. 114–15.

18. Walker, Meridian, p. 119.

19. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, New York: Norton Press, 1976, p. 40.

20. Walker, Meridian, p. 51.

21. Walker, Meridian, p. 51.

22. Walker, Meridian, p. 79.

23. Walker, Meridian, p. 69.

24. Walker, Meridian, pp. 72–3.

25. This passage is hauntingly similar to Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Child Who Was Tired’, a chapter in her collection that incorporates modernist imagery of fragmented womanhood as its literary lens. Walker's postmodern representation of murderous maternity, however, is significantly different in her vision of maternal murder as a natural reaction rather than one nightmarish fragment of forced feminine enslavement. See also Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension, New York: A. A. Knopf, 1926.

26. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 54.

27. Walker, Meridian, p. 89.

28. Walker, Meridian, p. 90.

29. Walker, Meridian, p. 91.

30. Walker, Meridian, p. 91.

31. Lindsey Tucker writes in ‘Walking the Red Road’ of the apparent conflict in Walker's concept of the maternal figure. Tucker finds that, in comparing Meridian with In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, there is a marked disjunction in Walker's text, claiming: ‘It would appear that Walker has a problem with this maternal legacy, a problem that manifests itself thematically in numerous images of entrapment and paralysis’. It is, however, crucial to note that In Search of Our Mother's Gardens is a work of prose, an altogether autobiographical piece in which Walker attempts to connect with the stories of her mother and all mothers. The place where her prose and her fiction meet reflects not a necessary break in her rhetoric of motherhood, but rather a convergence of history and the present, legacy and possibility, for the woman who chooses to mother. See also Lindsey Tucker, ‘Walking the Red Road: Mobility, Maternity and Native American Myth in Alice Walker's Meridian’, Women's Studies, vol. 19, 1991, pp. 1–17.

32. Walker, Meridian, p. 91.

33. Walker, Meridian, p. 219.

34. Walker, Meridian, p. 219. For a full discussion of the resurrection of Lazarus, see the Bible, John 11.11. Note verse 44: ‘The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”’ It is interesting to note that Lazarus must remove the funeral garments, just as Meridian must discard all clothing from her past.

35. Walker, Meridian, p. 219.

36. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 54.

37. See Walker's preface in which she traces the definition of meridian as: ‘1. the highest apparent point reached by a heavenly body; 2. (a) the highest point of power, prosperity, splendor, etc.’

38. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. ix.

39. Cixous, p. 889.

40. Often called ‘post-feminism’, the chronology of second-wave feminism overlaps what others have deemed third-wave feminism. While some critics mark the early years of second-wave between 1967 and 1973, others cite third-wave generation as being born between 1963 and 1974. Further studies have named the 1980s as the true birthplace of third-wave feminism, leaving the field of feminism's chronology to be a hotly contested era.

41. Catharine R. Stimpson, ‘The Handmaid's Tale’, The Nation, May 31, v242, 1986, p. 764.

42. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986, pp. 7–8.

43. Atwood, p. 8.

44. Atwood, p. 9.

45. Atwood, p. 28. This scene is often linked more to the issue of the veil in Atwood's novel, a trope that one critic notes as ‘tropological excess’, and synonymous with Jacques Derrida's theory of hymeneal logic. For more on this interpretation see also David Coad, ‘Hymens, Lips and Masks: The Veil in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale’, Literature and Psychology, Spring/Summer, 2001, p. 54.

46. Atwood, p. 261.

47. Atwood, p. 263.

48. Atwood, p. 255.

49. Atwood, p. 104.

50. Atwood, p. 103.

51. Atwood, p. 73.

52. Atwood, pp. 73–4.

53. Atwood, p. 73.

54. Atwood, p. 73.

55. Atwood, p. 47. Offred refers to her body as ‘treacherous ground’. Atwood earlier describes a scene in which homosexuals have been hung and displayed on the Wall wearing ‘purple placards’ with the words: ‘Gender Treachery’. The notation of the colour purple is intriguing, as it has historically represented (since Greece) funeral grief and royalty. See Atwood, p. 43.

