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COMITETUL DE REDACŢIE Elena PETRE: Redactor-şef
MEMBRI
Fabienne SOLDINI Bledar TOSKA Cristina TRINCHERO Angelica VÂLCU (Aix-en-Provence) (Vlora) (Torino) (Galaţi) Victor OLARU Emilia PARPALĂ-AFANA Anda RĂDULESCU
SECRETAR DE REDACŢIE Laurenţiu BĂLĂ
ISSN: 1841-8074
The Traditional Approach on Metaphors and Metonymies Compared to the Cognitive View
Cristina ANDREI
University of Craiova, Department of Applied Foreign Languages
ABSTRACT
The present paper deals with two important aspects of linguistics (metaphors and metonymies) based on traditional and cognitive approaches, better said, on the differences between them. In traditional linguistics, metaphor is perceived as a property of words whereas in cognitive linguistics it represents a fundamental part of human language. Metaphors can be easily used in everyday communication in order to express abstract concepts such as: time, space, etc.
KEYWORDS: metaphor, metonymy, traditional linguistics
For many persons, metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is compared to another by saying that one is the other. The definition given to metaphor by Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English language Ed. 1997 presents this concept as “the application of a word or phrase to an object or concept it does not literally denote, suggesting comparison to that object or concept”. The traditional concept of metaphor can be briefly characterized by pointing out some of its commonly accepted features: metaphor is a property of words, a linguistic phenomenon; it is used for artistic and rhetorical purposes; it is based on a resemblance between the two entities that are compared and identified.
At the same time, the traditional approach sees metaphor as a conscious and deliberate use of words which needs a special talent to be able to use it. It was also considered that metaphor is not an inevitable part of everyday human communication, since this can be done very well without using any metaphors.
Kovecses (2002: 68) presents some typical features of the traditional view of metaphor for the expression “the roses on her cheeks”.
(1) Metaphor is decorative and fancy speech. We use the word roses to talk about somebody’s cheeks because we wish to create some special effect in the listener or reader (such as creating a pleasing image). We do not use the word roses as part of the process of conceptualizing and understanding one thing in terms of another.
(2) Metaphor is a linguistic, and not a conceptual, phenomenon. Whatever the intended effect or purpose is, in metaphor we simply use one word or expression
instead of another word or expression, rather than one conceptual domain to comprehend another.
(3) The basis for using the word roses to talk about somebody’s cheeks is the similarity between the color of some roses (pink or red) and that of the color of a person’s cheeks (also pink or some light red). This similarity makes it possible for speakers to use the word rose instead of, say, the phrase the pink skin on her cheeks for some special effect. The similarity between some roses and some kinds of skin exists in reality before anyone uses roses to talk about somebody’s cheeks.
(4) It is this preexisting kind of similarity between two things that constrains the possible metaphors speakers can employ for skins of some color. Given the color of this kind of skin on the cheeks, the rose is a good choice for a metaphor in a way in which many other things would not be; thus, for example, we could not talk metaphorically appropriately about the pinkish color on a person’s cheeks by using the word sky as in “the sky on her cheeks”. The sky as we normally think of it (we take it to be blue) simply bears no resemblance to healthy pinkish skin on the cheeks. It is in this sense that in the traditional view certain preexisting similarities can determine or limit which linguistic expressions, rather than others, can be used to describe the world.1
In 1980, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson developed a new view of metaphor that challenged all the aspects of the traditional theory in a coherent and systematic way. This view is known as “the cognitive linguistic view of metaphor”.
In cognitive linguistics, metaphors are seen as fundamental to human language and conceptualizing. They are in fact a major and indispensable part of our ordinary, conventional way of conceptualizing the world, and our behavior reflects in fact our metaphorical understanding of experience.
In the classical theory, metaphor was defined as a poetic or novel linguistic expression where one or more words are used outside their normal conventional meaning to express a similar concept.
The contemporary theory of metaphor shows that the place of metaphor is in thought, in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another.
We can use metaphors in our everyday speech to express abstract concepts such as time, space, purpose, etc. In cognitive linguistics, according to Lakoff, the study of literary metaphor is in fact an extension of the study of everyday metaphor which is characterized by many cross-domain mappings and is made use of in novel metaphor.
In fact, the term “metaphorical expression” is considered a linguistic expression, a word, a sentence or a phrase that represents the surface realization of a cross-domain mapping. In old theories the term “metaphor” was used instead of the “metaphorical expression”.
According to Saeed, “metaphor has traditionally been viewed as the most important form of figurative language use, and is usually seen as reaching its most sophisticated forms in literary or poetic language.”2 Before opening the discussion about metaphors, the same author offers two examples, one of a typical metaphor in sports and the other of an innovative metaphor from a newspaper article:
Cristina Andrei: The Traditional Approach on Metaphors and Metonymies Compared to…
1. Ireland were torn to shreds as France recorded an almost facile victory, scoring seven tries to one.
2. When scientists have asked giant computers to make forecasts, they have pointed the digital finger at changes in ocean currents of the North Atlantic with remarkable regularity.3
In the first example the defeat is presented like destruction and not just like a normal one but a physical one. The second example personifies computers; they are presented like human beings who are able to predict and point fingers.
Considering the traditional approaches on metaphor, two are of great importance: the classical one and the Romantic view. The classical one can be traced back to Aristotle’s times. It sees metaphor as a means of decorative addition to simple language in order to create various effects:
This view portrays metaphor as something outside normal language and which requires special forms of interpretation from listeners or readers. A version of this approach is often adopted in the literal language theory. […] In this view metaphor is often seen as a departure from literal language, detected as anomalous by the hearer, who then has to employ some strategies to construct the speaker’s intended meaning.4
The Romantic view on metaphor is traced back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when romanticism placed a mark on people’s imagination.
In this view, metaphor is integral to language and thought as a way of experiencing the world. In this view metaphor is evidence of the role of the imagination in conceptualizing and reasoning and it follows that all language is metaphorical. In particular, there is no distinction between literal and figurative language.5
Thus, we can easily consider that the cognitive approach is very similar to the Romantic view on metaphor. The only distinction is that cognitivists do not agree with the idea that all language is metaphorical. Even if metaphors are very important in the way we visualize things and express ourselves, cognitivists agree with the idea that not all concepts are metaphorical. For example, Lakoff and Turner believe that “Metaphors allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another. To serve this function, there must be some grounding, some concepts that are not completely understood via metaphor to serve as source domains”.6
We can add that the very role of metaphors in categorizing our world and their vital importance as underlying semantic processes in everyday language was surprisingly neglected until the appearance of Cognitive Linguistics. Basically, a metaphor (from Greek metaforein which is to transfer) is viewed as an experientially-based mapping from an ICM (Idealized Cognitive Model) in one domain onto an ICM of another domain.
