Readings: Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade – John Hawkes; To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf; Anti-Oedipus – Deleuze & Guattari; S/Z – Roland Barthes.
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One thing that we see when we look at Gustav Klimt’s famous painting, The Kiss, is the male subject in the act of subsuming the female participant. This painting can, and has often been, interpreted as a moment of intense passion – the woman goes limp, transferred to a state of pure bliss – the gold aura that surrounds the embrace and draws the two together is a symbolic gesture representing the energy and pleasure of the moment, while the juxtaposition of geometric forms expresses further this moment of transference. But it can also be interpreted in the complete opposite; the woman, on this view, is pulling away from the man. Rather than her lips, she offers only her cheek, her expression one of patient obedience. The hand around the man’s neck is clenched into a half position between a fist and a soft resting, as if the female cannot decide which to make. The fingers on her other hand delicately reach upward to curl over the man’s hand, which is positioned over where her neck ought to be; but his fingers brush against her cheek, allowing for the interpretation that this gesture is loving. Regardless of the gesture, however, the man holds her in place in order to control the act of passion; the woman is reduced before the man, by the man, visually in size (a folding of her form plus the twist of her head) and by the strength of his body and assumptive aura. In this sense, the aura can be seen as stemming from the man, and the juxtaposition of geometric forms can be understood as a symbolic representation of the masculine and feminine difference.
This representation reminds me of a particular passage near the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Mrs. Ramsay, reflecting on woman’s condition, wishes that it were not so but recognizes that she can do nothing about it. “They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better – her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties.” (6) Mrs. Ramsay recognizes her position but assumes it willingly – even gracefully. Woolf shows that this reflects a kind of power. “She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose – could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers” (7). The “wretched atheist” ‘chasing’ after her daughters makes clear (metaphorically) that times are changing. Dr. Shihada (2005) writes that Mrs. Ramsay represents the conventional Victorian female (submissive to the masculine), “her medium emotion and her form human relationship” (136). This is what makes her so beautiful to Mr. Tansley as he walks with her. She allows him to talk about his problems, voice his opinions; she “stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter,” the Queen an authority only by virtue of her position within a patriarchal system. Standing for this moment silent, “(as if she had been pretending up there, and for a moment let herself be now)” paused in her continuous performance as ‘woman’, as ‘Other’ – the Other who fulfills the male in the act of courtship. This, after all, is what to Lacan creates culture; the “non-rapport” [inability to find symmetry] between the two sexes [and thus form a whole “One”]. But she quickly re-assumes her role, allows Charles Tansley his revelation [that “she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen”] and subsequent pride; “for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had hold of her bag.” (14) This last sentence is full of import; by holding her bag, he makes use of himself and thus validates himself through her existence.
The character of Mrs. Ramsay has me thinking about the protagonist of Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, comparing the two. Before I had begun the book I had not realized that ‘skin trade’ referred to the sex trade in Alaska, only knew that it was about a woman’s search for her father. I was struck by the frankness of her words, the confident poetic voice that weaved for me worlds dominated by the female – a female that is not only ‘feminine’ in the conventional sense [as well as the unconventional], found located in a place that is also often thought of as isolated (barren, cold, almost otherworldly due to its midnight sun). Alaska becomes an oasis that preserves woman’s freedom; the realm of the Flower sisters, meanwhile, is tied to the patriarchal. The protagonist’s mother, like Cinderella, is saved from the evil Flower sisters by the male savior. Her mother goes from a female-dominated world (nevertheless structured by masculinity), to a truly patriarchal realm. That being said, her mother is allowed to enjoy herself in this world, as long as there is mutual love; for love between the father and mother opens up a space for enjoyment, though the male lover is always there in that dynamic, never separated.
There is a strange Oedipal dynamic present in this novel. As a young girl, she calls her mother ‘Sissy’ and her father ‘Uncle Jake’ out of respect for her father’s wishes. “I was not allowed to call him Father. I was never allowed to call him Dad. Especially I was never allowed to call him Dad.” The father is thus distanced from the daughter, at the same time as she is brought close. She describes the eating of a gifted sandwich with every tinge of childish pleasure – yet the overabundance of description, the almost mind-numbing pleasure she experiences despite the dangerously rocking ship, yields a strong, sexual interpretation.
