Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.
She stepped out against the white wall, a woman-shaped hole, a black cardboard cut-out; with a crooked, charming smile she clapped her hand to her mouth, either taking something out or putting something in—see? . . . Come up close and you’ll see that her eyes are silver, most unnatural. It came to me that we had been watching this woman perform for half an hour and had not given one thought to what might be happening around us or to us or behind us.
A DISPLAYING TEXT gives us the signal to attend, to be alert to the performance that unfolds when we give that attention to the text of another woman. The signal is a gesture, and gesture is a matter of movement, of form rather than content alone. Content speaks, but it cannot hail the reader. In order to be seen a novel needs to make the gesture, to signal to us. Form itself “bodies” forth a “message.” It stands, it takes a stance; it signals as a gesture signals for attention of a certain kind.
The reader notes the gesture: this is not only a woman writing, it is a woman making something. It is as if something moves, as if one can see it in space like the hailing signal of the hand, uplifted, a wave, fingers and palm together in a certain movement, a pose that moves, a stance that one recognizes. “I’d know her anywhere,” one says of a friend, “that walk, the set of the shoulders, the lift of the chin.” Her silhouette is kinetic, dynamic, inseparable from her movements, inseparable from the space she now inhabits, now displaces in motion.
This is not the “writing of the body” that some French feminist theorists recommend, but it is not thoroughly dissimilar, either.1 What is important is that a voice goes with the picture. A woman’s text is not “silent.” It speaks as it displays; it speaks in order to display. That is how it is like a play, a dramatization, and its actors (all of whom are the author) are conscious of their audience. The audience is listening as well as watching, but the eye is the initial organ of perception. And, the eye having been caught, it is the voice that enables the pictures to move, the voice that fuels the movement in space on which the reader’s “eye” continues to be fixed, the voice that propels the movement that “makes” the story and unfolds the drama. Imagining the voice allows the tableau vivant of the woman’s novel to take kinetic shape in the theater of voice and movement that the writer and the reader have established together. The writer stages the performance; the audience supports and encourages it.
THE DIFFERENCE between acting in films and on the stage, John Gielgud remarked, is the presence of the audience in the theater.2 Gielgud said that as a stage actor he has tried to be a “vessel for the play,” that learning to relax, to “support” the play, and not to “show off” is the hardest part of acting for the stage. These remarks have some usefulness for us, particularly if we put them alongside Joanna Russ’s envoi to her “little daughter-book” (an extension of Chaucer’s envoi to his “litel bok”)3 and consider the implications for our metaphor of book as stage and the reader-writer relationship as that of the theater audience to a play.
In one sense, a play has two audiences: the initial or primary audience, consisting of the actors and other technicians who interpret and stage the play, and the secondary audience, the people gathered in the theater to view the play. The playwright is only one of the people responsible for the collective effort resulting in the presentation viewed by the theater audience. The novelist, in contrast, herself produces the novel that is presented to the audience of readers. Who or what serves as a “vessel for the play”? Who learns to “relax,” to “support” the play and not to “show off”? Text? Author? Characters? Audience?
If we look to Joanna Russ’s admonition to her “little daughter-book,” we see how these analogies may serve us. “Go little book,” she writes, “behave yourself in people’s living rooms. ... Do not scream when you are ignored, for that will alarm people ... do not fume. . . . Live merrily, little daughter-book. . . . recite yourself to all who will listen; stay hopeful and wise. ... Do not complain. ... do not mutter angrily to yourself. ... Do not get glum. . . . Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.”4 She speaks to her book as if it were a person, an actor, an agent capable of so much self-directed activity as to need a warning not “to reach up . . . and punch the readers’ noses.” Where does the virtue of the kind that Gielgud suggests, the virtue of active passivity, reside? In the book? Is the book in the position of actor, on a stage? (I’ve already suggested that the book itself is the stage.) Is it in the writer, the author herself? (No; she let the book “go,” sent it out into the world alone.) Is it in the production, the achieved presentation of the text itself—text as opposed to book—if we see the text as the interwoven and moving pattern of the words on the page as the reader perceives them, and the book as the stage, the concrete place of presentation for the text? The active passivity Gielgud suggests lies perhaps in the text, if it can be seen as active, moving, participating in the “show” of the narrative (or the narrative of the show) on the stage of the novel, the concrete book.
The book is the frame, the arch of the proscenium, the window into which the audience—the reader—may direct her view for the “showing off” of the text, which has become the actor(s), moving and on full view. Meanwhile the original actor, the writer, recedes into the background, withdrawing in the essential artistic and aesthetic modesty crucial for effective performance.
For such a novel the audience is, at least metaphorically, like the audience for the drama: stage actor and writer are each initial audiences; reader and theater-going audience are secondary but ultimate. They are of the utmost importance, for without the buoyancy of the interaction between actor and audience, between writer and reader, the dynamism achieved by mutuality of need and intent, a performance could not be said to take place. Certainly it would lack the effectiveness that allows us to recognize aesthetic satisfaction or achievement.