Metaphors are used in all domains, be it sports commentaries, newspaper articles, literary forms, etc. They can be associated to similes, with the difference
that whenever we use metaphors, we actually transfer properties from one concept to another. The starting point is often called the target while the comparison concept is referred to as the source domain:
[…] metaphoric mapping involves a source domain and a target domain […]. The mapping is typically partial. It maps the structure in the source domain onto a corresponding structure in the target domain.7
The cognitive mapping is always a partial transposition of categories from a more concrete domain onto a less concrete one in order to categorize facts of experience in terms of features of already familiar experience. Then, the mapping process will necessarily hide aspects of the ground that are inconsistent with the current metaphor.
When talking about metonymy, we identify the referent by something associated with it. Examples may also be provided from various domains: The Oval Office, the top floor, etc.
Metonymy as a cognitive process also finds its roots in the Greek and Roman times as well as in the works of medieval scholars. Aristotle subsumed metonymy and synecdoche under metaphor while the more recently Groupe de Liege subsumed metaphor and metonymy under synecdoche. Cognitive linguists like Koch, Blank or Clarke base their cognitive approaches to metonymy on the rhetorical tradition.
Nowadays, linguists and psycholinguists see metonymy as a cognitive phenomenon underlying our everyday thinking and believe that the use of metonymy in language is a reflection of its conceptual status. It is true that metonymy has received less attention than metaphor in cognitive linguistics.
Starting out with the Aristotelian poetic, there has been a whole and traditional general agreement on both the tight connection between metaphor and metonymy and, at the same time, the basic distinction between them. It is commonly said that while metonymies are based on a relationship of contiguity between the concept and the vehicle, elements of metaphor come from different conceptual fields. Thus, many theories have been stating this basic distinction by means of more or less the same terms, opposing contiguity (in the case of metonymy) to resemblance or similarity (in the case of metaphor). But from the cognitive treatment of the matter, we must point out that the notion of domains plays a crucial role in both conceptual processes:
…metaphoric mapping involves a source domain and a target domain from two different discrete domains, while a metonymic mapping occurs within a single conceptual domain which is structured by an ICM.8
The so-called line of ancestors should not be neglected when talking about the cognitive theory of metaphor. We should not forget the main contributions of Kant, Blumenberg or Weinrich who all discovered metaphors by different researches. Kant discovers metaphor while talking about human understanding,
Cristina Andrei: The Traditional Approach on Metaphors and Metonymies Compared to…
Blumenberg talks about metaphor while presenting the history of philosophical and scientific concepts, and Weinrich considers that the theory of metaphor results from the philosophical as well as linguistic observation of everyday language.
Kant did not use the term “metaphor” but spoke of “symbols”, and, instead of “metaphorical sensualisation” he used “symbolical sensualisation”.
Kant speaks of analogy, construed as the transfer of reflection on some object of intuition to a completely different concept, maybe one to which no intuition can ever correspond directly. This is the equivalent of Lakoff’s and Johnson’s cognitive- conceptual definition of metaphor, combined with a claim of necessity and an epistemological reason for the unidirectionality of metaphor: concepts to which no intuition corresponds directly are experientially grounded by means of analogical transfer.9
Thus, we should also take into consideration that Lakoff’s and Johnson’s
“conceptual metaphor” was first used as “analogy” by Kant, as “background metaphor” by Blumenberg, and as “image field” by Weinrich. The same
“metaphor expression” of cognitive linguistics was used as “symbol” by Kant and as “metaphor” by Blumenberg and Weinrich. The ICM or the cognitive model was also present in the works of Blumenberg and Weinrich. The latter also used the terms “image donor field” and “image recipient field” for the present correspondence “source domain” and “target domain”.
Thus, the works of Kant, Blumenberg and Weinrich are not just mere anticipations, but contributions that shouldn’t be ignored by a cognitive theory of metaphor.
NOTES
1 Zoltan Kovecses, Metaphor. A Practical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 68.
2 John Saeed, Semantics, Blackwell, 2000, p. 302.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibidem, p. 303.
5 John, Saeed, op.cit., p. 303.
6 George Lakoff, Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: a field guide in Poetic Metaphor, Chicago University Press, 1989, p. 135.
7 George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago University Press, 1987, p. 288.
8 Ibidem.
9 Olaf Jakel, “Some Forgotten Contributions”, paper presented at The Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam, July 1997, published in Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, John Benjamin Publishing Company, 1999.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jakel, Olaf (1999), “Some Forgotten Contributions”, paper presented at The Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam, July 1997,
published in Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, John Benjamin Publishing Company.
Kovecses, Zoltan (2002), Metaphor. A Practical Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, George (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lakoff, George; Turner, Mark (1989), More than Cool Reason: a field guide in Poetic Metaphor, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Saeed, John (2000), Semantics, Blackwell.
Francofonie, francofilie, francofobie…
Laurenţiu BĂLĂ Universitatea din Craiova, Departamentul de Limbi Străine Aplicate
RÉSUMÉ : Francophonie, francophilie, francophobie…
L’auteur passe en revue quelques arguments qui devraient, à son avis, diminuer l’enthousiasme francophone des Roumains (tel qu’il en est...) et plaide pour une approche plus modérée de cette question.
Son plaidoyer est fondé sur quelques données officielles qui prouvent que le nombre des adeptes de cette langue est en baisse continue depuis une bonne dizaine d’années et que l’intérêt de la société envers le français se diminue sans cesse.
Au fond, balbutier quelques mots en français (pour la plupart de la population, l’examen de bac représente le suprême emploi de cette langue !) est beaucoup trop peu pour que les habitants d’un pays puissent être considérés... francophones !
En conclusion, les Roumains ne sont pas du tout francophobes, ils sont aussi bien francophiles, que germanophiles ou américanophiles, et ils sont, malheureusement, assez loin de pouvoir être considérés de vrais...
francophones !
MOTS-CLÉS : francophonie, langue française, Roumanie, francophilie
„Toutefois, nous n’englobons pas tous les Belges dans la « francophonie », bien que l’avenir des Flamingants soit vraisemblablement d’être un jour des Franquillons.”1
Onésime Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies, 1886
Ce este francofonia? Sau poate pentru a parafraza, într-un fel, şugubăţul stil mioritic abordat de o bună parte a presei româneşti înainte şi după Sommet-ul de la Bucureşti – a se vedea titluri de genul „Dăm cu francofonia în gard” (Gardianul, 7.06.2006), „Francofonia blochează România” (Jurnalul naţional, 24.09.2006),
„Băsescu a aflat că francofonia nu-i ca anglofonia” (Adevărul, 29.09.2006) etc. – ar trebui să ne întrebăm: „Ce este francofonia pentru România?”
