THE RESISTING READER A Feminist Approach to American Fiction Judith Fetterley INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington X Preface It has been, therefore, an understandably communal act made possible by the energy and vision of countless women who have encouraged and assisted and inspired. One part of my deepest debt has been realized by the dedication; another part has been realized in my introductory chapter, where the extensive quoting serves not simply to establish points or to share important perceptions but to express the degree of my indebtedness to the work of other women; the final part I realize now in thanking those women who in particular have given generously of their time and energy, emotional and intellectual, to the process of writing this book: Martha Warn Firestine, Carole Friedman, and Joan Schulz. i INTRODUCTION On the Politics of Literature Literature is political. It is painful to have to insist on this fact, but the necessity of such insistence indicates the dimensions of the problem. John Keats once objected to poetry "that has a palpable design upon us." The major works of American fiction constitute a series of designs on the female reader, all the more potent in their effect because they are "Impalpable." One of the main things that keeps the design of our literature unavailable to the consciousness of the woman reader, and hence impalpable, is TrTe~very posture of the apolitical, the^pxetetise that literature speaks universal truths through forms from which all the merely personal, the purely subjective, has been burned away or at least transformed through the medium of art into the representative. When only one reality is encouraged,-legitimized, and transmitted and when that limTte"cT'vision endlessly insists on its comprehensiveness, then we have the conditions necessary for that confusion of consciousness in which impalpability flourishes. It is the purpose of this book to give voice to a/different reality and difJfer^t.vision, to bring a difj^ent subjectivity to bear on jJhe_jold. "universality." To examine American fictions in light of how attitudes toward women shape their form and content is to make available to consciousness that which xi xii Introduction has been largely left unconscious and thus to change our understanding of these fictions, our relation to them, and their effect on us^ It is to make palpable their designs J^mejiHn.Jiterature is majejt To read the canon of what is currently considered classic American literaFure is per-force to fTtfeiOL&fy' as male.*Though'""exceptions to this generalization can be found here and there—a Dickinson poem, a Wharton novel—these exceptions usually function to obscure the argument arid confuse the issue: i American literature is male. '(5ur. "literature neither Je&ve§ .worn onits unp^^^.^£^a>sa^^ime that it defines"tKaTuniver-s^li|y jn, specifically male terms. "Rip Van Winkle^/is paradigmatic of this ^phenomenon. 'Whlle^fie^^sire to avoid work, escape authority, and sleep through the major decisions of one's life is obviously applicable to both men and women, 'in Irving's story this "universal" desire is made specifically male. Work, authority, and decisionmaking .....are^ symbolized 1by~TJ^me Van Winkle, and the longing for flight is defined against her. She is what ^ne must escape from, and the "one" is necessarily male. In [Mailer's An American Dream, the fantasy of eliminating all one's ills' through the ritual of scapegoating is equally male: the sacrificial scapegoat is the woman/wife and the cleansed survivor is the husband/male. In such fictions the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; sheas askecTtb id£Btifx3fltlLO defines itself in opposlHonTq, Jierj,she ig required to identify against herself.,,. The woman reader's relation to American literature is made even more problematic by the fact that our literature is frequently dedicated to defining what is peculiarly American about experience and identity. Given the per-vasive male bias of this literature, it is not surprising that in it the experience of being American is equated with the experience of being male. In FitegejaldVT^ Great Gatsh, On the Politics of Literature xui "The background for the experience of disillusionment and ""Betrayal revealed in the novel is the discovery of America, and Daisy's failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations in-the imagination . pf the men who "discovered" it. America is female; to be ^Xmerican is male; and the quintessential American experience is betrayal by woman. Henry James certainly de->ffned our literature, if not our culture, when he picked the situation of women as the subject of The Bostonians, his very American tale, (Power is the issue in the,politics, of,literature, as it is in thepolitics of anything else. To be excluded from a literature that claims to define one's identity is to experience a peculiar form of rjowerlessness—not simply the power-lessness which derives frorri not seeing One's experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly the jjowerlessness which results from the endless division of selfy*gainst self, the consequence of the invoca-'tion to identify as male while beirig^xeixu»dedjJiat„tQ..b.e male"—to be universal, to be American—is to be not female. Not only does powerlessness characterize woman's experience of reading, it also describes the content of what is read. Each of the works chosen for this study presents a J^erjsior^ari^ of the drama of men's^jpower oyer women. The final irony, and indignity, of the woman reader's relation to American literature, then, is that she is required to dissociate herself from the very experience the literature engenders. Powerlessness is the subject and powerlessness the experience, and the design insists that v Rjj3_Van' Winkle/Frederic Henry/Nick Carraway/Stephen Rojack speak for us all. The drama of power in our literature is often disguised. In "Rip_XarLJWiiikJe," Rip poses as powerless, the henpecked husband cowering before his termagant Dame. Yet, when Rip returns froinjhe mountains, armed by the drama of Jemale deposition witnessed there, to discover t xiv Introduction that his wife is dead and he is free to enjoy what he has always wanted, the "Shucks, M' am, I don't mean