The play of the text, then, and not the author herself, is to be “supported.” This support, however, needs the text offered by the author, who, as her text, allows herself to “relax” and not to “show off” and allows her book to be the “vessel for the play.” She herself is no longer actor, as Gielgud of course intends the actor vessel to be, but the book is the theater, the place of staging for the play that is acted out by the text. The showing off is accomplished by the play itself, play between book and reader; the reader supports the action of the text, furnishing a part of the dynamics of book meeting reader, especially when a woman’s book is in the hands of a woman reader. It is then that the text is enabled to assume a voice and begin to “speak.”
What has been missing in the previous paragraphs is the matter of voice, specifically, a voice speaking. The actor’s voice is central to the performance, to the movement and shape of the text. In the staged performance that is the book, there is no movement without the voice. The action stops, freezes, enacts nothing. It would be at best a photograph, a “still,” or that old-fashioned amusement, a tableau vivant. By definition, a tableau vivant is constituted by live but motionless and silent figures, a literal “still life.” But always one knows that the figures could move.
What if the figures, the characters, began to move? That would be to break the rules of the game, to go against the form of the art itself; that is the pleasure of the tableau vivant. But what if the figures began to move, and in moving, began to speak? Rather than trying to say why they might speak, or speculating on the voice with which they might speak, let us consider where such a voice comes from, whose voice it is (besides the author’s, besides the characters’). Where does it come from? The woman in the man’s text has been the object of the eye-object dialectic, the tableau vivant, where the titillation comes from knowing that she can move and speak but the rules of the game require that she cannot. The “voice” of the contemporary woman’s text is making the woman (and women) “move.”
Several such tableaux vivants appear in Edith Wharton’s The Houseof Mirth. Wharton describes those tableaux vivants that precede one presented by the protagonist, Lily Bart, and distinguishes Lily’s presentation from the others. In doing so, Wharton gives us a pictorial, as well as an expository, representation of the woman-in-the-text. Although this woman is as yet silent, a “voice” begins to make itself felt in the “predominance of personality” that Wharton stresses. In Wharton’s description of Lily Bart as artist of the tableau vivant, we are presented with the woman’s body, her figure in space, the “flesh-and-blood” woman expressing herself in an art form that, typically, had been all self-effacement and lack of self-expression.
Our male observer, Selden, gives us another insight into the contrast between women’s and men’s watching of women. We must remember that Edith Wharton allows him to speak. Her voice speaks on the page; her eyes see through his, as ours do.
Indeed, so skillfully had the personality of the actors been subdued to the scenes they figured in that even the least imaginative of the audience must have felt a thrill of contrast when the curtain suddenly parted on a picture which was simply and un-disguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.
Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality—the unanimous “Oh!” of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of Reynolds’ “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the flesh-and-blood loveliness of Lily Bart. She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’ canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a splendid setting—she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepo-lo’s Cleopatra—had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her unassisted beauty. ... Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart. . . . Lily had not an instant’s doubt as to the meaning of the murmur greeting her appearance. No other tableau had been received with that precise note of approval; it had obviously been called forth by herself and not by the picture she impersonated.5
Lily Bart’s “artistic intelligence” is not very different from that of Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette. In a visit to the Brussels museum, Lucy rejects Rubens’s Cleopatra, a picture of “portentous size, set up in the best light, having a cordon of protection stretched before it, and a cushioned bench duly set in front for the accommodation of worshipping connoisseurs,” a picture which, in short, “seemed to consider itself the queen of the collection.”6 This production “represented a woman, considerably larger,” Lucy remarks sardonically, “than the life,” and is so at variance with her own perceptions that she cannot for a moment take it seriously: “Pots and pans—perhaps I ought to say vases and goblets—were rolled here and there on the foreground; a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the floor.”7 Through Lucy, Brontë offers us a corrective description that attempts to wrench the picture back into some semblance of a woman’s “real” life. Lucy rejects this unrealistic and obscured representation of a woman, just as Lily Bart rejects a view of yet another male painter’s Cleopatra, because it is inadequate to represent her self.
Later in Villette, Brontë contrasts the same unrealistic representation of a woman that Lucy had earlier rejected with the actress Vashti’s dramatic presentation of herself/her character.
