Otherness in The Holder of the World

Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World is a story about, according to the back cover, "Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, 'a person undreamed of in Puritan society.' Inquisitive, vital, and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal India, with her husband, an English trader. There , she sets her own course, 'translating' herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja." And while it claims to "deconstruct the barriers of time and geography," which in many ways it does, this novel fails in promoting an actual recognition, acceptance, and embrace of the theme of alterity that Jacques Lacan terms "the Other."

In many ways the novel does expose the ridiculous hatred of otherness, and challenge the hegemony associated with this construct, with examples of the relations and beliefs of Americans, Europeans, Indians, and Muslims and Hindus. First on page 13, Mukherjee talks about the difference between Puritan simplicity and Asian gaudiness and the ethnocentrism of Americans about this difference between us and them. On page 21she exposes the American view of Native Americans in the 17th Century: "they are children; they are trusting; they are proud and generous. Even capable of nobility. But at heart they are savage: bestial, unspeakably cruel." When Hannah is living in Fort St. Sebastian, India, she remarks on page 99 that the English separated "oneself from Them primarily by staying clean and upright: starched, dignified, sober, righteous and faithful...but the occasional misstep was not to be confused with the gleeful wallow of the Hindus and, only slightly above them, the Muslims." The Indians "all spoke different languages, they owed fidelity to different masters, they worshiped different gods..." and Mukherjee shows the difficulty in experiencing otherness by the fact that "It had been inconceivable to a Puritan soul like Hannah's," (100) "She had not been raised in a world of savagery, not on the scale of India. The vast inequalities, as well as the injustice and superstitions of India, seemed to her unnatural and unbearable" (237).

People feel comfortable with what is most the same, which is why, as Hannah says, the Hindus were hated more by the English than the Muslims: "Muslims seemed a more knowledgeable people than Hindus; Muslims' aversions and their attractions struck familiar chords with devout Christians. They had a heaven a hell...Their dialectic codes were harsh, but logical. The idea of Hinduism was vaguely frightening...English attitudes saw Islam as a shallow kind of sophistication; Hinduism a profound form of primitivism...[And so] Christians and Muslims tended to concentrate the opprobriums against the common Other" (212-220). Another kind of Other not accepted are the "disfigured" two-headed, six-legged humans and animals, the "freaks of nature [who] were given less opportunity to emerge and no comfort to thrive. And, of course, the authorities would not permit it" (173).

Despite this uncomfortableness, Hannah took "sheer pleasure...in the world's variety," showing that otherness is not as bad as it is wonderful. Hannah also is able to grow out of the societal values that have constructed her beliefs and finally accept, sympathize with, and admire her mother, who had followed her heart in the face of adversity and ran off with her (Other) Native American lover. Mukherjee deconstructs the ideals of American history, exposing the violence, hatred, and injustice all around: things that public schools don't typically teach. She also is deconstructing space in the fact that she is considering New England's relationship not only to England in the 17th century, but also India and "Other" countries. She compares the battle between New England and Native Americans with that of England and the Indians: "the story of the Coromandel Coast is the story of Europe, of white nations battling each other in outposts paved with gold. It is the story of North America turned inside out.

But despite these deconstructions and demystifications, she still practices some of the same white arrogance and doesn't fully accept all aspects of otherness. It isn't until Hannah becomes an outcast herself (215) that she can have a "moment's sharp awareness" (222) that brakes down the barriers of Otherness for her. She still portrays a type of white ethnocentrism, only enhanced by the fact the Mukherjee talks about fate and destiny several times throughout the book and what this means for the White Salem Bibi. Even the future Beigh Masters get a little kick out of thinking that the women in the painting are all struck by the white foreignness of the Salem bibi (and in turn all Europeans): "black-robed women with haggard faces tug loose edible tufts of samphire and sea grasses. I was right--they were fascinated by us" (16). So if Hannah did break down any barriers, this doesn't seem to have an affect on her descendant, also evident when she chooses to use the word "should" (meaning the right way) when describing how the painting is like an Indian dessert: "things fried that shouldn't be, hot that should be cold, sweet that should be tart" (19).

Near the end of the story Hannah is able to recognize the thin line of Other that causes the fighting between the Raja and Aurangzeb, so she takes on the task of "righting" (in the way Beigh used "should" earlier) their ways, as "Only a person outside the pale of the two civilizations could do it. Only a Woman, a pregnant woman, a pregnant white woman, had the confidence or audacity to try it. Besides the fact that realistically this would probably put her at every kind of disadvantage in that culture, the war is remembered as a war "fought over a diamond and the demands of an American lady." And Hannah is able to talk to Aurngzeb, try to push her ideals of peace and democracy on him, like "no man, no matter how powerful" (270) could have. This type of ideological way of writing about the American hero is very reminiscent of the message in Binyavanga Wainaina's How to Write about Africa. This is especially obvious on page 268: "The was the moment...when the gods that controlled the universe had conspired to put her Christian-Hindu-Muslim self, her American-English-Indian self, her orphaned, abandoned, widowed, pregnant self, her firangi and bib self, into a single message, delivered to the most powerful man those separate worlds had ever known. She stood."
(I realize that this may not be the main point of the novel, but it is something that interested me, and I want to apologize for you having to read so many quotes, but I really wanted to back up this argument with textual evidence!)