Nu numai pentru România, ci şi pentru celelalte ţări membre ale OIF (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie), Francofonia (cu majusculă!) reprezintă o entitate care cuprinde în momentul de faţă 63 de state şi guverne membre, dintre care 10 state au statut de observator. Populaţia totală a membrilor
OIF este de 710 milioane. Franceza este limba oficială în 29 de state membre, fie singura, în 12 ţări, fie împreună cu alte limbi ca engleza, araba, spaniola sau portugheza, în 17 ţări. În clasamentul ţărilor cu cei mai mulţi francofoni se află Franţa, Algeria, Canada, Maroc, Belgia, Coasta de Fildeş, Tunisia, Camerun, Republica Democrată Congo şi Elveţia. În toată lumea există 175 de milioane de francofoni. Franceza este una dintre singurele două limbi vorbite pe toate continentele, cealaltă fiind, evident, engleza...
Dacă e să ne referim numai la cazul României, influenţa franceză – un fel de francofonie avant la lettre –, a început prin anul 1750; astfel încât, treptat, Franţa a devenit pentru români – ca, de altfel, şi pentru locuitorii altor ţări – aproape un mit de cultură, de libertate şi de democraţie.
Şi astăzi, după aproape trei secole, limba franceză mai are încă, în România, statutul unei limbi privilegiate, fiind uneori supranumită langue de coeur (francofonii ştiu ce înseamnă, francofilii bănuiesc, iar francofobii nu vor să ştie!)…
Ea a fost (dar, din păcate, nu prea mai este!) poate cea mai iubită dintre limbile străine învăţate în şcoală datorită calităţilor sale intrinseci specifice: origine comună latină, uşurinţa învăţării (aici se mai poate discuta!), expresivitate, prestigiu, prestanţă, eleganţă, rigoare etc.). Ba mai mult, spre deosebire de ceea ce s-a întâmplat la noi cu limba rusă, în România nimeni nu a fost vreodată obligat să înveţe limba franceză!...
Toate acestea pot fi câteva argumente care justifică, până la un punct, francofonia românilor... De ce până la un punct? Pentru că nu ajunge să studiezi câţiva ani în şcoală limba franceză ca să poţi fi considerat (sau chiar să te auto- consideri!) francofon! De aceea, Maurice Druon, membru al Academiei Franceze, avea mare dreptate când afirma că engleza este limba care se învaţă cel mai uşor şi, în acelaşi timp, este cel mai uşor de vorbit prost, iar lucrurile stau la fel, după părerea noastră, şi cu limba franceză... Aşa că, a fi francofon înseamnă ceva mai mult decât cele câteva cuvinte franţuzeşti pe care orice român le poate stâlci, ajutat fiind (ca şi în cazul altor limbi străine „vorbite” de mioritici!) de limba...
gimnastică!
Înseamnă să cunoşti şi să practici în mod frecvent această limbă, or, pentru cei mai mulţi dintre români, suprema folosire a limbii lui Voltaire se reduce la proba orală de la examenul de bacalaureat, căci după liceu, cei mai mulţi studenţi aleg să studieze engleza...
De ce s-a ajuns aici? Iată ce spunea un francofon adevărat, criticul şi istoricul literar Nicolae Manolescu, întristat de situaţia limbii franceze în România, răspunzând întrebărilor unui reporter al magazinului francofon regard, care apare la Bucureşti:
Cela me fait penser au roman d’Andreï Makine, « Le Testament français », qui évoque le destin d’une famille d’aristocrates russes exilée en Sibérie. Elle avait quitté sa maison avec des malles pleines de coupures de journaux français – que tout le monde lisait avec passion – mais sans habits ! C’est un peu ça, le français en Roumanie. Des souvenirs de famille, un rêve du passé... Je dois vous l’avouer : je pense que le français en Roumanie est en voie de disparition. (…) L’Angleterre
Laurenţiu Bălă: Francofonie, francofilie, francofobie…
a perdu ses colonies, mais elle a conservé sa langue, en acceptant notamment qu’elle soit mal parlée. Les Francophones sont beaucoup plus sévères, et le français a sans doute perdu du terrain à cause de ses difficultés orthographiques et grammaticales.2
Cunoaşterea limbii franceze, precum şi practicarea ei, sunt facilitate de manifestarea unui interes constant pentru cultura şi civilizaţia franceză, or, interesul românilor în acest sens este într-o continuă scădere, iar această tendinţă se manifestă la toate nivelurile şi în toate sferele societăţii româneşti actuale.
Exemple?
Câteva date statistice vor fi, credem, mai mult decât relevante:
- în România, în anul şcolar 1993/1994, numărul elevilor ce studiau limba franceză era de 2.051.018 (comparativ cu cei 1.224.128 care studiau limba engleză). Conform unor statistici neoficiale, acest indicator ar fi avut valoarea de 1.575.987, în cursul anului şcolar 1998/1999, ceea ce înseamnă o reducere cu cca.
25 %, în cinci ani!!!
- numărul total al profesorilor de limba franceză (la nivel naţional), în anul şcolar 1993/1994, era de 16.145 (comparativ cu cei 6.969 de profesori care predau limba engleză). După aceleaşi statistici neoficiale, acest indicator ar fi avut valoarea de 14.500, în timpul anului şcolar 1998/1999, ceea ce înseamnă o reducere cu cca. 10 %, în cinci ani!!!
Un alt exemplu? Printre cele peste 60 de programe de televiziune care pot fi recepţionate prin cablu de către orice „francofon” român, operatorul RCS (unul din cei mai mari, dacă nu cel mai mare din România!) a inclus doar... 2 (două) franţuzeşti (TV5, disponibil în toate cele patru pachete de programe, şi France 2, care figurează doar în pachetele „extra” şi „extra +”!!!).
Şi ca să rămânem la televiziune, câte filme franţuzeşti se difuzează pe canalele româneşti de televiziune şi câte americane? Şi să nu uităm, vorbim de o ţară ale cărei personalităţi în domeniul cinematografiei – începând cu fraţii Auguste şi Louis Lumière (inventatorii cinematografului), şi continuând cu mari actori ca Jean Gabin şi Catherine Deneuve, sau cu regizori geniali precum Jean Renoir sau François Truffaut – sunt, parcă, fără număr... Iar în plus, Franţa găzduieşte Festivalul Internaţional de Film de la Cannes (între 16-27 mai 2007 a avut loc a...
60-a ediţie!), al cărui trofeu, Palme d’Or, este poate cel mai râvnit în lumea cinematografiei mondiale. Şi totuşi, se pare că nu e de ajuns...