“Where was the artist of the Cleopatra?” Brontë writes. “Place now the Cleopatra, or any other slug, before [Vashti] as an obstacle, and see her cut through the pulpy mass as the scimitar of Saladin clove the down cushion. Let Peter Paul Rubens wake from the dead, let him rise out of his cerements, and bring into this presence all the army of his fat women.”8 We might imagine from this impassioned prose that Vashti (and Brontë, and her Lucy) would make short work of this overfed army, which has nothing to do with them and which, in their view (her view in each case), fails abysmally as artistic representation. The representation itself is overfed, encumbered and encumbering, aesthetically as well as pragmatically wrong. The accurate representation of a woman—as Lucy’s indignation and as Vashti’s “scimitar”-like performance show—is unencumbering and like herself, as demonstrated by Lily Bart’s artistic intelligence, her instinct in “selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself.”9
Two writers, Brontë in 1862 and Wharton in 1905, thus described a woman’s artistic sensibility, telling us what we might expect from a woman’s art. In both cases a woman’s art is a blend of the “real” (the real “self”) with the representation (the “picture”). The representation offers the exposure, the display, the revelation of the woman in “real life.” As Bronte writes, true to her time, but thrilled by the “immorality” to which she is witness:
It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.
It was a spectacle, low, horrible, immoral.10
From the modern perspective, Gilbert and Gubar offer us several observations in their discussion of Bronte’s Villette which are pertinent here: “Unlike the false artists who abound in Villette, Vashti uses her art not to manipulate others, but to represent herself. Her art, in other words, is confessional, unfinished—not a product, but an act; not an object meant to contain or coerce, but a personal utterance. . . . By transcending the distinctions between private and public, between person and artist, between artist and art, Vashti calls into question, therefore, the closed forms of male culture.”11 Calling into question “the closed forms of male culture” is not, however, central to the act we are examining. Vashti’s concern, as presented by Brontë, is with her own act, not in reference to, or in reaction against, male culture. The act, the performance and presentation of the actress Vashti, is self-referring, which is where its effect lies, where its power for Lucy (and for Brontë) resides. It is another character, Dr. John, who assesses Vashti’s act in terms of the male culture. Simple or reflexive response is initial (as Lucy’s is, and as Brontë presents it); comparison may follow and may even be partial explanation for what is recognized as new but, more importantly, as “ours.” In opening out the closed forms of male culture in which we have been contained, women make connections. We do not escape in an aura of “transcendence”; we literally work with what we’ve got. A woman’s art is “not a product, but an act” This act itself, “unfinished, confessional,” can be equated with a “personal utterance.” Acting is speaking and speaking is acting. Together the two offer the performance of a woman’s text. To act, to speak, the woman must first find a voice. To find a voice she must, indeed, define her own body in space, lay claim to her own boundaries and her own arena of performance.
WHILE BRONTË and Wharton were publishing their novels in England (1853) and in the United States (1905), what was happening in the lives of some other people in the Western world?
Alice James (Henry and William’s sister), age nineteen, is sitting in her father’s library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The year is 1868, the year when she will have her first “breakdown.” She describes her life at that time: “As I used to sit immovable reading in the library with waves of violent inclination suddenly invading my muscles taking some one of their myriad forms such as throwing myself out of the window, or knocking off the head of the benignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table, it used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse and strait-jacket imposed upon me, too.”12 Alice’s description is from a diary entry written two and half years before her death in 1892.
In Paris, in 1885-86, the thirty-year-old Sigmund Freud, five years after receiving his M.D. degree, is studying with Charcot, the famous clinician and teacher. Photographs of Charcot’s female patients at the Salpêtrière were published in 1876-78 in two volumes with the artistically scientific title Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Service de M Charcot).13
Stephen Heath describes Charcot’s work:
In Charcot’s clinical teaching practice at the Salpêtrière, the Tuesday lessons attended by Freud, attention was paid to the realisation of a photographic record of the cases presented, a veritable iconography of hysteria: “we saw,” write the compilers of the record, “from M Charcot’s example how considerable were the benefits to be had from representations of this kind.”
