Reading/Visual material of the week: “Woman’s Situation and Character” (Chapter ten, The Second Sex) – Simone De Beauvoir; “Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?” (Chapter two, Enjoy Your Symptom!) – Slavoj Zizek; The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath; The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Art by Francesca Woodman.
Some thoughts.
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The Subject for Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Esther) seems to me to come in three layers or degrees. First there is Esther, the protagonist of the book, who functions as an Other for Plath. Then there is Plath, who occupies the Real in a Lacanian sense, and who uses language to create or translate herself into a symbolic Other, which is Esther. Esther creates her own Other, Elly, who [or which?] can be conceived as merely a name standing in for another Esther, who is an alter ego that is no different in personality from Esther herself.
The Bell Jar is considered a semi-autobiographical work, with dates and names changed – much of what Esther experiences or does in the book mirrors Plath’s own experiences. Now, the connection between Plath and her protagonist reveals itself as a mirror; thus the space of the relationship in question is taken up in space by an object, that is, the (conceptual) mirror – which, in this case, could be said to be language, because language is the means by which the relationship is conveyed. Esther is an almost-perfect reflection of Plath, because she mirrors her actions and thoughts but within a different space that retains different names. Elly is a perfect reflection of Esther, because she has no extra attributes and functions entirely in the same world; she is merely Esther by another name, within the world that Esther inhabits. Elly cannot be considered a mirror of Plath, though she might be allowed the title of ‘extension’, and we cannot say that the same language is the mediator of Esther and Elly’s relationship. Elly is Esther’s imago, her imaginary ego, which Esther creates in order to mediate her interactions with a male Other.
In light of Zizek, we consider that Esther has already encountered the event of emptiness. From the first pages, she appears to the audience as a flat note, something empty or devoid, something already lacking; she embodies the void into which Karin descends, having already undergone the “encounter with the Real” (42) that Karin is overwhelmed with [Karin embodies the void in this moment too, recognizing herself in this void as the objet a]. That being said, exactly what Esther has encountered is ambiguous, because we never see that encounter. It has already happened, at the onset of the story; the story merely traces Esther’s descent from this already “point zero” plateau into complete disarray. She repeatedly tries to find herself in the primordial/mystical flow of womanhood (of which de Beauvoir speaks), but fails (her references to water (purity and drowning – perhaps in that purity) dissolve over the course of events until finally it is no longer referred to by the end of the book). She attempts to take control of her own love life, refusing to accept offers of male dates and taking it upon herself to “decide” to seduce a man or let him seduce her. Her intentions are never properly realized, whether we are dealing with Marco, who she rejects and is attacked by, or Constantin, who she hopes will seduce her. “the woman, like the child, indulges in symbolic outbursts… it is not only for physiological reasons that she is subject to convulsive manifestations: a convulsion is an interiorization of an energy that, thrown into the world, fails to grasp any object” (648). Esther has tried to grasp, and she has failed, which leads her to suicide – which is actually (unfortunately) the moment when she gives into the symbolic system established by society. She does not appear, at first, to fit de Beauvoir’s statement: “they [women] play at suicide more often than man, but they want it more rarely”. After all, the choices Esther makes lead up to her final decision to commit suicide. But we must turn to Zizek, who illustrates that woman becomes the objet a, the object which is defined by an internal lack. She is one of the Names-of-the-father, a kind of capricious Master who consistently eludes the grasp of the male. She is his fantasy “par excellence”, but in so being she is also Other – something ambiguous or open, something almost imaginary. And we realize: Esther spends the entire novel playing at suicide, playing with this feminine lack, trying to “grasp any object” in order to fulfill this lack. She fails, and so she actually consents to this ‘big Other’ of psychoanalysis. She departs from nature’s flow which de Beauvoir says is an innate part of womanhood by partaking in that which is either the exact opposite of natural, or else is the natural transformed into something that is not: the pill. It initiates death, and this is the death of Esther’s autonomy. She accepts her role in the fold. Inappropriate as it might be to mention – Plath’s own death was suffocation by the oven, itself is a social symbol of the feminine. They (she) are (is) killed by the social construct – they murder themselves in order to escape this inescapable Other; but as Zizek points out, killing themselves involves utilizing that which is part of the Other, and is thus an affirmation of the power of this Other, as well as an admission to it (caving to this power). Truly, it is inescapable.
Elucidating on this idea of woman being connected to nature, de Beauvoir says that “they almost never use knives of firearms. They drown themselves more readily, like Ophelia, showing woman’s affinity for water, passive and full of darkness, where it seems that life might be able to dissolve passively.” [This reminds me briefly of a moment in Demons in the Age of Light where Ani talks to Whitney about her own ability to see auras: “So you can see these auras, for real?”/ “Sure. They’re strongest around your center and they fade once they leave your skin. Some people barely glow and some are lit up like fireflies. But you, you got the darkest aura I’ve ever seen.” (87) Whitney, a schizophrenic patient, is flattered; what this says about feminine psychosis – as opposed to plain madness – in terms of Zizek or de Beauvoir is up for debate; though darkness, to me, signifies this lack the belongs to femininity.]
The female protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper is more like the female which de Beauvoir describes. She certainly plays at suicide, locking herself in her room and finally removes all of the wallpaper – the removal of the wallpaper can be seen as a suicide, of sorts, because the idea that the woman beneath the wallpaper stems from the idea that the woman is part of the wallpaper (over the course of the story, the two become separated, which indicates a sure psychological departure of the protagonist from the symbolic fold of society). Her illusion becomes that there is another woman trapped underneath the wallpaper, who she needs to free. At first the other is a hostile object, but soon the protagonist empathizes with this creature. She begins to “see” her “creeping” outside of the room in the daylight, more a feeling than visual perception. Every time she turns to look, the woman is too fast! She gets away. At the conclusion of the story, the protagonist mimics this creeping and proclaims triumphantly: “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (36) John faints at this active display of rebellion against the patriarchal scheme. What follows is an ambiguous phrase to draw the moment to a close, which suggests that the protagonist is now aware of her ability to move into and out of the patriarchal structure (the wall serving as the symbolic structure or social system): “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” (36). Gilman shows the woman for once successful in her rebellion, pushing the man down with mystical force so that he will stay down. The moment described here thus comes across as static, as an ongoing state of affairs. There is in fact a photograph by Francesca Woodman that illustrates both the before and after states of the yellow wallpaper. The figure here is concrete, standing apart from the wall; but the absence of her head indicates a certain nothingness, where identity is absent and all that remains is the body. The navel is shown here, not just for stylistic purposes, but also because doing so denotes the responsibility of womanhood to reproduce. Further, the wallpaper (which could be seen as a layer of womanhood, that is, an entity that is on the one hand part of the wall but also not, and which can be removed, ripped, manipulated – that is, we can do things with our role that are subversive) covers her sexual parts, evoking the importance society places on tastefulness, which itself actually shows the sex to be the focus of the collective psyche.