Acestea sunt numai câteva considerente pentru care credem că românii ar trebui să fie mai reticenţi în a-şi atribui statutul de „francofoni”... Cât despre străinii care ni-l acordă, unii o fac din ignoranţă (pentru aceştia înseamnă că dacă vorbim o limbă de origine romanică, suntem automat şi „francofoni”!), iar alţii (francezii) din interes (aducem vreo 20 de milioane de rude, fie ele şi mai sărace şi cu destul de mari probleme de limbă) în familia încă nu destul de numeroasă, se pare, a francofonilor de pretutindeni...
Nici în ceea ce priveşte al doilea termen al triadei din titlu, „francofilia”, lucrurile nu stau foarte clar, deşi aceasta este o etichetă poate mai potrivită pentru români (şi nu numai pentru ei!), căci cărei doamne îi pot rămâne indiferente
celebrele parfumuri franţuzeşti Channel, Givenchy sau Dior, ce bărbat nu rămâne mut de admiraţie în faţa ultimului model de Renault, Citroën sau Peugeot, ce gurmand nu pofteşte măcar la renumitele Camembert sau Roquefort, din cele peste 200 de feluri de brânzeturi pe care le prepară francezii, ce puşti nu-şi doreşte să se numere printre vedetele lui Olympique Lyon, a căror „lecţie de franceză” fotbaliştii steliştii nu o vor uita prea curând, sau ce adolescentă nu visează să defileze pe podiumurile prezentărilor de modă, purtând ţinutele marilor creatori francezi, precum Yves Saint-Laurent sau Jean-Paul Gaultier? Dar, atâta timp cât aceiaşi oameni se entuziasmează şi în faţa unui Porsche, Audi sau Volkswagen (ca să ne limităm numai la aceste exemple), nu ar trebui să se vorbească şi de germanofilia românilor, exact în aceeaşi măsură în care se pomeneşte de francofilia lor? Sau poate, de multe ori, de americanofilie, nu-i aşa?
Cât despre „francofobie”, acesta este termenul cel mai puţin aplicabil românilor (poate cu excepţia unor microbişti – steliştii ştiu de ce!), căci suntem departe, din acest punct de vedere, de englezi, de exemplu, a căror francofobie este poate cea mai veche (după unii, ar data de prin... 1066, de pe vremea invaziei Angliei de către normanzii lui William Cuceritorul!) sau decât germanii, a căror ţară, după Primul Război Mondial şi Tratatul de la Versailles (din 1919) era preponderent francofobă!
CONCLUZII. Din păcate, trebuie să-i dăm dreptate lui Cristian Preda, care susţinea într-un interviu, cu puţin înainte de Sommet-ul de la Bucureşti:
Depuis 1989, et toujours aujourd'hui, on considère que la Roumanie est d'ores et déjà un pays francophone. En réalité, 8 % des gens parlent couramment français, et ce chiffre diminue.3
Acelaşi pesimism îl întâlnim şi la Zoe Petre, intelectuală şi francofonă de marcă, dar care, tot în cadrul unui interviu apărut în regard, întrevede o speranţă în ceea ce priveşte limba franceză:
En Roumanie, il existe encore un fond francophone assez important, mais il est en train de se dilapider. Au début des années 80, mes étudiants étaient en majorité usagers du français, sinon francophones. Maintenant, c’est l’anglais. La francophonie devrait au moins fournir autant d’informations en français sur des sources électroniques qu’il y en a en anglais. C’est la seule manière de résister.
Créer des bibliothèques digitalisées, une vie intellectuelle sur Internet qui font encore défaut.4
În concluzie, credem că ar trebui s-o luăm mai „uşor cu... francofonia pe scări”, ca să-l parafrazăm pe Marin Sorescu, şi să manifestăm mai multă circumspecţie în utilizarea acestui termen a cărui proprietate nu ne este, vai!, întotdeauna foarte clară!
Laurenţiu Bălă: Francofonie, francofilie, francofobie…
NOTE
1„Totuşi, nu-i includem pe toţi belgienii în „francofonie”, deşi viitorul flamanzilor pare după toate aparenţele acela de a fi într-o zi francofoni.” (trad. noastră, L.B.), in Onésime Reclus, France, Algérie et colonies, Paris, Hachette, 1886, p. 422. Se impun două observaţii. În primul rând, termenul „Flamingant” (care iniţial însemna „care vorbeşte flamanda; unde se vorbeşte flamanda”) este folosit astăzi peiorativ. Este puţin probabil ca el să fi căpătat deja, la sfârşitul secolului al XIX-lea, când a apărut lucrarea lui Reclus, această nuanţă. A doua observaţie este legată de termenul „Franquillon” (adesea ortografiat şi „Fransquillon”), care, în Belgia francofonă reprezintă un nume dat celor care vorbesc franceza într-o manieră afectată, având astăzi o pronunţată nuanţă peiorativă, în timp ce în Belgia flamandă este numele dat celor care vorbesc franceza. În argou, el denumeşte atât individul (francezul), cât şi limba franceză.
2 „Aceasta mă face să mă gândesc la un roman de Andreï Makine, Testamentul francez, care evocă destinul unei familii de aristocraţi ruşi exilată în Siberia. Ea părăsise casa cu valize pline de tăieturi din ziare franţuzeşti – pe care toată lumea le citea cu pasiune – dar fără haine! Cam asta este situaţia limbii franceze în România. Amintiri de familie, un vis din trecut… Trebuie să vă mărturisesc: eu consider că limba franceză în România este pe cale de dispariţie. (…) Anglia şi-a pierdut coloniile, dar ea şi-a conservat limba, mai ales acceptând ca aceasta să fie vorbită prost. Francofonii sunt mult mai severi, iar franceza a pierdut fără îndoială teren din
cauza dificultăţilor ortografice şi gramaticale.” (trad. noastră, L.B.), Nicolae Manolescu,
« Défendre la francophonie, c’est aussi parler roumain ! » in regard, n° 23, 2006.
3 „Din 1989, şi astăzi la fel, se consideră că România este de-acum o ţară francofonă. În realitate, 8
% din oameni vorbesc în mod curent franceza şi această cifră scade.” (trad. noastră, L.B.), Laurent Couderc et Saux, Volker, « Interview avec Cristian Preda, doyen de la faculté des Sciences politiques de Bucarest », in regard, n° 10, 15 mars-15 avril 2005.