no harm" posture dissolves. In Sherwood Anderson's "I Want to Know Why," the issue of power is refracted through the trauma of a young boy's discovery of what it means to be male in a culture that gives white men power over women, horses, and niggers. More sympathetic and honest than "Rip," Anderson's story nevertheless exposes both the imaginative limits of our literature lica|4ons of that fact are the crux of the story. Aylmer is free to experimentjpn^^or^ha',, to the pbint Of death, because she is both woman and wife. Hawthorne indicates the attractiveness of the power that marriage puis in the hands of men through his description of Aylmer's reluctance to leave his laboratory and through his portrayal of Aylmer's inherent discomfort with women and sex. And why does Aylmer want this power badly enough to overcome his initial reluctance and resistance? Hitherto Aylmer has failed in all his efforts to achieve a power equal to that of "Mother" nature. Georgiana provides an opportunity for him to outdo nature by remaking her creation. And if he fails, he still will have won because he will have destroyed the earthly embodiment and repre- On the Politics of Literature xv Tentative of his adversary. Hawthorne intends his character to be seen as duplicitous, and he maneuvers Aylmer through the poses of lover, husband, and scientist to show us how Aylmer attempts to gain power and to use that power to salve his sense of inadequacy. But even so, Hawthorne, like Anderson, is_unwilling to do more with the sickness than call it sick. He obscures the issue of sexual 'pcBHcs^ffina' a"Ka^e"''t5f^iinrversals" and clothes the rnur-der of wife by husband in the language of idealism. ThougTi1tKe~grotesque may serve Faulkner as a disguise in the same way that the ideal serves Hawthorne, "A Rose for Emily" goes farther than "The Birthmark" in making /JJie"power of men over women an overt subject^^igni^^Jife... is shaped by her father's absohjte_£ontrc^jDverJher; her murder of Homer Barron is reaction, not action. Though Emily exercises the power the myths of sexism make available to her, that power is minimal; her retaliation is no alternative to the patriarchy which oppresses her. Yet Faulkner, like-Anderson and Hawthorne, ultimately protects himself and short-circuits the implications of his analysis, not simply through the use of the grotesque, which" makes Emily eccentric rather than central, but also though his'^Ss^76T£erJ.viciim. in_haymg. Emily murder Homer Barron, a northern day-laborer, rather than Judge Stevens, the southern patriarchy Faulkjier^ndjcates how far he is willing to go in imagining even thie minimal Tever-saj^_f_pojyer.. involved in xetaJjatioiu The elimination of Homer Barron is no real threat to the system Judge Stevens represents. Indeed, a few day-laborers may have to be sacrificed here and there to keep that system going. In A Farewell to Arms^ the issue of power ijs thoroughly ^sc,urecT3y tKe mythology, language, and structure of romantic love and by the invocation of an abstract, though spiteful, "they" whose goal it is to break the good, the beautiful, and the brave. Yet the brave who is broken is Catherine; at the end of the novel Catherine is dead, Fred- XVI Introduction On the Politics of Literature xvii eric is alive, and.the.jcese.i»blance.ta"RipJfctn Winkle" and "The Birthmark" is unmistakable. Though the scene in the hospital is reminiscent of Aylmer's last visit to Georgiana in her chambers, Hemingway, unlike Hawthorne, separates his protagonist from the source of his heroine's death, locating the agency of Catherine's demise not simply in "them" but in her biology. Frederic survives several years of war, massive injuries, the dangers of a desperate retreat, and the threat of execution by his. o^n_..a^^"Xadbienne' dies in her first pregnancy. Cleal4y/^^Jp^j§.jcJeijiny^)Ye't, '* Catherine is as much a. scapegoaiLaTT^me"Vah Winkle^ Georgiana, liaisy J'"ay, and Deborah Rojack. For Frederic to survive, free of the intolerable burdens of marriage, family, and fatherhood, yet with his vision of himself as the heroic victim of cosmic antagonism intact, Catherine must die. Frederic's necessities determine Catherine's fate. He is, indeed, the agent of her death. In its passionate attraction to the phenomenon of wealth. The Great Gatsby reveals its author's cons^ujr^g interest in the issue of rjoweri In the quintessentially_male ^ drama of poor boy,s-Ihecoming...rich boy, ownership of wolnen_is inyr^kj^4-^J-he index of power: he who possesses Daisy FayJ§ the most powerful boy. But when the rich boy, fearing finally for his territory, repossesses the girl and, by asking "Who is he," strips the poor boy of his presumed power, the resultant animus is directed not against the rich boy but against the girl, whose rejection of him exposes the poor boy's powerlessness. The struggle for power between men is deflected into safer and more certain channels, and the consequence is the familiar demonstration of male power over women. This demonstration, however, is not simply the result of a greater safety in directing anger at women than at men. It derives as well from the fact that even the poorest male gains something froj^j^ wh^ than attack the men who represent and manifest that system, he Identifies with them-and acquires his sense of power through superiority to women. It is not surprising, there-foreTthat the drama of The Great Gatsby involves an attack on Daisy^AvHo^SYStematic reduction from the glamorous object^ofGatsby's romantic longings to the casual killer of Mynle~"Wíršbn provides an accurate measure of the power available to the most' powerless male. By his choice of scene, context, and situation, Henry James in The Bostonians directly confronts the hostile nature" of the relations between men and women and šegSm that~waT'tTie cíěrimng characteristics of American culture. His honesty provides the opportunity for a clarification rather than a confusion of consciousness and offers a welcome relief from the deceptions of other writers. Yet the drama, while corrj^tJ^Jabele$,».