“It was a sandwich. A chicken sandwich. He must have arranged much earlier with Jim to bring me a chicken salad sandwich at the height of the gale, knowing how I would fill my little mouth with soft white bread, golden crusts, cold lettuce, mayonnaise that could not have been creamier, the firm wet cubes of chicken flavored with all the succulence of a secret childhood meal at the height of a gale. And there I lay, propped on elbow, bracing myself with naked foot, knee, elbow, and savoring, as he knew I would, my plump white sandwich while the cabin reeled and the porthole ran with water and the wind howled. The storm drove my face into the sandwich, smeared soft butter and softer mayonnaise on my lips, my lips, my eyebrows, my cheeks, which I wiped with the back of my hand, which I then licked. Chewing turned into rumination and slow bliss. I was my father’s replica, my father’s child, I carried the taste of the treasured sandwich back to the bottom, down to the dreamless sleep of my peace and pleasure.” (47-48)
The eating of the treasured sandwich is, in a Freudian reading, like engaging with the father in the act of sex. It is not as one-sided as might appear, for he ‘knows’ how she will eat the sandwich, how she will savor consumption of the sandwich. The emphasis of white (mayonnaise, chicken, butter, white bread) points both to the consumption of a pure object and to human fluid, perhaps specifically semen. Yet there is even more so a sense of masturbation taking place, the fact that a relationship between the self and object marks the foundation of the consumptive act points to a corollary in the notion of the hand as object, separate from the body, but which is also the means to sexual experience. This is carefully connected to who, or what, she has become. “I am something of a man myself, or have my share of the masculine component, as they say, and dress like a man and stand alone” yet, “Uncle Jake, I owe you nothing”. She embraces the Oedipal father at the same time time as she rejects him. The innocent (metaphorical) fantasy presented above has the father present in the form an abstract physicality as well as conceptually ever-present. But her connection to her father is not just ingrained in her personality, despite her claim that she has broken away from him – she is the last in his line to inherit lineage. A lineage which, because she is female, will die with her.
This masculine-felt side of her has completely messed up the Electra complex. Sunny is drawn to her father by the Electra-drive, but he distances her by name and by substituting himself for her, entering into her fantasy as the chicken sandwich. As the son ought [in the Oedipus complex], Sunny puts herself on the level of her father in relation to her mother. “But if my father was to be blamed for humorously renaming the unoffending population of his little world, and most of all denying to his daughter was was rightfully hers – the name appropriate to that man who was her sole spell-caster – how much more was I to be blamed, since I too called my mother Sissy.”
The protagonist is free to become androgynous, her mother is not. (We can see the theme of the woman being allowed to be whatever she likes also emerging in To The Lighthouse). The daughter repeats the same idea, established at this young age when she and her parents land at Juneau: “And was I not like my father? Size and gender aside, I was his replica.” (41) She peers down from her father’s shoulders at her mother. The girl identifies herself with this position, which is a position of power and organization, based off of the affinity she feels for her father. “But we hung on, Uncle Jake and I, and I knew that I alone was the cause of the electric whistle’s withering, ungainly noise and that soundlessly Uncle Jake was laughing. Together we reveled, he and I -”. In relation to this idea of power, I have at the back of my mind Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic and the structuring of language in relation to the Name-of-the-Father. Writing down her father’s stories from her own convoluted perspective allows the woman to control the structure of language. But Hawkes wants us to remember that language is ultimately masculine (Sunny is male on the surface, but below she is female), and that Sunny thus presents a feminine perspective struggling out of the confines of the masculine text. But Sunny and her “transient girls” seem to do everything but struggle in the Alaskan Skin Trade; the power of the woman to subdue masculinity via her womanly charms is portrayed as a dominance that cannot be trumped. The masculinity of language is manipulated by the women, and they give themselves the phallus “The Men Only [sign] is meant to inspire amusement, curiosity, a dash of pride. At any rate our Willies have the courage to enter… Willie grins or blushes. Among other Willies, he sits on one of the leather and aluminum chairs or cream-colored calfskin couches as deep and soft as snow…” (26) She has become the author that Hawkes grants the woman: “the created woman is reason enough for her creation.”
Reading this book in conjunction with passages from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and John Dewey’s Art and Experience, I start to think of the female as somehow not a Desiring-machine. The Desiring-machine obeys a binary law of governance where the production of production (flow machine) is connected to an interrupting machine, which interrupts or draws off part of this flow, and so on in a linear fashion down an endless line of connecting entities. As I continue to study and process this idea, I shall elaborate further. It is as if Sunny has broken away from the chain of machinery, or at least separated herself partially, tied to the chain by an elastic string. How far can she go? Is she the author, or is Hawkes? We can see Freud’s psychoanalytic categories breaking down, showing that not all cases can be fit into his paradigm. What is creation in The Alaskan Skin Trade? Is it art?
Additional References:
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience.
Ferrari, R. (1996). Innocence, Power, and the Novels of John Hawkes. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ragland, E. (1995). Psychoanalysis and Courtly Love, Arthuriana 5(1), 1-20. Retrieved from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27869092?seq=6#page_scan_tab_contents.
Shihada, I. (2005). A Feminist Perspective of Virginia Woolf’s Selected Novels: Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. Retrieved from: https://www.alaqsa.edu.ps/site_resources/aqsa_magazine/files/44.pdf.