56. Atwood, p. 220.

57. Atwood, p. 293. Woolf's angel was an amalgam of masculine thought, an entity that attempted to dictate her words and control her autonomous thought. Woolf claimed to have ‘killed’ the specter, but warns that other women will face the same task. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1929.

58. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 42.

59. Atwood, pp. 308–9.

60. Atwood, pp. 308–9.

61. Morrison, p. ix.

62. Emma Parker, ‘A New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison's Beloved’, Twentieth Century Literature 47, Spring, 2001, p. 6.

63. Qtd in Parker, p. 5. Original citation: Morrison, p. 55.

64. Qtd in Parker, p. 6. Original citation: Morrison, p. 55.

65. Parker, p. 7.

66. Parker, p. 7. Of course, any interpretation of Morrison's text as resistant, counter-hegemonic text is valid. It is important, however, to avoid universalization of African American texts as univocally speaking in racial contexts. This work considers Morrison's representations of both race and sexuality as those experiences, while undeniably connected, are not necessarily one and the same. Parker does go on to suggest the significance of sugar as it pertains to ‘race and gender power structures’, yet finds even then for a hysteria that functions primarily as a ‘counterhegemonic form of mimicry’ invoking the history of slavery.

67. Morrison, p. 16.

68. Morrison, p. 250.

69. Other textual implications for Morrison's depiction of maternity have found it to be a resistance to patriarchal objectification, arguing for a more aggressively amaternal reading. For this and other alternate readings, see Paula Gallant Eckard, Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith, University of Missouri Press, 2002; Jennifer L. Holden-Kirwan, ‘Looking Into the Self That Is No Self: An Examination of Subjectivity in Beloved’, African American Review, vol. 32, n. 3, Fall, 1998; Kimberly Chabot Davis, ‘“Postmodern Blackness”: Toni Morrison's Beloved and the End of History’, Twentieth Century Literature 44.2, Summer, 1998; Cynthia Dobbs, ‘Toni Morrison's Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revisited’, African American Review, vol. 32, n. 4, Winter, 1998; and Michele A. L. Barzey, ‘Thick Love: Motherhood in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love’, Black Theology in Britain 5, 2000, pp. 9–20.

70. Morrison, p. 17.

71. Alison Easton, ‘The Body as History and “Writing the Body”: The Example of Grace Nichols’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 3, n. 1, 1994, p. 59.

72. Easton, p. 62.

73. Morrison, p. 164.

74. Morrison, pp. 164–5.

75. Morrison, p. 15.

76. Morrison, p. 51.

77. Morrison, p. 5.

78. Morrison, p. 38.

79. Morrison, pp. 38–9.

80. Morrison, p. 210.

81. Morrison, p. 131.

82. Morrison, p. 45.

83. R. Clifton Spargo, ‘Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison's Beloved’, Mosaic, 35, Winnipeg, March, 2002, pp. 113–19.

84. Toni Morrison, ‘Memory, Creation, and Writing’, Thought: A Review of Culture and Ideas 59, December, 1984, pp. 385, 389.

85. Easton, p. 62.

86. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, ‘Daughters Signify(ing) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved’, American Literature 64, September, 1992, pp. 567–98.

87. Morrison, p. 256.

88. Morrison, p. 256.

89. Morrison, p. 256.

90. Morrison, p. 261.

91. Morrison, pp. 272–3.

92. Morrison, pp. 272–3.

93. Morrison, p. 95.

94. Morrison, p. 274.

95. For a full discussion of Morrison's term ‘rememory,’ see Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, ‘“Rememory”: Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison's Novels’, Contemporary Literature, 53 Fall, 1990, p. 300 (24). Morrison's own definition can be found on p. 36, of Beloved as Sethe explains to Denver: ‘If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.’

96. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, p. 276. First printed in 1974, ‘A Letter to the Editor of Ms.’

97. Walker, In Search, p. 393.