^ The Bosto- nians is an unrelenting demonstration of the extent, and an incisive analysis of thé"šourcěs, of the power of men as a class over women as a class. Yet, though Tames laments t women's oppression, and laments it because of its effects ■ on women, he nevertheless sees it as inevitable. The Bostonians represents a kind of end point in the literary exploration of sex/class power; it would be impossible to see more clearly and feel more deeply and still remain convinced that patriarchy is inevitable. Indeed, there is reyo-lution latent in Tames's novel, and, while he would be the last to endorse it, being far more interested in articulating and romanticizing the tragic elements in women's powerlessness, The Bostonians provides the material for that analysis of American social reality which is the beginning of change. ťíoTřnan (Mailer's An American Dream represents another . kind of end point. Mailer is thoroughly enthralled by the possibility of power that sexism makes available to men, absolutely convinced that he is in danger of losing it, and completely dedicated to maintaining it, at whatever cost. It is impossible to imagine a more frenzied commitment to KNIHOVNA KATEDRY ongltvltVy a omerikoni^h-y Filosofické fakuky Universiry J. E. Purkyně BRNO, Arno Nováka 1 XVUl Introduction the maintenance of male power than Mailer's. In An American Dream all content has been reduced to the enactment of jnen's power over women, and to the development ancP legitimization of that act Mailer brings every strategy he can muster, not the least of which is an extended elaboration of the mythology of female power. In Mailer\wgrk jjtxe effort to obscure the issue, disguise reality, and confuse consciousness is so frantic that the antitheses he provides to protect his thesis become in fact his message and his confusions shed a lurid illumination. lfThe Mostonians induces one to rearrange James's conceptual framework and so to make eyitable his inevitable^A^American Dream induces a desire to eliminate Mailer's ccmceptuaT, framework altogether and start over. Beyond his frenzyjs^1' only utter nausea and weariness of spirit and a profound willingness to give up an exhausted, sick, and sickening struggle. In Mjnler, the drama of power comes full circle; . at once Ulg^mmt se.xisjLwriter, he is also the most freeing, and out of him it may be possible to create anew. ; II But what have I to say of Sexual Politics itself? &fillett has undertaken a task which I find particularly worthwhile: the consideration of certain events or works of literature from an unexpected, even startling point of viewv Millett never suggests that, hers is a sufficient analysis of any of the works she .^discusses. Her aim is to wrench the reader from the vantage poin£|^|ias long occupied, and force hin> to look at life and letters From a new coign. Hers is not meant to be the last word on any writer, but a wholly new word, litde heard ' before and strange. For the first time we have been askedjto look at literature as women; we, men, women and Ph.D.'s, ^Ji^e^alwa^s read it as men. Who cannot point to a certain overemphasis in the way Millett reads Lawrence or Stalin or Euripides. What matter? We are rooted in our vantage points and require transplanting which, always dangerous, involves violence and the possibility of death. —Carolyn Heilbrun1 On the Politics of Literature xi: .■method that is required is not one of correlation but of liberation. Even the term "method" must be reinterpreted ^and in fact wrenched out of its usual semantic field, for the emerging creativity in women is by no means a merely cere-T>ral process. In order to understand the implications of this process it is necessaryto grasp the fundamental fact that women have had thejj^wer"of naming stolen fro in "s..,W" have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, tfag. world, or God. The oJdj^ming_was'hot the-product of jqialogue—a fact inadvertently admitted in the Genesis story •of Adam's naming the animals and the woman. \Stomen.are now realizing that the universal imposing of names by men Qjas been false because partial. That is, inadequate words have been taken as adequate. -Mary Daly2 Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see—and therefore live—afresh. —Adrienne Rich3 A culture which does not allow itself to look clearly at the obvious through the universal accessibility of art is a culture of tragic delusion, hardly viable. —Cynthia Ozick4 When a system of power is thoroughly in command, it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned, it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change. —Kate Millett5 ^ Consciousness is power. To create a new understanding of our literature js to make possible a new effect of that xx Introduction ( ^ literature on us. And to make possible a new effect is in* turn to provide the conditions for changing^yie^ulturg, that theliterature reflects. To expose and question that' complex of ideas and mythologies about women and men which exist in our society and are confirmed in our literature is to make the system of power embodied in the literature open not only to discussion but even to change. Such questioning and exposure can, of course, be carried on only by a consciousness radically different from the one that informs the literature. Such a closed system cannot be opened up from within but only from without. It must be entered into from a point of view which questions its values and assumptions and which has its investment in making available to consciousness precisely that which the literature wishes to keep hidden. Feminist criticism provides that point of view and embodies that consciousness. In "A Woman's Map of Lyric Poetry," Elizabeth Hampsten, after quoting in full Thomas Campion's "My Sweetest Lesbia," asks, "And Lesbia, what's in it for her?"6 The answer to this question is the subject of Hampsten's essay and the answer is, of course, nothing. But implicit in her question is another answer—a great deal, for someone. As Lillian Robinson reminds us, "and, always, cut bono— who profits?"7 The questions of who profits, and how, are crucial because the attempt to answer them leads directly to an understanding of the function of literary sexual politics. Function is often best known by effect. Though QQS__of the most persistent of 'literary^stereotypes, is the^ castrating .bitch, the cultural reality is not the emasculation of men by women but the irnmasculation of women by rnen. As readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to t Wnkjisn&eB*. taidfeOtity. jyjtJb^niiJe .E^int of view, and to accept as normal and, legitimate a male system of values., one of whose central principles isjnisogyny. One of the earliest statements of the phenomenon of immasculalioji, serving indeed as a position paper, is * On the Politics of Literature xxi *" jffiaine Showalter's "Women and the Literary Curriculum." In tKe opening part of her article, Showalter imaginatively recreates the literary curriculum the average young woman entering college confronts: In her freshman year she would probably study literature and composition, and the texts in her course would be selected for their timeliness, or their relevance, or their "power to involve the reader, rather than for their absolute standing in the literary canon. Thus she might be assigned any one of the texts which have recently been advertised for Freshman English: an anthology of essays, perhaps such as The Responsible Man, "for the student who wants literature relevant to the world in which he lives," or Conditions of Men, or Man in Crisis: Perspectives on The Individual and His World, or again, Representative Men: Cult Heroes of Our Time, in which thirty-three men represent such categories of heroism as the writer, the poet, the dramatist, the artist, and the guru, and the only two women included are the Actress Elizabeth Taylor and The Existential Heroine Jacqueline Onassis. . . . Bv the end of her freshman year, a woman sptudeiit would have learned something about intellectual neutrality; she would be learning, in fact, how to think like a man.8 Showalter's analysis of the process of irnmasculation raises a central question: "What are the effectsjjf thjs Jong apprenticeship in negative capability on the self-image and i( the self-confidence of women students?" And the answer is II self-hatred and self-doubt: "Women are estranged frorn^ 1 ' th,ejr own experience and unable to perceive its shape and authenticity. . . . they are expected to identify as readers , with a masculine experience and perspective, which is presented as the human one. . . . Since they have no faith m^the. validity of their own perceptions and experiences, rarely seeing them confirmed in literature, or accepted in criticism, can we wonder that women students are so often xxu Introduction timid,., cautioji^j^nd insecure when we exhort them to-j» /tfiink for themselves'?"9 " The experience of immasculation is also the focus of Lee Edwards' article, "Women, Energy, and Middlemarch." r Summarizing her experience, Edwards concludes: Thus, likejnost women, I have gone ^hrough, m^.. gntire -j ^MWIt'Pn—as both student and teacher—as a s^hizoghjcang ic^and I do not use this term lightly, for mjjdjjgjjfij^ the ''Mzarxc but logical cpnclusjpji.aLQu&education. Imagining v', myself male, I attempted to create myself male. Although I knew the case was otherwise, it seemed I could do nothing to make this other critically real. Edwards extends her analysis by linking this condition to the effects of the stereotypical presentation of women in literature: I said simply, and for the most part silently that, since neither those women nor any women whose acquaintances I had made in fiction had much to do with the life I led or wanted to lead, I was not female. Alien from the women I saw most frequently imagined, I mentally arranged them in rows labelled respectively insipid heroines, sexy survivors, and demonic..destroyers. As organizer I stood somewhere else, alone perhaps, but hopefully above them,10 Intellectually male, sexually female, one is in effect no one, nowhere, immasculated. ______<■■ Clearly, then, the first act of the feminist critic must be to ''■ becfime a resisting rather than an absenting reacTer and, by thiaxefusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us. The consequence of this exorcism is the capacity for what Adrienne Rich describes as re-vision—"the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction." And the consequence, in turn, of this re-vision is that books will no longer be read as they have On the Politics of Literature xxm "fgad and thus will lose their power to bind us un-ringlv to their designs. WKitewolffleft obviously cannot fjwwite literary works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality, we can_ acorratd^j^ame^he j'eality thfty do reflect and so change literary criticism from a closed conversation to an active dialogue. .(|tt making available to women this power of naming reality, feminist criticism is revolutionary. The significance OKuch power is evident if one considers the strength of the taboos against it: I permit no woman to teach . . . she is to keep silent. —St. Paul By Talmudic law a man could divorce a wife whose voice could be heard next door. From there to^Shakespeare: "Her voice was ever soft,/Gentle, and low-ah excellent thing in woman." And to (Yeats: "The women that I picked spoke sweet and low/ And yet gave tongue." And to Samuel Beckett, guessing at the last torture, The Worst: "a woman's voice perhaps, I hadn't thought of that, they might engage a soprano." —Mary Ellmann11 The experience of the class in which I voiced my discontent still haunts my nightmares. Until my face froze and my brain congealed, I was called prude and, worse yet, insensitive, since I willfully misread the play in the interest of proving a point false both to the work and in itself. —Lee Edwards12 The experience Edwards describes of attempting to communicate her reading of the character of Shakespeare's Cleopatra is a common memory for most of us who have become feminist critics. Many of us never spoke; those of usjjjj^ dlcT speak were usually quickly silenced. Trieneed to keep certain things from being thought and said reveals ^heirif^6ftance7'Feminist criticism represents the discovery/recovery of a voice, a unique and uniquely powerful voice capable of canceling out those other voices, so XXIV Introduction On the Politics of Literature XXV movingly described in Sylvia Plain's The Bell Jar, whiclf spoke about us and to .us and at us but never for us. Ill The eight works analyzed in this book were chosen for| their individual significance, their representative value, and their collective potential. They are