Charcot’s cases included men and children, [but] the photographs are of women, plates interspersed within the text of the clinical details; often a portrait of the particular woman as she is at rest, the “normal physiognomy,” much like any other late nineteenth century portrait photograph, then the stages of the “attack” so dear to Charcot in his endeavor to bring hysteria into the order of medicine, to define a clinical picture, the “tableau clinique”: very occasionally . . . nurses intrude, by the side of the patient, fixing the camera, determinedly posing; now and then an effect of “beauty,” a young girl composed on her bed . . . something of Millais’ Ophelia, “terminal stage of the attack,” no trace of disturbance, in her “the delirium sometimes takes on a religious character”—the aura of hysteria, part of the picture. The interest for Charcot, and for the compilers, is in the stages, the step by step unfolding of the attack. Where others had seen only disorder, merely the random, Charcot saw order, a repeated pattern which the photographs must serve to give: hence the series of plates for a single patient, an attempt at duration, a movement in time ... a sixteen year old girl in the throes of the period of delirium: the various “passionate attitudes” are shown in sequence and named—attitudes of “threat,” “appeal,” “amorous supplication,” “eroticism,” “ecstasy,” “hallucinations of hearing.” The effect is of a kind of cinema: the spacing of gestures in a succession of images, the holding of those same gestures to the clarity of a narrative meaning: one can imagine the Salpêtrière Iconographie as a catalogue of gestural signs for the use of performers in silent films—and such an imagination would not be too far from the spectacle of the lessons, which all the contemporary pictures and prints pick up: the excited audience, the master, the young woman in a series of pathetic scenes according to script (there is a certain controversy over the demonstrations and the repetitions of the stages of the attack: hypnotized by the master’s zealous assistants, with pressure applied to their “hysterogenic zones,” was there any other part for these woman?).14
“What is missing in the photographs,” Heath goes on to observe, “is the voice, an absence signalled, as it were, in the naming of the ‘hallucinations of hearing’ plate. . . . The text restores a little of the voice, almost nothing: when a patient cries ‘Mummy!’, Charcot comments, ‘You see how hysterics shout. Much ado about nothing. Epilepsy which is much more serious is much quieter.’”15
Charcot’s female patients are caught in these photographic frames; their gestures are fixed in them. By presenting these fixed gestures in succession Charcot attempts to give a kind of “narrative meaning” to each case in the series and an overall meaning to the species of patient called the “hysteric,” who is, by visual definition at least, a woman. As Heath points out, Charcot had men and children as patients, as well as women, but the photographic presentation was restricted to women. If a voice is allowed to the woman it is edited and minimal—the “Mummy!” for example. The woman’s voice is mentioned in the text accompanying the photographs as an occasion for Charcot to comment on the noise of the hysteric, her “shouting,” which is meaningless (only the succession of photographs is to carry meaning). The really “serious” case, an epileptic, for instance, is much “quieter.” But even here the woman is edited out. She is not an epileptic in Charcot’s words; she is lost in the designation of her disease—“epilepsy.” Charcot seems to suggest that the silent presentation, the series of photographs, the artificial “life” given by a succession of tableaux vivants, typical postures and poses, would allow a practitioner to recognize an afflicted woman far better than her own version of her condition, or any verbalization on her part at all.
Apparently many women tried to conform to such expectations of immobility before they were ever diagnosed as “hysterical.” Recall Alice James’s feeling that she had not only the “duties of doctor and nurse” imposed upon her if she was to keep herself “immovable,” but that of a “strait-jacket” as well. She continues in the same diary entry: “Conceive of never being without the sense that if you let yourself go for a moment your mechanism will fall into pie and that at some given moment you must abandon it all, let the dykes break and the flood sweep in, acknowledging yourself abjectly impotent before the immutable laws. When all one’s moral and natural stock in trade is a temperament forbidding the abandonment of an inch or the relaxation of a muscle, ‘tis a never-ending fight.”16 Although Alice was diagnosed and treated for her nervous illness, she ultimately chose to make an art of invalidism, achieving her early death at the age of forty-three.
“WHAT is MISSING in the photographs” Stephen Heath writes in 1978, “is the voice.”
“What is wanted,” says Freud, writing for publication in 1905, “is ... an elucidation of the commonest cases [of hysteria] and of their most frequent and typical symptoms.” To this end, he presents “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.”17 “Dora” (the fictitious name for the young woman whose case Freud recounts) was a more independent young woman than Alice James. Freud first saw Dora when she was sixteen. Her most persistent symptom was tussis nervosa,a nervous cough; his statement of her attitude toward treatment two years later was this:
When, at the age of eighteen, she came to me for treatment, she was again coughing in a characteristic manner. . . . The most troublesome symptom during the first half of an attack of this kind, at all events in the last few years, used to be a complete loss of voice. The diagnosis that this was once more a nervous complaint had been established long since; but the various methods of treatment which are usual, including hydrotherapy and the local application of electricity, had produced no result. . . . Moreover, she had always been against calling in medical advice, though she had no personal objection to her family doctor. Every proposal to consult a new physician aroused her resistance, and it was only her father’s authority which induced her to come to me at all.18
Freud’s general description of the girl is as follows:
Dora was by that time in the first bloom of youth—a girl of intelligent and engaging looks. But she was a source of heavy trials for her parents. Low spirits and an alteration in her character had now become the main features of her illness. She was clearly satisfied neither with herself nor with her family; her attitude towards her father was unfriendly, and she was on very bad terms with her mother, who was bent upon drawing her into taking a share in the work of the house. She tried to avoid social intercourse, and employed herself—so far as she was allowed to by the fatigue and lack of concentration of which she complained—with attending lectures for women and with carrying on more or less serious studies. One day her parents were thrown into a state of great alarm by finding upon the girl’s writing-desk, or inside it, a letter in which she took leave of them because, as she said, she could not longer endure her life. Her father, indeed, being a man of some perspicacity, guessed that the girl had no serious suicidal intentions. But he was none the less very much shaken; and when one day, after a slight passage of words between him and his daughter, she had a first attack of loss of consciousness—an event which was subsequently covered by an amnesia—it was determined, in spite of her reluctance, that she should come to me for treatment.19
Alice James’s treatment also began in her middle teens; she too had thought of suicide. It was her father who determined, but more actively than Dora’s father did, Alice’s attitude toward an attempt on her life. In a letter to his youngest son, Robertson, the elder Henry James describes an interchange. “One day a long time ago,” he writes,
[she] asked me whether I thought that suicide, to which at times she felt very strongly tempted, was a sin. I told her that I thought it was not a sin except where it was wanton. ... I told her that so far as I was concerned she had my full permission to end her life whenever she pleased; only I hoped that if ever she felt like doing that sort of justice to her circumstances, she would do it in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends. She then remarked that she was very thankful to me, but she felt that now she could perceive it to be her right to dispose of her own body when life had become intolerable, she could never do it. . . . 20
One could draw many more parallels between the two young women; indeed, this scenario for the hysterical young woman of the Victorian age was acted out in upper-middle-class houses throughout the United States and Western Europe. Dora and Alice James are two typical “cases.” Both found that, as Alice put it, if they were to keep themselves “immovable,” to persist in their “moral and natural stock in trade,” they must assume the “duties of doctor, nurse and strait-jacket” to keep to the normal course of events in their lives. Lest they forget that, as women, they are (like children) to be “seen and not heard,” M. Charcot’s Iconographie photographique, his tableaux cliniques, can be seen figuratively, as well as literally in the case of his patients at the Salpêtrière, to “put them in their place.” Their place is that of image, a series of staged gestures and poses to which their own unwilling bodies submit them (as Alice writes): “So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the other, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing.”21 Meanwhile Charcot’s colleagues, nurses, and assistants—with students such as Freud looking on—assist the patients in their “routine,” help put them through their paces to furnish material for his tableaux cliniques, his icono-graphical representations of hysterical women.
It is chilling to contemplate the use of women to represent themselves, but not as themselves, in a tableau clinique that is not far removed, in its implications, from the tableaux vivants with which people amused themselves at social gatherings. In both cases the female figure represents something preconceived, something other than herself. She represents something already known. Her images are merely a replication of that which is already “proved.” She serves to confirm the status quo, to give an image to others’ knowledge, others’ desires.
No wonder a young Victorian woman who could salvage a selfhood so unendingly beleaguered felt she had to play doctor, nurse, and straitjacket to herself. Such was the iconography of her culture. But the battle with herself, the battle to remain silent and immovable, to mimic in life the images presented to her, was a “never-ending fight” that she sometimes lost. It is not surprising that women’s literature of this time should “enact a drama of enclosure and escape”;22 nor that Freud’s work in this time should leave a legacy in which even the iconoclastic French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan portrays “woman” as the place where men (as little boys) first see only a lack (of the penis), and later (as men) see a place on which to “hang” their imaginings: women become the place of metaphor for men. Women are reduced to images, to symbols—indeed, to icons.23
Male proprietorship of the gaze—of seeing and of determining what is to be seen and in what way—was already being challenged in the nineteenth century. Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth (1905), Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) all refute male proprietorship of the gaze, as did Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) several decades earlier. In her discussion of Villette in the feminist classic Sexual Politics, Kate Millett writes: “Lucy watches women . . .” (the emphasis is my own). She then describes the first of the women Lucy watches—Ginevra Fanshaw.24 The next paragraph begins, “The other women Lucy watches . . .” (and she enumerates them—Madame Beck and Mrs. Bretton, and Paulina Mary). Then Millett observes, “Lucyhas watched men look at women, has studied the image of woman in her culture.” Millett goes on to say, “There is probably nothing so subversive in the book as that afternoon in the Brussels museum when she scrutinizes the two faces of women whom the male has fashioned, one for his entertainment, one for her instruction: Rubens’ Cleopatra and the Academician’s four pictures of the virtuous female.”25 Further, Millett writes:
The disparity in the contradiction of images represented by the two pictures explains the techniques of Villette better than any other moment in the novel. It is a division in the culture which Brontë is retorting to by splitting her people in half and dividing Lucy’s own responses into a fluctuating negative and positive. The other dichotomy is between her newness, her revolutionary spirit, and the residue of the old ways which infects her soul. This inner conflict is complemented by an exterior one between her ambitions and desires and the near impossibility of their fulfillment.26
With these remarks Millett returns us to the argument that Gilbert and Gubar pursue, to that perception of the disease and anxiety felt by the woman and the woman artist in the nineteenth century, the woman “broken in two / By sheer definition.”