4 „În România, există încă un fond francofon destul de important, dar el este pe cale de a se risipi. La începutul anilor 80, studenţii mei erau în majoritate utilizatori ai limbii franceze, dacă nu francofoni. Acum este engleza. Francofonia ar trebui să furnizeze cel puţin tot atâtea informaţii în franceză pe suport electronic câte există în engleză. Acesta este singurul mod de a rezista. Crearea unor biblioteci digitalizate, a unei vieţi intelectuale pe Internet, lucruri care lipsesc încă.” (trad. noastră, L.B.), Zoe Petre, « La Roumanie, c’est avant tout l’histoire d’une résistance », in regard, n° 27, 20 mars-20 avril 2007.
BIBLIOGRAFIE
Bârleanu, Vlad, „Dăm cu francofonia în gard”, in Gardianul, 7.06.2006.
Couderc, Laurent ; Saux, Volker, « Interview avec Cristian Preda, doyen de la faculté des Sciences politiques de Bucarest », in regard, n° 10, 15 mars-15 avril 2005.
Cristea, Irina, Constantinoiu, Marina, „Francofonia blochează România”, in Jurnalul naţional, 24.09.2006.
Manolescu, Nicolae, « Défendre la francophonie, c’est aussi parler roumain ! » in regard, n° 23, 2006.
Marin, Viorica, „Băsescu a aflat că francofonia nu-i ca anglofonia”, in Adevărul, 29.09.2006.
Petre, Zoe, « La Roumanie, c’est avant tout l’histoire d’une résistance », in regard, n° 27, 20 mars-20 avril 2007.
Reclus, Onésime (1886), France, Algérie et colonies, Paris : Hachette.
Patriarchal Relations
Olivia BĂLĂNESCU University of Craiova, Department of Applied Foreign Languages
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on patriarchal relations and their unfortunate influence upon womanhood. While stressing various schemes that are culturally employed in the objectification of women, my discussion attempts to emphasise a series of strategies, such as female speech, that women writers use, in order to transform the female imposed inferiority into a source of empowerment and self-invention.
KEYWORDS: patriarchy, speech, silence, objectification, laughter
We women, sexed according to our gender, lack a God to share, a word to share and to become. Defined as the often dark, even occult mother-substance of the word of men, we are in need of our subject, our substantive, our word, our predicates: our elementary sentence, our basic rhythm, our morphological identity, our generic incarnation, our genealogy.
(Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies 71)
Patriarchy, generally understood as referring to the oppression and marginalisation of women, has proved a major source of inspiration for contemporary women writers. Novels and short stories engage in depicting various, intricate systems of male domination that are largely legitimated by patriarchal relations. At one point or another, each and every woman writer emphasises the consequences of male power, since, as Palmer argues, there is hardly any woman who has not felt the threat of ‘being trapped in a conspiracy of male domination’1 manifested either publicly or privately.
Whereas the theme of patriarchal oppression is highly prolific in fiction, the term ‘patriarchy’ itself has received confusing interpretations in literary theory and criticism. ‘Patriarchy’ is increasingly considered too vague a term to be entirely satisfactory, and as a result critics speak more and more about ‘phallocentric’ or
‘phallocratic’ societies. K.K. Ruthven attempts to clarify this recent terminology, and points out that in Western societies the main modes of representation are called
‘androcentric’, because man occupies the centre, or ‘phallocentric’ due to the
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association that psychoanalytic theory establishes between man and phallus. To posses a phallus is to have unconditioned access to power, hence the use of the term
‘phallocratic’ (‘kratos’ = ‘power’) to refer to a symbolic order ruled by the power of the male2.
Sarah Ahmed implies, like Zillah Eisenstein, that the term ‘phallocentrism’
describes the relationship between language and body by showing how the body is culturally constructed through language and institutions. If the phallus is regarded as a sign of masculine privilege, this privilege however ‘comes both before and after the phallus: it is both already inscribed on the male body, and a consequence of the symbolising of that body in a specific economy’3.
P.K. Vijayan discusses patriarchy in terms of hegemonic masculinities, arguing that ‘patriarchy’ should not be understood as a universal, descriptive proposition, but as an analytical concept ‘referring to the generally recognizable social, cultural, economic, institutional and political configuration…of the dominance of men – in other words, as masculine hegemony that permits the hegemonic power of specific hegemonic masculinities’4. In this light, patriarchy ceases to be regarded as a single, all encompassing concept, and becomes instead a plural, diversified network of ‘hegemonic’ power.
Apart from these terminological debates, ‘patriarchy’ acquires different meanings in different discourses, enhancing the imprecision of the term. Even feminists use it differently, depending on the aspects of male domination which they refer to. It becomes clear that the notion of a universal patriarchy can no longer be tenable, and has been largely criticised in recent years for ‘its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists’5. A universalising concept of patriarchy, argues Butler, disregards the role of race, class or ethnicity distinctions. At the same time, it foregrounds a
‘transhistorically essentialist and inexorable reality’6 of women as an eternally oppressed group with no active agency on self-invention.
When discussing patriarchal relations, feminist critics and theories tend to follow two major trends: Marxism and psychoanalysis. Radical feminists such as Kate Millet have argued that women’s subservient role in society is too deeply woven into the social fabric to be unravelled without a revolutionary restructuring of society itself. Patriarchal power appears as ubiquitous, permeating all representations and cultural structures7. Marxist feminists, such as Shulamith Firestone, have underlined that the origins of women’s subordination and men’s domination lay in the capitalist modes of production8. For feminists writing in this vein, ‘patriarchy was proposed as an alternative to, or occasionally the accomplice of, capitalism’9.
According to feminist theorists informed by psychoanalysis, patriarchy refers to a society in which men share the symbolic power of the phallus while women remain in the negative side of the Other. The castrated female body, a powerful image in Freud’s accounts of sexual difference and gender acquisition, has become an ideological tool in the process of women’s objectification, hence the extensive literature that has been written on this topic. Angela Carter, for instance, periodically
returns to the image of woman’s castration, whose cultural reverberations she outlined in The Sadeian Woman:
The whippings, the beatings, the gougings, the stabbings of erotic violence reawaken the memory of the social fiction of the female wound, the bleeding scar left by her castration, which is a psychic fiction as deeply at the heart of Western culture as the myth of Oedipus, to which it is related in the complex dialectic of imagination and reality that produces culture. Female castration is an imaginary fact that pervades the whole of men’s attitude towards women and our attitude to ourselves, that transforms women from human beings into wounded creatures who were born to bleed. (23)
The Freudian theory becomes Carter’s target in ‘Peter and the Wolf’, a tale of her 1985 collection of short stories, Black Venus, where she challenges Freud’s story of the little boy who is horrified at the sight of the little girl’s lack of penis. In Carter’s rewritten version, seven-year-old Peter, when looking at his girl cousin’s body, notices not what is not there but what is there, thus articulating the female genitalia as material presence rather than frightening absence:
Peter’s heart gave a hop, a skip, so that he had a sensation of falling; he was not conscious of his own fear because he could not take his eyes off the sight of the crevice of her girl-child’s sex, that was perfectly visible to him as she sat there square on the base of her spine… It exercised an absolute fascination upon him. (83) Whereas Freud considers that a boy’s initiation into the sex/gender system is triggered by the fear of castration that he experiences when faced with the girl’s
‘lack’, Peter is by no means afraid, on the contrary he is fascinated by the girl’s intimacy and dazzled by her otherness. In other words, Carter extracts Peter from the classical oedipal scheme, since he does not perceive female difference from the perspective of the logic of the same – having a penis or not10. If the phallus thus loses its powerful signification in the process of individuation, and if the female genitalia acquire material presence, then all the binary systems based on the axis absence/presence are bound to be deconstructed.