interconnected in the ways that they comment on and illuminate each other, and they form a dramatic whole whose meaning transcends the mere sum of the parts.. These eight are meant to stand foxa, rnuch larger body of .literature; their individual and collective designs can be found elsewhere repeatedly. The four short storie$ form a unit, as do the four novels., These urtiTS"are~subdivided into pairs. "Rip Van Winkle" and "I Want to Know Why" are companion pieces whose ! focus is the fear of and resistance ffi|g6wihg upi The value of Anderson s story lies mainly in the light it sheds on Irving's, making explicit the fear of sexuality only implied in~~"KIp" and focusing attention on the strategy of deflecting hostility away from men and onto women. "The Birthmark" and "A Rose for Emily" are richly related studies of the consequences of (growing up and, by implication, of the reasons for the resistance to it. In both stories sexual desire leads to death. More significantly, they are brilliant companion analyses of that sex/class hostility that is the essence of patriarchal culture and that underlies the adult identity Anderson's boy recoils from assuming, '^he Birthmark" is the story of how to murder your wife and get away with it; "A Rose for Emily" is the story of how the system which allows you to murder your wife makes it possible for your wife to murder you. Both A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby are love stories; together they demonstrate the multiple uses of the mythology of romantic love in the maintenance of male power. In addition they elaborate on the function of ing evident fn "Rip Van Winkle" and "The mark." In its more obvious connection of the themes ofi&ye and power. The Great Gatsby brings closer to consciousness the^Kosulity "which~~A Farewell to Arms seeks to diiguise and bury. The Bostonians and An American Dream farm the most unlikely "and" perhaps the _ most. fascmating oTthe pairs. In both, the ottfi^ajto^ been cleared away and the issue of power directly joined. JaaiEfejxa«eI-describes a_._s_o.cial reality—male power. soc thaiinverts that reality. Yet finally, the intention of Mailer V mythology is to maintain the reality it denies. TheiMos— Umiaks forces the strategies of An American Dream into the open by its massive documentation of women's oppression, ' W.«W«-»-W,.1,,-___w_^^ and An American Dream provides the political answer to The Bostonians' inevitability by its massive, though unintended, demonstration of the ,fact.jhjat^^men's oppression grows notjoiit nf biology but out of men's need to oppress,. The sequence of both the stories and the novels is generated by a scale of increasing complexity, increasing consciousness, and increasing "feminist" sympathy and insight. |Thus, the movement of the stories is from the black and white of "Rip Van Winkle," with its postulation Qf igfjfflttl ffl'Y aTW* villain and its formulation in terms of iSSSCeni; fable, to the complexity 6T"A RoseTor Emily," whose action forces sexual violence into consciousness and demands understanding for the erstwhile villain. The movement of the novels is similar. A Farewell to Arms is as simplistic and disguised and hostile aF*^^ indeed, the two have many affinities, not the least of which is the similarity of their sleep-centered .protagonists who beheye that women are a bad dream that will go away if you just stay in bed long enough. The sympathy and complexity of consciousness in The Bostonians is even larger than that in "A Rose for Emily," and is exceeded only by xxvi Introduction the imagination of Aq American Dream, which is "feminist"! not be ..design. .ktttJby^default. Yet the deasion to end withr An American Dream comes not simply from its position on. the incremental scale. Ar^ AmericanJ)ream_ is 'JRip Van ^Wjnkle" one hundred and fiTtJjears later,, Intensifiecfto be sure, but exactly the sarhv'story. Thus, the complete trajectory of the immasculating imagination of American literature is' described by the movement from "Rip Van Winkle"XQ,An_ Americans is finally circular. This; juxtaposition of beginning and end provides the sharpest possible exposure of that circular quality in the design of our literature, apparent in the movements within and between works, which defines its imaginative limits. Like the race horse so loved by Anderson's boy, the imagination which informs our "classic" American literature runs endlessly round a single track, unable because; unwilling to get out of the race. ONE PALPABLE DESIGNS .^Jfour American Short Stories An American Dream: "Rip Van Winkle" V Washington Irving is reported to have spent a June evening in 1818 talking with his brother-in-law about the old days in Sleepy Hollow. Melancholy of late, the writer was pleased to find himself laughing. Suddenly he got up and went to his room. "By morning he had the manuscript of the first and most famous American short story, and his "Best single claim to a permanent^ reputation.1 The figure of Rip Van Winkle presides over the birth of the American imagination; and it is fitting that our first successful homegrown legend should memorialize, however playfully, the flight of the dreamer from the shrew— into the mountains and out of time, away from the drab duties of home and town toward the good companions and the magic keg of beer. Ever since, the typical male , protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or _ into combat—anywhere to avoid "civilization," which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility.2 Engendered in melancholy, released through nostalgia, and interchanged with sleep—what better place to begin 1 2 Palpable Designs than with Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," the story which marked the emergence of American literature at home and abroad, which began the long dream of our fiction, and which has become an inherent part of our national mythology. In writing "Rip Van Winkle," Irving adapted to the American scene, setting, and psyche the elements of a German folk tale, itself a version of a time-honored legend. In making this translation he produced a classic statement of character and theme in American lit-? erature. Aj>jlipjis_a protagonistwhom one will encounter t a^in and again ^ so his story!. presents the fantasy woven