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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Every mention of her past life hurt.., like a tender place in the corner of her mouth that the bit left ....
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Investigating the imbrication of sexual and artistic passion developing within a matrix of violence and oppression, this essay looks at two first novels--Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)--and wonders if it is possible to save memories and preserve stories of horrific brutality without repeating them. Relying upon the disciplines of literary studies, psychology, and, to a lesser extent, history, I focus on the complex, commingled relationships between sexual trauma, its repression, and its potential healing through narration/ narrative. Within these "hysterical" texts, in which trauma is forcibly and violently enacted upon a female body, cultural/political/ historical factors merge with personal/psychological ones to induce experiences so devastating that we wonder how, even if, they can be endured. In Corregidora and Bastard, culturally instituted and legally sanctioned sadomasochism--slavery in the first text, class prejudice resulting in poverty in the second--becomes inseparably entwined with individual and psychological sadomasochism--domestic violence and incest in both texts--which situates each traumatized protagonist within a concatenation of circumstances unique to her social, historical, geographical, familial, and psychological experiences.(1) For Corregidora's Ursa, whose mind and spirit reside within the sociopolitical institution of slavery, although slavery ended one hundred years earlier, "ordinary" daily life is traumatic. Bastard's Ruth Anne, victimized by culturally sanctioned sadism in the form of poverty, is physically and socially deteriorating from hunger, beatings, and humiliation because of her family's "low" class status. Contextualized by and inextricably linked with these "external" traumas are "internal"/personal/domestic ones: Ursa is physically and emotionally abused by two husbands, and Ruth Anne is raped and repeatedly beaten by her stepfather.
Still, both novels emphasize the crucial need to understand and integrate one's past, especially when that story derives from and is embedded in sexual/violent trauma. Insisting that neither individuals nor cultures can survive if they are irreparably severed from their histories, Jones and Allison mandate Ursa and Ruth Anne (also known as Bone) to move forward into their futures without repressing or re-creating the sadism of their pasts. Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, whose clinical work and research focus on victims of domestic and political trauma, asserts, "Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims" (1). Interpreting what Herman calls "[r]emembering and telling the truth" to mean communicating the constructed story of the trauma without violently reenacting it, I suggest that narrative offers a unique possibility for healing. Not until the victim encounters and translates her "unspeakable" tragedy into "her" ,story can she envision a future devoid of violence. However, pivotal to the formal structure of these two novels is the fact that trauma works to subvert, if not entirely prevent, precisely this rehabilitative process, especially when its victims are traumatized again by being silenced. Thus each text becomes a meta-story centered upon the protagonist s search for and acquisition of story.
In Jones's Corregidora, Ursa literally journeys home to learn the heretofore secret story of her past from her mother. Significantly, she discovers that Mama's sexual life, like her own, has been ruined by slavery. The daughter and granddaughter of slaves, Mama is thwarted by her own grandmother's mandate that the women in the family bear children to whom they must repeat and pass on the story of slavery. Over the generations, this high-minded edict has deteriorated into robotic procreation devoid of sexual pleasure, and lost is the wish to preserve the past. At risk for Ursa is her identity as an artist, without which her physical survival is meaningless. For Bastard Out of Carolina's Ruth Anne, whose rape and ongoing beatings by her stepfather destroy her self-image and cause her to feel alienated or detached from her body, emotional survival depends upon salvaging her creative/sexual capacities and pleasures. Only if she unites her wounded and fragmented "selves"--her ravaged and, according to her, "ruined" body with her "other self" who wishes for love, sex, and artistic expression--can she have a future.
Psychoanalytic theory provides a useful framework with which to approach these intersecting questions of trauma, repression, healing, and narrative. The first part of this essay suggests a paradigm for discussing an aspect of a girl's psychosexual development, one that both converges with and diverges from Freud's theory that sexual difference and epistemology are linked. While Freud attributes the genesis of intellectual curiosity and the drive for knowledge, termed "epistemophilia' by Toril Moi (199), to the moment when a child becomes consciously aware of sexual differences, I do not believe that any single event exists as the site or the root of "original" or "primary" curiosity. In my view, when the little girl notices anatomical distinctions, her curiosity, in its drive to solve this mystery, can work to deepen her capacity for narrative. Rather than the trauma that, according to Freud, results when she discovers that she does not have a penis, I think that her awareness of difference leads to still another rewarding realization: a new or different use of narrative. Relying on story to satisfy her curiosity, and motivated by the ecstasy of "knowing," she resourcefully designs a plot to solve a confusing puzzle.(2) The second part of my argument examines Jones's text in the context of contemporary black feminist scholarship.
That "castration anxiety" and "penis envy" have disappeared as subjects of serious discourse does not mean that their resonance has evaporated from our culture's consciousness. Deconstructing aspects of Freud's assumptions regarding sexual difference and epistemology forces a head-on collision with his damaging conclusions that women's "lack" of a penis evokes their irreparable depression. According to Freud, the girl's first foray into the intellectual world, provoked by her need/wish to explain biological gender differences, is a traumatic confrontation with the fact that she does not have a penis. From this perspective, women's intellect and creativity are forever inhibited. Even more disturbing is that, without explanation, Freud yokes a woman's depression regarding her body's "lack" of a penis with her discovery or knowledge of that "lack." He writes, "The impression caused by this failure in the first attempt at intellectual independence appears to be of a lasting and deeply depressing kind" ("Leonardo da Vinci" 453); but is the "failure" her missing penis or her desire for "intellectual independence," or are they, to Freud, one and the same, meaning that anatomy is both biological and intellectual destiny?
To some extent, I rework Freud's erroneous idea that sexual difference is, for girls, a trauma. Instead, I think that it fascinates and evokes curiosity in children of both genders. That narrative has aesthetic form suggests that a child expresses the conundrum of "difference" artistically through story. The urge for a satisfying explanation of "difference," which, for an assortment of reasons, is not forthcoming from adults, inspires the little girl to imagine and narrate her own clarifying script. Indeed, as a puzzle, sexual difference stirs creativity, inviting children to use art in the form of stories to solve the incomparable mystery. Still, the ability to summon stories from within oneself presumes psychological freedom, an internalization of what D. W. Winnicott calls a "good-enough mother," which allows the little girl to move unencumbered between fantasy and reality. Such is not the case in either Corregidora or Bastard. For Ursa and Ruth Anne, the stories they ultimately come to "know" are buried in sexual sadomasochism.
At around age two, according to current psychoanalytic thinking, children recognize biological sexual difference in new ways.(3) Most likely, a young girl has seen the naked bodies of boys or men before but, cognitively, was not sufficiently mature for the dissimilarities to have explicit meaning in her conscious mind. That she can now translate earlier images into words evokes myriad feelings, including pleasure, desire, astonishment, and, most significantly, curiosity. Reacting to her new observations, the child "invents" narratives to demystify "difference." In this sense, fantasy/story--artistic creation--is inextricably encoded with her perception of bodily differences. Of course anatomical gender distinctions are "real," but the narratives that children conceive in order to understand those differences, unique to each girl's psychology,...
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