The girl in Carter’s story is a baby, once taken away by wolves that raise her in the mountains, far from human society and its influential laws. She is briefly rescued by her human family, but the wolves come to reclaim her, and Peter meets her after many years by a river in the woods, where she is surrounded by her cubs.
Deprived of any cultural teaching, the girl escapes from Freud’s oedipalisation, as well as from Lacan’s mirror stage and linguistic socialisation.
She could never have acknowledged that the reflection beneath her in the river was that of herself. She did not know she had a face and so her face itself was the mirror of a different kind of consciousness than ours is, just as her nakedness, without innocence or display, was that of our first parents, before the Fall… Language crumbled into dust under the weight of her speechlessness. (86)
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Surprisingly, the girl does not feel exiled from her fellow humans, but Peter, the socialised observer, feels himself painfully estranged from the girl’s
‘marvellous and private grace’ (86). As Sarah Gamble points out, the story raises not only the issue of gender acquisition, but also ‘the challenge the wolf-girl poses to the entire human order in the completeness with which she has passed out of it’, a possessor of a different consciousness11. Seeing the girl for the second time in her milieu unaltered by linguistic and doctrinal meanings, Peter realises how irrelevant all the masculinist systems are: ‘what would he do at the seminary, now… He experienced the vertigo of freedom’ (86).
Symbolic castration, apart from designating the cultural image which insures women’s inferiority to men, signals a process whereby the female erotic potential and desire are curtailed. By accepting their predefined role within the patriarchal scheme, women are to suffer from a sense of low self-esteem, a point that Carter makes clear in the paragraph cited above from The Sadeian Woman where she mentions ‘our attitude to ourselves’ as being influenced by the bleeding wound. As Linda Hutcheon emphasises in The Politics of Postmodernism, women’s desires ‘are constructed within a range of signifying practices; in other words, they are not natural or innate’ but the product of ideological discourses which ‘sustain male privilege’12.
In the title story of Black Venus, Carter presents the clash between erotic masculine desires of women’s bodies and the actual feminine experiences, a clash founded on Baudelaire’s refusal to allow his mulatto mistress, Jeanne Duval, a different role than that of Muse and feminine Other. As a muse, Jeanne does not have a voice, but she is the poet’s inspiration and object of adulation. His erotic fantasy surfaces in the manner he perceives Duval:
He thinks she is a vase of darkness; if he tips her up, black light will spill out. She is not Eve but, herself, the forbidden fruit, and he has eaten her!
Weird goddess, dusky as night, reeking of musk smeared on tobacco,
a shaman conjured you, a Faust of the savannah, black-thighed witch, midnight’s child. (15)
Whereas he constructs for her an idealised version of femininity, completely remote from reality, she understands him very well, although she cannot make much use of her knowledge, dispossessed as she is by an entire history of racial exclusion: ‘If he was a connoisseur of the beautiful, she was a connoisseur of the most exquisite humiliations but she had always been too poor to be able to afford the luxury of acknowledging a humiliation as such. You took what came’ (9).
Carter’s text draws its substance from these two antagonistic discourses: ‘the language of Baudelairean decadent male eroticism’ and ‘the stark social reality of Jeanne Duval’s position as a colonial, a black, and a kept woman’13. A suggestive example is the episode in which this ‘Dame Créole’, finally aroused from her
‘innate’ state of laziness, dances for the poet a voluptuous dance that he devised for her: she, dressed in beads and bangles, he, covered by ‘the public nineteenth-
century masculine impedimenta of frock coat (exquisitely cut); white shirt (pure silk, London tailored); oxblood cravat; and impeccable trousers’ (19). While he watches her, authentically entranced by the suede-like skin of this ‘bizarre déité’, she performs her exotic dance in ‘slumbrous resentment’ wondering ‘what the distinction was between dancing naked in front of one man who paid, and dancing naked in front of a group of men who paid’ (12). He dreams romantic dreams, she thinks of how much to ask, as she has no notion of her own value.
What Carter does in order to retrieve Jeanne Duval from the obscure facts that are known about her, is to give her a narrative space from which ‘she can resist the process of mythification that will be her fate’14 and, in so doing, to give her back the history of which she was deprived. At the same time, as both Gamble and Hutcheon observe, Cater gives Jeanne the opportunity to laugh last, by rewriting her story as one of revenge: she outlives Baudelaire, turns his artistic creation into hard cash, and goes back to her native Martinique where ‘she will continue to dispense, to the most privileged of the colonial administration, at a not excessive price, the veritable, the authentic, the true Baudelairean syphilis’ (23).
A correlative approach to patriarchal relations is provided by Lévi-Strauss who attributes the objectification of women to a circuit of social exchange: culture depends on communication and relationships, which are maintained by using women as objects of exchange through the institution of marriage15. Starting from Lévi- Strauss’s theory, Judith Butler argues that the bride-as-gift ‘functions as a relational term between groups of men; she does not have an identity, and neither does she exchange one identity for another. She reflects masculine identity precisely through being the site of its absence’16. In other words, the bride is just a link between different ‘patriarchal clans’, which serves to reinforce men’s bonds with each other.
Repressed homosexuality, therefore, becomes socially disguised in ‘the heterosexual exchange and distribution of women’17.
By playing an important part in the consolidation of relations between clans, the woman is destined to communication to the extent that she becomes a symbol of language. Just a sign, however, because, as critics have argued, the woman has culturally been denied any access to language or power. In this way, language becomes complicit in the oppression of women, the logos acquiring the symbolic value of the phallus. In all Western discourses the woman ‘has to be debarred from powerful language: castrated, or decapitated, in the name of her supposed state of native or cultural castration’18. From this perspective, language participates in the symbolic representation of women as ‘castrated’.