by our writers on the under-) side of our national consciousness, in subconscious coun- f terpoint to the official voice of our public rhetoric. j "Rip Van Winkle" is the dreamwork of the persona!, created by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, the inevitable consequence of the massive suppressions required by Franklin's code of success. The voice to which Rip gives ear is the exact opposite of the voice embodied in the Autobiography, with its imperatives for self-improvement and for constant and regulated activity, for a day neatly parceled out in preplanned units, goal- and future-oriented, built on a commitment to accumulation and an investment in the notion of progress. "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," cries Franklin, to which Rip responds with an infinite desire for sleep. lJ-£xax&lin\AiitQkberaphy represents .one, kincl of American success story, "Rip Van .Winkles xe^resenjts. another, for what his story records is the successful evasion of the demands and values that speak through Franklin. And if Franklin's book is a testament to how lucky it is to be an American, "Rip Van Winkle" is perhaps the first registering of a disillusíqnméiit with America as iďeä^ándTTäčt : which Mark Twain was later to articulate in the voice oT another famous villager, Pudd'nhead Wilson: "It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it." Four American Short Stories 3 2SJ^yiS'l-f°i™Ji^ti2B. °f n's classic American gtflgfetf the role he gives to women. The German tale on Mimsh he based "Rip" has no equivalent for Dame Van Wjjklftfshe is Irving's creation and addition. Irving's tale is extinguished from its source by his elaboration^ of the ff^daology behind the experience of protracted sleep, and this elaboration is in turn distinguished by women's involvement in it. What drives Rip away from the village and trp-into the mountains and what makes himja'fiESty, J>ar_ taker of the sljeejQ-indiiringJiqiinr 'is riis wife| all thejlls frojBuwhieh 4lip seeks escape are symbolically "located in ^pCffl^^ Van Winkle. Thus, an es»«&§ialjjart^t^ ^S^^^R^^PIS^L^^^^i^ as obstacle to the achievement of meTjj|jreamjpf pleasure; as mouthpiece for the values of work, responsibility facTulthood—the imperatives of Benjamin Franklin. Significantly, Irving's tale connects the image of woman with the birth of America as a nation and with the theme of growing up. Rip is the first in a long line of American heroes as "nigg., >§u^' He isa "great favorite" and is possessed of "univer-sal popularity." Eyerybody in the village loves him; children shout with joy at his appearance and not a dog will bark at him. He is kind, simple, good-natured, and meek. He is never too busy to join the children at their sports 01 to run errands for the women or to assist the men in their projects. Having no concerns of his own, he responds to the needs of others. In a Benjamin Franklin world, where everyone else is busy pursuing goals, Rip represents that summum bonum, a person with nothing to do. His popularly derives from his availability and from a concomitant self-effacement and meekness of spirit. There^ is one person with whom Rip is not popular, v^g^he~mir'not'serve, and whose demands go unan-sygrejjLlbal..isf course,^^w^^^£^mce of Mip's T*SStaRce to Dame Van Winkle is not laziness, for he will 4 Palpable Designs fish and hunt all day, tramping through miles of forest arii swamp, up hill and down. Nor is the source of his resis tance a distaste for work, since he is glad to assist in thi roughest toil of the community, whether husking Indiai corn or building stone fences. Rather, Rip resists Dam< What Rip rejects is the belief that the end of work is th accumulation of profit; what he resists is the imperativi "thou shalt make money." Inverting Franklin's pattern o: increment, the saga of the poor boy who begins with on! two loaves of bread and ends as one of the richest men i: the city of Philadelphia, Rip refuses to touch his patrima nial estate and has let it dwindle until it is nothing mon than a poor parched acre. Yet Rip's resistance is not simpl; to work as a way to profit; it is equally to work as a moral imperative—that which one ought to do as opposed to thatf. Four American Short Stories 5 of evasion. And what he evades, of course, is ithe war between the sexes, the war between the and the mother country. Rip rejects the conven-Spage of masculinity and the behavior traditionally d of an adult male and identifies himself with char-and behaviors assumed to be feminine and as-© women. Thus, the figure who "presides over the \lf|p(3frof^heAmerican imagination" is in effect a female-woman-hater. Here is a conflict whose evasion injures all of Irving's art—and gets it; for Irving is as dedicated to avoiding conflict as his hero, sinking the history of colonial conflict in the confusion of Dutch Hendrik with .English Henry, converting the tombstone connotations of R.I. P. and the death wish behind it to the fantasy of endless rebirth. Dame Van Winkle is the unsympathetic thorn in Rip's , • , . . j t) ■ ■„• „ , T exceedingly sympathetic side. She is the embodiment of all which one wants to do. Rip is wuung..to do everything except i , . , r r n i_ • u * u Lt t u- . ■ \ 1 j the values he reiects, the would-be enforcer of all the lm- what he ought to; his commitment is to pleasure and play. - . , . „ ! , n , • , i- i i —-~r ~~a ™ j peratives he is fleeing, the spoiler of his holiday, the Like his more famous successor, Huckleberry Finn, Rip > . ' ,, . * _ , _ . . wages a subterranean and passive revolt a^ajnstjjie enemy. "Rip Van Winkle" is one of the first American , •. • ... • j2Qok§ inwhTch man, nature, and beast (who is always male superego and its imperatives. •^-"^Vr—^ , , ' . ' , • , «,i • \ ,n ,,. ,"r w . . • • cr . r ,-. • -too—Rip would not go into the woods with a bitch ) are Rip s refusal to do what he ought is in effect a refusal to • i c i,.u u*xj if * r ' • „ sacfosanctly linked and woman is seen as the agent of be what he ought. He reiects the role of master, preferring . >*. 7, , , . , , . . T instead to be servant; no father to his children, he SfoJ®'^.