Gender, Self, and Play

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Notes

notes

1 Barbara Herb Wright has argued persuasively that the “weird seizures” are to be thought of as epileptic fits, which plagued Tennyson's father and uncle. But there is of course a thrill to this vertigo as well. Visitors to the home of Tennyson's brother Charles would probably often have heard or danced to a jig called “The Self” played by local paper-maker and musician Joshua Gibbons (1778–1871). Musicians interested in Victorian deconstruction may find this tune and the rest of Gibbons’ repertoire in Sumner, ed., Lincolnshire Collections, Volume I: One might also note that Tennyson was playful with notions of gender and the self in his letters. On 7 February, 1833 he wrote to James Spedding of giving “metaphysical flankers and crossbuttocks” to his friend Hallam (Letters 86; Cf. Thorn 108–09).

2 Butler's argument is not new: it is a queer-theory application of a more general line of thinking that is familiar to readers of Bakhtin, Lacan, Althusser, Levinas, and Derrida and that originates in the nineteenth century. Lacan's psychoanalytic and linguistic demonstration of “the self's radical eccentricity with respect to itself” (Écrits 162) and Levinas's theological notion of the self as “a being divesting itself, emptying itself of its being, turning itself inside out” (106) are well known, as are Althusser's notion of the subject as an individual hailed or interpellated by ideology and Bakhtin's argument that “The ‘I-experience’ actually tends toward its own extermination” (Richter 934). Butler's argument that “There is no volitional subject behind the mime who decides, as it were, which gender it will be today,” consistent with these results, is a corollary of Derrida's notion that being is only a consequence of differance. All of these articulations of the non-being of the self owe a debt to Hegel, whom Tennyson probably studied (Shaw 109). Hegel thought of the self as “pure negativity” or “simple becoming” (Phenomenology of Spirit 11): the self becomes aware of itself by “giving up the fixity of its self-posturing, by giving up not only the fixity of the pure concrete, which the ‘I’ itself is, in contrast with its differentiated content, but also the fixity of the differentiated moments which, posited in the element of pure thinking, share the unconditioned nature of the ‘I’” (Phenomenology of Spirit 20).

3 On deconstructive play as affirmative, cf. Stewart, especially pp. 215 ff.