I point again, however, to the pairing of images in Villette that I have already emphasized: not the two images of woman presented to her by man, but the implicit image of a woman that Brontë emphasizes by Lucy’s rejection of Rubens’s Cleopatra, set alongside the image of a woman presented by a woman in Vashti’s performance. Vashti’s image, Lucy realizes, is not an “image” at all, but the woman herself. Here we have not a woman broken in two, not a woman split in half, but a woman looking at another woman and seeing “a great and new planet” whose “rising” she awaited, “a study of such nature as had not encountered [her] eyes yet.”27 A century later Joanna Russ writes, “it came to me that we had been watching this woman perform for half an hour and had given not one thought to what might be happening around us or to us or behind us.”28
It is plain, then, that to “step out of the picture” of the masculine conception, our first step is simply to look at one another and see, to watch one another, as Millett makes clear Lucy is doing in Villette.Hard on the heels of that first step is the second, which is to be conscious of what we are doing and what that doing implies. In seeing with our own eyes, we have begun to act, and in such action we will perceive our differences from other women as well as our likenesses. In stepping out of the picture, the images into which we had been fixed, we find ourselves “in action.” In that action we begin to find our voices as well.
“DORA” LOSES HER VOICE; Alice James remains immovable; Charcot’s patients are presented: “‘the delirium sometimes takes on a religious character’ . . .—the aura of hysteria, part of the picture.” Three centuries earlier, the sculptor Bernini, in his Ecstasy of St. Teresa, fixed St. Teresa forever in his shaping of her “ecstasy.” Her words were disallowed, her own attempt to fix her own experience of ecstasy disallowed—shoved off the page—in favor of her shape in space, molded by the male eye into sculpture, that purest form of fixing in space for the gaze of the eye.29
“Riding high above the complex,” Robert M. Adams reminds us, “is a scroll bearing an amazingly audacious motto spoken to Teresa in one of her visions by the Lord Himself: ’Nisi coelum creassem ob te solam crearem’ (‘If I hadn’t already created Heaven, I would create it for you alone.’) Very few women can have received so courtly a compliment from so high an authority; it is a compliment that Bernini in his chapel—which catches in a single ecstatic instant death, life, love, violence, and surrender to make of them a world—does not hesitate to repeat.”30 Bernini used “Teresa’s own poems and autobiography,” but these “poems and autobiography” are appropriated into Bernini’s scheme of representation in marble, the better to catch the life. Even if the words engraved on the scroll are those reported by St. Teresa herself—indeed, it is her audacity thus to report them—they were spoken by the Lord Himself. It is His voice cast into stone, she and Adams tell us, not Teresa’s—this “amazingly audacious motto”—the whole given to us by Bernini. St. Teresa is edited out in the process, just as Charcot edited the voices of his hysterical patients, the image to speak for the woman, or rather to remind us that the woman does not speak for herself except in her silence. She, Teresa, and the Alices and Doras who came after her are silent, contained, fixed, created by men and displaying the jouissance, the joy in play that the male eye feels when it looks upon the image. The display of women in joy becomes the occasion for his jouissance, and he calls it theirs, calls his, hers: the Ecstasy of St. Teresa.
But what if the image began to move, the picture began to speak? What if Alice James had begun to move, following one of her “violent inclinations,” and had indeed knocked off “the head of the benignant pater”? What if Dora had chosen to speak rather than to “lose” her voice? What if the scroll “riding high above” were ripped off its metaphorical hinges and St. Teresa’s marble lips, so ecstatically parted, began to move? What “mighty revelation,” to quote Charlotte Brontë, might we expect? What “spectacle”? I venture that the spectacle was then and is now merely the ordinary, the spectacle of the “common woman,” as the poet Judy Grahn calls her.31
IN AN ESSAY entitled “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) Freud points us to a kind of explanation for the phenomenon that “specularizes” the “common woman” and that made her movement in her own space so distracting and “unnatural” until this century: “The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is . . . undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.”32
The “uncanny,” for Freud, is “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. How this is possible,” he writes, “in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall show in what follows.”33 What follows, as one might expect, is Freud’s attribution of the essential fears of the Oedipal situation, the fear of castration for little boys in particular, as the constituting factors of that “common core . . . which allows us to distinguish as uncanny certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.” Freud uses a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Sand-Man,” to illustrate what he considers to be the underlying basis for the aesthetic effect of the story. As Freud points out, the story contains the original of Olympia, the doll that appears in the first act of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffmann. “But I cannot think,” he writes,
—and I hope most readers of the story will agree with me—that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story. Nor is this atmosphere heightened by the fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch of satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man’s idealization of his mistress. The main theme of the story is, on the contrary, something different, something which gives it its name, and which is always re-introduced at critical moments: it is the theme of the “Sand-Man” who tears out children’s eyes.34
Having one’s eyes torn out, for the male child at least, according to Freud, is tantamount to and symbolic of castration by the father. The maker of the doll Olympia, Professor Spalanzani (who models the “perfect” young woman, the protagonist Nathanael’s “idealized mistress”) and the itinerant optician, Coppola, who furnishes the doll with eyes (figuratively the “eyes” of the beholder, Nathanael) both function as “father figures.” Thus Freud felt himself enabled to assign the conflict of the Oedipal situation acted out in this story of high romanticism the central place in “our” response to it. He sees the doll Olympia as a mere prop pointing up the conflict that finally drives the young man mad. The doll, on the other hand, is literally torn apart by the two “fathers”—Coppola and her putative father, Spalanzani, who furnished her mechanism, her “clock-work”:
Nathanael rushed in, impelled by some nameless dread. The Professor was grasping a female figure by the shoulders, the Italian Coppola held her by the feet; and they were pulling and dragging each other backwards and forwards, fighting furiously to get possession of her.