^ t0 rePreS,S thlS ^"^i °PP°~ stead the playmate of others' children; his concept of polit- Sl^n to ^P's Pleasuf P"nciPle> Dame Yan Winkle is vol-ical responsibility consists of listening to the contents of ^le on the subject of work and on the value of practicality, months-old newspapers drawled out by the village Thf °PP™tion of Rip and Dame is extended to women schoolmaster and commented on by the puffs from m SeneraL In the °V*™s Pfragraph Irving Nicholas Vedder's pipe. Although a descendant of the Van "^-n W1VCS" ° th^Vllla^e regfd the Winkles, "who figured so gallantly in the chivalrous days of fC*tSklUs as Perfect barometers, enabling them to forecast Peter Stuyvesant," Rip has inherited little of the martial theJ fantasy figures from the dream past who play tives to be otherwise. Rip's idea of fighting is the passive m the Catskills are all male. Rip's "perpetual club of the 6 Palpable Designs sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of the lage" is all male too and is dedicated to the pure pleasur of sitting long afternoons in the shade and telling "endlea sleepy stories about nothing." Dame Van Winkle is linked to civilization and to th institutions which it is composed of in another way. She i connected to politics through the somewhat elaborate! metaphor of "petticoat government" and to America'! coming of age as a separate political entity by virtue of thi similarity between her behavior and that of the politico! Rip encounters on his return to the village; their shrill and disputatious tones are the very echo of the voice of tW termagant Dame. If women are bad because they are por* trayed as governmental, government is bad because it is portrayed as female. It is not hard—there are lots of pointers along the way—to get from Irving's Dame to Ken Kesey's Big Nurse, who is bad because she represents a system whose illegitimacy is underscored by the fact that she, a woman, represents it. In its simplest terms, the basic fantasy "Rip Van Winkle" embodies is that of being able to sleep long enougfrto avoid at once the American Revolution and the wife. The story imagines and enacts a successful evasion of civilization and of the imperatives of adulthood. Rip__skeps through those years when one is expected to bejgoj^ticgj^y, personally, and sexually mature and thus moves front the boyhood of youth to. jft&Jboyhood _ of .mjC^dLsgf^SaT promises to go on forever. In addition, he accpmrJiBes something else: access to.life in an all-male world, a wojld without women, the ideal American territory. Like Melville a half-century later, Irving invokes as playground a world which is perforce exclusively male—the world of men on ships exploring new territories. Rip encounters in the mountains the classic elements of American male culture: sport invested with utter seriousness; highly Four American Short Stories 7 I nonverbal communication; liquor as commu-p$nd the mystique of male companionship. In an act ^l^flynaraderie. based on a sure and shared instinct as to ttyfffie-expectancv of termagants, the little men provide flffi mnth the opportunity and instrument of escape. ..;The experience in the mountains, however, is not simply of evasion, culminating in the perfect communion of males; it is equally an act of invasion, carrying out on a ■lOFgw-Kale the pattern of Rip's "femininity" and suggest-ingth'at the secret source of his fantasy lies in a fear and envy of women. What Rip sees in the mountains is a reversal «rf the pattern that prevails in the village, for here it is men who invade female territory and dominate it and drive the women out. The material appended as postscript to the story gains its significance in light of this reversal. The postscript contains Indian legends, the first of which concerns the old squaw spirit who ruled the Catskills and "influenced the weather, spreading sunshine or clouds over the landscape, and sending good or bad hunting seasons." Rip's vision in the mountains displaces this legend, making men the gods of weather and relegating women to the position of mere interpreters of their thunder. "Rip Van Winkle" constitutes a patriarchal revolution in miniature in which men assume the powers previously accorded to women and female-centered myths are replaced by male-centered myths. Emblematic of this displacement, the legend of the old squaw spirit is appended as postscript, while the epigraph of the story is an invocation to Woden, God of Saxons, whose son and sometimes other self was Thor, god of thunder. When Rip awakens from his sleep in the mpuAtains, his first concern, kliis, wife—what excuse can he make to her for his "overmghj^' absence from home. This concern, however, soon gives way to a larger sense of unease. His clean, well-oiled gun has been replaced by a rusty old fire- 8 Palpable Designs lock with a worm-eaten stock; his dog is nowhere to bj found; there is no sign anywhere of the men hef encountered in the mountains or of the place where theyL played. Metaphorically as well as literally Rip, upon awak-f ening, is out of joint. Unease moves toward terror as Riri returns to the village and it becomes clearer and clearer toy him that the world he left is not the world he has returned! to. Like the Catskills, with which he has such an affinity,! Rip seems "dismembered," something left behind on ar great drive forward, onward, westward. With each suof ceeding encounter his sense of himself becomes more and* more confused until at last, when forced to identify him-i self, he can only cry, "I'm not myself—I'm somebody; else—that's me yonder—no—that's somebody else got into my shoes—I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the1 mountain, and they've changed my gun, and everything's changed, and I'm changed, and I can't tell what's my name, or who I am." "Rip Van Winkle" is a fantasy tinged with terror, a dreamwork with hints of nightmare. Yet itsT6rie~Ti~nnally one of reconciliation and incorporation. In "Rip Van Winkle" one can go home again. Rip's village eventually believes his statement that he means no harm, dismisses its view of him as lunatic or spy, and accords him the identity of returning hero. He is embraced as one who is connected by his age to what is now perceived as that more pleasant past before the Revolution and by his experience in the mountains to that still more pleasant past before America ever was, to that time when it was still an idea