The importance of language in women’s objectification is emphasised by Julia Kristeva in her study About Chinese Women, where she goes back to the literature of Judaism to observe how patriarchal monotheism gradually repressed and replaced ancient maternal, religious practices in order to establish a symbolic, paternal community. No civilization, argues Kristeva, has proved so efficient in separating the two sexes. Monotheistic unity depends on this cleavage. For the supreme values of the community to be successfully inscribed into the ‘symbolic realm’, the body, the desires and the emotions had to be localised in the other sex. Desire threatens the
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unity and coherence of monotheism, and once it is associated with women, who have
‘no access to the word’19, man remains sublimated in his dialogue with God. The word, argues Kristeva, serves a double function: it keeps society together and represents the paternal. Without access to the word or to knowledge and power, the biblical woman ‘has no direct relation with the law of the community and its political and religious unity: God generally speaks only to men’20, which means men have direct access to the divine grace.
Much has been written about women’s silence: from the culturally imposed silence, to the silence ‘voicing’ a repressed desire, to the silence as a form of tacit, non-verbal communication between women. The topic has been closely scrutinised in women’s fiction, from which a large gallery of silenced women can be retrieved.
A case in point is Margaret in Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, a novel which is at heart a family story about a traditional family dominated by parental authority. A tyrannical presence, Uncle Philip demands total obedience from his wife Margaret and the two ‘sons’, Margaret’s younger brothers. Symbolically, Margaret has been dumb since she got married, and her silence is consistent with the theories mentioned above regarding women’s silence as lack of access to language and power. At the same time, as Butler has argued, in marriage women lose any sense of personal identity. Therefore, Margaret is passive, unable to express herself, since her self no longer exists. The food she cooks is her only form of expression and communication with the family. Although unable to eat in her husband’s presence, choked as she feels by his authority and her wedding present – a massive silver chain that she wears on Sundays – Margaret takes pleasure in cooking and spoiling her brothers with wonderful food that she herself enjoys only when Philip is not there.
As in many contemporary feminine novels, food and eating are presented not for simple mimetic effects, but for their close connection to physical and psychic appetites. Thus, Uncle Philip’s obsessive desire to control emerges in his grotesque appetite, while in Margaret’s case, cooking and catering grant her indirect power through the domestic dependency that she creates, a form of compensation for her lack of any power in the family.
Uncle Philip’s infernal appetite conceals murderous desires: ‘He attacked the defenceless goose so savagely he seemed to want to kill it all over again’ (160). It is Sarah Sceats who reads the tyrant’s greediness as a manifestation of criminal potential. Her conclusion is that Uncle Philip stands for ‘an oppressive or corrupt political reality which has something to do with patriarchy, something with capitalism… and something to say, perhaps, about the corruption of power itself’21. The underlying metaphor of consumption as related to power is simple: there are those who eat, and those who are eaten.
When not bullying his relatives, Uncle Philip enjoys staging performances in his puppet theatre. In the cellar of the house he unleashes his dark fantasies, embodied in the plays that he directs. ‘You see’ Finn explains to Melanie, ‘the puppet theatre is his heart’s darling. Or obsession, rather. You should see the scenes he puts on! And sometimes he lets me pull the strings. That’s a great day for me!’
(67–68). A special masculine bond arises in this ‘pulling of strings’ and the enacting of male privilege to manipulate women.
After her parents’ death, Melanie is adopted by her uncle, and thus falls into the role of daughter to Philip. She now has a father to mediate her transformation
‘from active girl to woman-as-object’22, through the violent imagery of rape. By superimposing the mythical rape of Leda by the Swan over Melanie’s oedipalisation, Carter emphasises the role played by both family and culture in shaping identity.
Significantly, Melanie plays a Leda dressed in white veils. Receding behind the veil, she is concealing her true self while presenting to the man’s eyes the image of femininity that he is willing to accept.
Melanie and Margaret, like Eve or Jeanne Duval, are women of silence, therefore Carter felt she must give them a voice and ‘hatched’ Fevvers as a woman of words. The story of Nights at the Circus opens in the heroine’s flowing, tumultuous oral style, while Walser, her addressee, carefully takes notes, trying hard to capture the essence of Fevvers, ‘to “puff” her, and if it is humanly possible, to explode her, either as well as, or instead of’ (11). Since forms of writing serve to legitimate relations of power and to consolidate phallic authority, Fevvers tries to evade Walser’s attempts to write her down so that she may transcend the power of any written word:
He continued to take notes in a mechanical fashion but, as the women unfolded the convulsions of their joint stories together, he felt more and more like a kitten tangling up in a ball of wool it had never intended to unravel in the first place; or a sultan faced with not one but two Scheherezades, both intent on impacting a thousand stories into the single night. (40)
Fevvers, like the mythical Scherezade, manages to survive by means of the magical power of the spoken word.
Lucie Armitt sees in the encounters between Fevvers and Walser ‘an anthropomorphic exploration of the meeting point of oral history and written culture’23. From this perspective, Fevvers is the clear exponent of oral history, hinting at a long period of time when women, for one reason or another, stayed away from the written word and hardly produced any texts. At the same time, the fact that Fevvers manages to impose her own version of the story on Walser proves the power of the oral style over writing. The heroine achieves her goal by manipulating the concepts of time, gravity, perspective with the skills of an actor who uses his/her body in combination with text, space, and audience in order to communicate a certain message. In her verbal performance Fevvers plays with the reverberations of her ‘extraordinarily raucous and metallic voice’ (13) and the flaunting rhythms of her body. While speaking, Fevvers stages an impressive spectacle of her body for, as Cixous observes commenting on women’s speech,
she doesn’t “speak”, she throws her trembling body into the air, she lets herself go, she flies, she goes completely into her voice, she vitally defends the “logic” of her
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discourse with her body; her flesh speaks true. She exposes herself. Really she makes what she thinks materialize carnally, she conveys meaning with her body.24 The breaks in Fevvers’s speech are equally conceived for theatrical effects:
she poses at the right time, at moments of climatic intensity skilfully underlined by her body language: ‘At that, she turned her immense eyes upon him, those eyes
“made for the stage” whose messages could be read from standing room in the gods’ (29). Under the pressure of the woman’s eyes, which look like sets of Chinese boxes, Walser experiences the strangest sensations, as if he were going to be enclosed in one of these many boxes which ‘opened into a world into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds’ (30). After such moments of intense confusion, Walser has to shake his mind so that he can refresh its initial pragmatism.