Nathanael recoiled with horror on recognizing that the figure was Olimpia [sic]. Boiling with rage, he was about to tear his beloved from the grasp of the madmen, when Coppola by an extraordinary exertion of strength twisted the figure out of the Professor’s hand and gave him such a terrible blow with her, that Spalanzani reeled backwards and fell over the table among the phials and retorts. . . . But Coppola threw the figure across his shoulder, and, laughing shrilly and horribly, ran hastily down the stairs, the figure’s ugly feet hanging down and banging and rattling like wood against the steps.
Nathanael was stupefied [so am I, but I’m not surprised; recall Alice James’s “So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet”]—he had seen only too distinctly that in Olimpia’s [sic] pallid waxed face there were no eyes, merely black holes in their stead; she was an inanimate puppet. Spalanzani was rolling on the floor; the pieces of glass had cut his head and breast and arm; the blood was escaping from him in streams. But he gathered his strength together by an effort.
“After him—after him! What do you stand staring there for? Coppelius—Coppelius—he’s stolen my best automaton—at which I’ve worked for twenty years—my life work—the clockwork—speech—movement—mine—your eyes—stolen your eyes—damn him—curse him—after him—fetch me back Olimpia—there are the eyes.” And now Nathanael saw a pair of bloody eyes lying on the floor staring at him; Spalanzani seized them with his uninjured hand and threw them at him, so that they hit his breast.
Then madness dug her burning talons into Nathanael and swept down into his heart, rending his mind and thoughts to shreds.35
Olympia is a doll made up of clockwork, seen and having her “seeing” only in the eyes of the beholder, the male romantic, the male “lover.” She is possessed by her “creators”—her fathers—the optician (the “Sand-Man”) and the professor, who “worked” on her for twenty years, “her speech—her movement—all” his. Movement, speech, minimal as they are, are given to her; they are her repertoire. But her eyes are never her own. They are the locus as well as the objects of dispute and conflict for the men involved in her “life.” The lack of eyes emphasizes Olympia’s lack of life.
Freud may dismiss her “place” in the story as the focal point, following, as always, the story of his own concerns, the concerns of men. But for a woman reading, the figure of the doll Olympia is central; she (“it”—but one cannot really call her “it” because her constraints, her confirmation and limitations are so recognizable that even for a woman reading now, almost two centuries later, too much is familiar), she is too familiar. One sees too much of oneself in “the doll” to dismiss the reality of the presentation.
Freud, however, does just this. In the early portion of his discussion he writes of an earlier investigation of the subject:
When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a suitable example to start on. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate”; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata. To these he adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of manifestations of insanity, because these incite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity.36
I recall my own experiences at “formal” dances in the culture of American high schools of the mid- and late 1950s. The description of Olympia’s first appearance in society is not very different from that of the middle- or upper-middle-class American female adolescent in a similar situation:
Olimpia [sic] was richly and tastefully dressed. One could not but admire her figure and the regular beauty of her features [“the prettiest girl in class”; “The Most Beautiful” heralded in the school yearbook]. Yet the striking inward curve of her back, as well as the wasplike smallness of her waist, appeared to be the result of too-tight lacing [Marilyn Monroe; the “merry widow” bra], and there was something stiff and measured in her gait and bearing that made an unfavorable impression upon many [the stiff tulle, the scratching lace, the “stiletto” heels]. It was ascribed to the constraint imposed upon her by the company [she’s “stuck-up; she’s unsure of herself; it’s her first dance”].37
I will not belabor the persona, now or then, but the presentation is unmistakable. A woman recognizes herself, or rather, the image of herself used—even by herself—and presented publicly as a doll, an automaton, and presented as such with some sardonic smirking by Hoffmann himself (as Freud points out), readying his readers for the more pertinent conflicts and personae to take center stage.