in the mind of Europe. He is the one who has rejected the identities handed to him, the "perfumes" of "houses and rooms" which Whitman resists at the opening of "Song of Myself"; who has experienced the fears attendant upon such a rejection, and who has nevertheless emerged as living proof that it can be done. He has indulged the communal dream of escape from all forms of responsibility and all the forces Four American Short Stories 9 ____;en the life of pleasure. Having slept through jpiears when adulthood is expected, he is allowed to iSQgiun now and forever a boy. Perceiving as he does that al||»at has happened in his absence is the exchange of one Qgopge for another, Rip inevitably suggests that the most meaningful relationship one can have to the Revolution is tpHbave slept through it. His experience in the mountains at once displaces the events of the Revolution and presents itM»|f as the logical substitute for them. The real act of ie hellion in Irving's tale is Rip's, and it is he who has enacted the real American Revolution. Thus, it is proper that he is recognized by the little men as one fit to join that long line of heroes who have disappeared into mountains where they sleep and wait until their time and world is xeady.3 ^HL^liaLis^woman.^^ojwithJlRirjJVan Winkle"? How is she to read our "first and most famous" story in which the American imagination is born if the defining act of that imagination is to identify the real American Revolution with the avoidance of adulthood, which means the avoidance of women, which means the avoidance of one's wujgi.Wfiajji^^the im^ac^of this American dream on her? The answer is obvious: disastrous. What is an essentially simple actjofidentification when the reader of the story is male becomes a tangle of contradictions wher^the reader is female,. Where IrTtlusi* story is the female reader to locate herself? Certainly she is not Rip, for the fantasy he em-bodies* is thoroughly male and*Ts" defined precisely by its Opposition to woman. ^pxiohjeJDame Van Winkle, for Dame is not a person: she is a scapegoat, trie enemy^the other. Without name or identity other than that of Rip's Dame, she is summarized, explained, and dismissed through the convention of stereotypes as a "termagant wife," a shrew, a virago. Because she is abstracted and reduced to a jJjexej*txaae~whose mechanism she endlessly re-Peats, her death .is_£re^oted_aj_ajpJ££_on that mechanism 10 Palpable Designs Four American Short Stories 11 and ig. viewed as a great relief. Dame Van Winkle is a ma.— "mechanism, not a woman. Wfiat, then, of her daughteij Jjidith, who takes Rip in where Dame threw him out ant! wKcTappears to be a pleasant akerna^ve„ttxJier.Jiiather] Yet, what is Judith really except her mother married t< someone other than her father? Marry her to her brotheL and, sure enough, you would have a daughter as like th^ mother as the son is like the father. The woman who reads "Rip Van Winkle" finds hersel excluded from the experience of the story. She is no parn of the act of resistance, nor does she recognize herself in! that which is being resisted. Indeed, the full extent of he exclusion can be seen in the fact that those qualitites whicl are potentially admirable aspects of the female role are1 assigned to Rip and made, positive because they are part of) his character, while what is negative about the male role is; accorded to Dame Van Winkle, who is made a masculine authority figure and damned for it. It would be nice if the female reader, upon realizing the dimensions of her exclusion from the story, could dismiss "Rip Van Winkle" as having nothing to do with her. Unfortunately, however, the story enforces a certain expert' ence on her. While not identifying with Dame Van Winkle, she nevertheless cannot fully escape the sense of being somehow implicated in the indictment of her sex thaT Dame Van Winkle represents. She cannot read the story without being assaulted by the negative images of women it presents. Primary among them is that view, as pervasive in American literature as it is in Western culture, of women as each other's natural and instinctive enejriies: "Certain it is that he was a great favorite among the good1-wives of the village, who, as usual with the amiable sex, took his part in all family squabbles and never failed whenever they talked those matters over in their evening gossipings, to lay all the blame on Dame Van Winkle." Surely this is one of Irving's nastier ironies, an example of lilip ___ Young calls his "whimsical antifeminism."4 „ real rub is the fact that the story forces the female *K> enact its definition of her sex. A woman reading __e" becomes perforce one of Irving's "good taking Rip's side and laying all the blame on Dame le; that is the way the story is written. The con- „___for the female reader is a divided self. She is Wo identify with Rip and against herself, to scorn the sex and act just like it, to laugh at Dame Van __und accept that she represents' "woman," to be at' . both repressor and repressed, and ultimately to re-:j|jat she is neither. Rip's words upon returning home ?his twenty-year evasion are ironically appropriate to ''I'm not myself—I'm somebody else—that's me ler—no—that's somebody else ... I can't tell what's m$hame, or who I am." iCjfce somewhat ironic tone Irving adopts toward his material might be adduced as evidence of a certain complexity to his immasculating imagination. He puts the story in tile mouth of Diedrich Knickerbocker, who has already beep, established as aiigure of fun in Knickerbocker's History of New York. The frame of the story makes us aware that there is more than one teller of this tale, and we would be wrong to miss the ironic Irving behind the dreamy Knickerbocker. The difficulty, however, is that Irving's irony seems finally a gesture, assop thrown to the critical faculties of his readers so that he may the more successfully float his fantasy. Irving is still committed to his dream and to the Jlfitifemihism underlying it, despite the fact that he casts it JiL^Joke- For however much he may mock Rip and protest Aat his tale is but a fantasy, Dame Van Winkle is still stuck with the stigmata of her shrewhood and the effect of Irving's story is still to make escaping her a national good, an American dream.