At the beginning of the novel, Fevvers’s performance at the music-hall is narrated by Walser, who attentively observes the aerialiste through his opera glasses. The detail of the glasses, as Sarah Bannock observes, introduces the themes of rationality and science which are traditionally associated with the male and privileged as superior means of acquiring knowledge25. Regarding women’s exclusion from knowledge, K. K. Ruthven argues that in the phallocratic order
‘knowing’ is a form of exploitation: ‘to know’ is ‘to master’ in the same way as women are to be mastered. Man is the subject who knows and woman the object to be looked at and thus known/mastered. Ruthven’s conclusion is that ‘any thoroughgoing critique of the phallocratic oppression of women must begin by recognising that the cult of so-called objective and impersonal modes of knowing makes what we call “knowledge” complicit in that oppression’26. Thus armed with the scientist’s pragmatism and scepticism, Walser wants to know, and this urge makes him a good reporter, whose professional judgment and ‘habitual disengagement’ (10) are coupled with the aura of an ideal hero: ‘He would have called himself a “man of action”. He subjected his life to a series of cataclysmic shocks because he loved to hear his bones rattle. That was how he knew he was alive’ (10). His religious belief in ‘all the laws of evolution and human reason’ (15) is utterly shattered by the fantastic anomaly of Fevvers’s body that defies logic and the laws of evolution.
As the novel moves steadily towards foreign and remote places, the story turns ever more fantastic, thus transgressing the stable grounds of reality and reason. Walser follows this movement closely, he himself undergoing a personal journey that estranges him from his initial roles of inquisitive journalist and detached spectator. Sarah Gamble points out that ‘like Desiderio and Evelyn before him, he is subjected to a steady, calculated separation from the privileged perspective of masculinity’27. Soon after joining the circus, an injury to his arm causes Walser to lose the ability to write and, together with it, the equilibrium of reason and patriarchal power. Consequently ‘his disguise disguises – nothing. He is no longer a journalist masquerading as a clown; willy-nilly, force of circumstance has turned him into a real clown’ (145). Deprived of the phallic prerogatives of
writing, Walser loses his ‘centre’ and joins the circus as a debased world where there is only ex-centricity. He reaches the bottom line of his downward progression when a blow to the head during the train explosion in Siberia throws him entirely off his centre: ‘The empty centre of an empty horizon, Walser flutters across the snowy wastes. He is a sentient being, still, but no longer a rational one; indeed, now he is all sensibility, without a grain of sense’ (236).
When all his previous experiences are rendered null and void, Walser is initiated into the mysteries of shamanism by an isolated tribe in the forests of Siberia. He is soon able to begin the process of self-reconstruction, although he will never retrieve his old self. His former detachment is forgotten in favour of a new emotional involvement. If at the beginning of the novel Walser is metaphorically on top, scrutinizing Fevvers from the height of scientific reason and logical investigation, in the end it is she who has the last word, who laughs last.
The novel ends on the ‘spiralling tornado’ (295) of Fevvers’s triumphant laughter which reminds of Bakhtian carnival but also of Cixous’s subversive Medusa.
Through Fevvers’s performance, Carter annihilates the forces that keep women down. Her character is meant to ‘be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound down to the ground’ (25). Many of the stories interwoven in the rich texture of the novel begin with images of female entrapment. Madame Schreck’s museum of freaks, the circus ring, and the Russian asylum are spaces of female confinement and exploitation, as well as of women’s solidarity, as I mentioned previously. Prisoners of a patriarchal order that systematically marginalises women, the female protagonists in Nights at the Circus follow Fevvers’s example and learn to ‘fly’, breaking the conventional walls that entrap them. Their own body is a major instrument of their liberation. Once the social and bodily boundaries are broken, they are free to face fearlessly the new. The women characters portrayed by Carter do not aspire towards any masculine prerogatives of control or mastery, but merely
‘dash through and…fly’ as Cixous says, for:
Flying is woman’s gesture – flying in language and making it fly. We have all learnt the art of flying and its numerous techniques: for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying: we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers.28
In the light of this triumphant ending, Nights at the Circus offers a positive alternative to the issue of female victimisation under patriarchy by showing that women, using the power of female speech and their own bodies, can transform their imposed inferiority into a source of strength and energy necessary to metaphorically rise and fly. On the other hand, Fevvers’s laughter casts an optimistic light over the intricate and often debated processes involved in the construction of feminine identity as a passive object. Thus Fevvers reverses the story of Melanie, who is forced into womanhood by various cultural representations meant to teach her to perceive herself as she must be: a veiled woman or a woman-as-object, a silenced bearer of meaning, not an active maker of meaning. Fevvers makes meaning on her
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own terms, and part of her strength comes from the women with whom she shares her marginality, from the various female communities that she inhabits along the narrative.
NOTES
1 Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory, London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, p. 69.
2 K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990, p. 1.
3 Sarah Ahmed, Differences that Matter. Feminist Theory and Postmodernism. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1998. p. 29.
4 P. K. Vijayan, “Outline for an Exploration of Hindutva Masculinities”, in Translating Desire. The Politics of Gender and Culture in India, Ed. Brinda Bose, New Delhi: Katha, 2002, p. 87.
5 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York & London:
Routledge, 1989. p. 3.
6 P. K. Vijayan, p. 87.
7 Kate Millet, “Sexual Politics”, in Feminisms. A Reader, Ed. Maggie Humm, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, p. 64.
8 Shulamith Firestone, “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution”, in Feminisms. A Reader. Ed. Maggie Humm, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992, p. 67.
9 Carol A. Stabile, “Postmodernism, Feminism and Marx: Notes from the Abyss”, in In Defence of History. Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, Eds. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006, p. 138.
10 Jean Wyatt, “The Violence of Gendering: Castration Images in Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, The Passion of New Eve and Peter and the Wolf”, in Angela Carter. Contemporary Critical Essays, Ed. Aliston Easton, London: Macmillan, 2000, p. 61.
11 Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997, p.
151.
12 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 1989, London & New York: Routledge, 2005. pp.
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13 Linda Hutcheon, p. 141.
14 Sarah Gamble, p. 150.
15 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Vol. 2, Trans. M. Layton, London: Allen Lane, 1977, p. 24.
16 Judith Butler, p. 39.
17 Judith Butler, p. 39.
18 Nicole Ward Jouve, White Woman Speaks with Forged Tongue. Criticism as Autobiography, London & New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 81-82.
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20 Julia Kristeva, p. 140.
21 Sarah Sceats, “The Infernal Appetites of Angela Carter”, in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter.
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22 Jean Wyatt, p. 65.
23 Lucie Armitt, Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic, London: Macmillan, 2000, p.
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24 Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 24, Trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986, p. 92.
25 Sarah Bannock, “Auto/biographical Souvenirs in Nights at the Circus”, in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter. Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, Eds. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton, London: Longman, 1997, p. 201.
26 K. K. Ruthven, p. 2.
27 Sarah Gamble, p. 164.
28 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, in Feminisms. An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1997, p.
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