I am “stuck,” willfully, with Freud’s “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.” With Freud’s inclusion of the “uncanny” effect of epileptic fits and “manifestations of insanity,” we return to Charcot’s tableaux cliniques as well as to Edith Wharton’s (and society’s) tableaux vivants and to Alice James’s and Dora’s attempts to play the doll, to keep to the “uncanny” experience of attempting to demonstrate, to themselves and others, that an “apparently animate being” is “really alive” (or vice versa). As Alice pointed out, proving you’re alive by pretending to be animate, albeit constrained, is futile: “Conceive of never being without the sense that if you let yourself go for a moment your mechanism will fall into pie and that at some given moment you must abandon it all” (my emphasis). This is the woman pretending to be the doll—the “Olympia complex,” more relevant for the woman and the girl child than is the “Oedipal complex.” And the “immutable laws” are those of the fathers: the providers of “eyes,” the makers of, the tinkerers with, the mechanism.
In working through the “Olympia complex” the doll begins to move, the woman begins to speak. The effect, even to herself, may at first be “uncanny,” that combination of the unexpected and the unbridled in the atmosphere of the contained familiar. Frightening it may be at first, but after one has seen it, by watching other women, the “horror” of it, the spectacle itself, becomes one of freedom of movement. One feels comfort in the familiar, the comfort of moving in one’s own element. For, after all, one is moving one’s own limbs, one’s own hands and lips and eyes and mouth, one’s own body in a familiar and comfortable space. One is seeing oneself with one’s own eyes—no longer the “pallid waxed face” in which “there [are] no eyes.” One might say, in such a situation, that one is “all eyes.”
“Lucy watches women . . . Lucy watches . . . other women.” This is Lucy Snowe as Brontë presents her to us in 1853, as Millett points out for us. In 1975 Joanna Russ can write, “She stepped out against the white wall, a woman-shaped hole, a black cardboard cut-out . . . see? . . . come up close and you’ll see . . . her eyes . . . most unnatural.”38 The lesson is simple: to regain our own voices, to gain our voices, we use our eyes. We see. We see one another. The gesture of the text, then, occurs in the context of “watching other women”; to signal our desire to speak and be heard, we must move, we must make the gesture. To hear we must attend to that gesture; and to attend to that gesture we must first see. To see, along with Lucy Snowe, we must observe; we must watch one another. Like Russ’s protagonist(s) in The Female Man, we must be able to find ourselves watching the performance of another woman so intently that we give “not one thought to what might be happening around us or to us or behind us.” We must be, in fact as well as in aspiration, “our own audience.”
If the effect is “uncanny,” we might contemplate again what that word means. The literal translation of the German word unheimlich is “unhomely,” “unhome-like”—something unfamiliar, something one is not used to experiencing in ordinary circumstances. The etymology, both German and English, is intriguing: an exploration of both words—uncanny, unheimlich—leads us back to familiar and not unexpected surroundings, both that which is so close, so familiar that we dare not contemplate it, and that which is “otherworldly,” including the religious, the spiritual, the mystical. As Freud points out in his tracing of the German etymology and usage of the word heimlich, it “is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.”39 In English, too, this is the case, and with regard to the “Olympia complex” the discovery is the same.
For our purposes, we can see as “uncanny” the notion of the allegedly unusual, the allegedly unexpected, the doll “coming to life,” the woman “coming to life” and expressing that life, freeing herself from mechanisms and models not her own, from restraints which, however familiar and habitual, have always felt strange to her. “Uncanny” is the restrained woman finally following her “violent inclinations,” which after all are only ordinary movements previously restrained by habit and custom.
On the other hand, the truly uncanny thing is that women were ever stilled, “killed” into life, “into a ‘perfect’ image” of themselves, to start with (as well as, or rather than, into “art”).40 In letting loose the spectacle of ourselves, as we see it with our own eyes—no matter how “low,” “horrible,” or even “immoral” we may for a moment feel it to be—we discover that this “spectacle” we are making of ourselves is, actually, that which is merely familiar to us: our lives, our bodies, the informal acts of our living—the ordinary, the commonplace, the homely. The “mighty revelation” is that we are looking at ourselves and it doesn’t feel bad. It is not “immoral”; it is, finally, not even “uncanny.” What is uncanny is that it took us so long to look at one another without the mediation of the male eye. The uncanny thing is the strength of will that it took to hold the pose for so long.
Having retrieved “our own eyes” in the nineteenth century, we began using them, and the woman’s text began to emerge. In the twentieth century we have begun to make a spectacle of the commonplace, the ordinariness of the “common woman.” The spectacular itself—uncanny phenomenon—becomes the commonplace, and the ordinary, more and more spectacular. This spectacular framing of our lives can be seen in the presentation of our lives, in the [auto]-biography that is our present and growing story. We include our “I’s” in order to exclude them, so that we may speak and be heard, so that we may “tell the truth” and still be heard.