Hannah goes back to New England, as she couldn't change the war due to her own "otherness" and womanhood. Although she seems strong and resourceful at some moments, her lack of accomplishment in the end sort of outweighs that (Like Hester Prynee). Hannah returns to suffer the same stigma's (as Hester Prynne) associated with adultery, single-motherhood, and otherness. So in the end she is punished for her ability to embrace otherness? Some call Hawthorne feminist, despite his constraint of that feminism, because he was radical for that time, but in 1993 why tell the same story?

To the right is a video of Slavoj Zizek speaking about otherness. You can watch the whole thing if you would like, but if you skip to about 4 minutes and 45 seconds, he talks about the animation Shrek and I think this explains the point I am trying to make about The Holder of the World: The displacement in the work actually tells the same old story, the fact that she "re-makes" The Scarlet Letter is reactionary but it prevents us from asking, "Why not tell a different story," and in the end it does denounce the rejection of otherness but it simultaneously practices it.

Agency, Representation, Space, and Tactics and Strategies in Relation to "The Writer"

In Jane Juffer's Single Mother and Naomi Klein's No Logo, both authors portray, explain, deconstruct and expose, in their respective fields of interest (single mothers for Juffer; brands, logos, and marketing for Klein), agency, representation, space, neoliberalism, and tactics and strategies. But what do these themes mean in relation to us as writers and/or English majors?

Agency is the power or operation of action: the ability to do something.  A writer is someone who has agency to represent those who cannot represent or advocate for themselves, such as single mothers who do not have the space, the time, or the energy. And such as 15 year old girls working in factories along the U.S.-Mexico border where they are too young, uneducated, and poor to quit their jobs and so they suffer the abuse and long hours for little pay in order to survive. Writers have the ability to write and use language in order to make our point understood in the most clear and succinct way possible, or to be verbose in order to "show our intellect," or to be creative and to set a tone and pace that fits our agenda. As writers who are able to be published in scholarly outlets, we also have agency due to "credibility" and "authority" in our field of study or research. The point of agency is not just to have all of this ability, we need to take action and do something about it! Klein is a great example of this as she is a journalist and uses her agency to write books such as No Logo that deconstruct a system in society that a lot of people are not aware of or don't care about because they don't realize its agency and what the effects are.

Representation often produces and reinforces complicated and hegemonic stereotypes which can either empower or dis-empower certain people or groups. This often becomes a tricky problem for English majors and writers because while we are deconstructing representations of people and groups in many different types of spaces and communities, thereby becoming knowledgeable and credible on these topics, we are often dis-empowered by the public sphere because we are represented as idealists, flowery poets, experts in the humanities but novice or impractical about our expectations and ideas for the "real" world. So while we may be represented as smart, we are often looked at by other departments or majors as "useless." While we all know this is highly false and kind of stupid, it does sadly affect our power of agency, especially in the public sphere and government. Especially when the representation of fictional writing and films scripting is determined as "Oh, it's not a big deal, it is only entertainment." Wow.  This literature is not just entertainment, it can have and has had HUGE affects on cultural work and changing society(i.e. Uncle Tom's Cabin--Challenged Slavery, The Scarlet Letter--Promoted Feminism (at least in opposition to The Coquette), The Godfather--Thin line between right and wrong, 1984-Exposes totalitarian regimes....and the list goes on indefinitely.)

Space is something that I have briefly mentioned already in this post because in many ways it relates to all of my other topics. It makes sense that events in our lives and our agency is very dependent on spaces; spaces we inhabit, work, study, play, think, etc.... For us in the university, we have a space in which we can freely discuss and challenge "the outside" world, politics, government policies, social norms, representation, and so much more. This physical space opens up a metaphorical "safe" space to do all of this. Also, journalists have the work space in order to research and write. But for those who work, have children, socialize casually but do not have a space, such as the university, to openly discuss and challenge the constructs of society around them. How can they challenge their government if they don't have a space to meet with others, nor the energy and time to put into it? They can't because they need to keep their jobs and their livelihood. How can they challenge their employer, who used factories overseas to eliminate the cost of production labor? They can't or they will be canned. Although they may disagree with certain things, it would be irrational for them to put that before their livelihood, especially if they have others to care for. Juffer does a great job of exposing this for single mothers, who need to be concerned with the well-being of their child in addition to themselves. We've also discussed space as it involves the government, public, and private spheres. The public sphere is supposed to be the connection between the other two spheres, but there is always a great division between what is real and what is ideal in all of these. This lack of communication between them causes definite problems for those not adhering to the Nuclear family (i.e.The Golden Girls), especially those of us who are able to see the benefits and practicality of alterity to the nuclear family in many circumstances.They use legal structures such as tax cuts and health-care laws to promote marriage and having children. By promoting this, they are in many ways illegitimizing any other sort family or familial-type support center. So even though this could be workable and beneficial to many different people, including those of us (English majors) who can recognize it, most of us will still get married because of the market incentives to do so and the "rational"-ness of it. (Not saying that the Nuclear family isn't what might work best for some people, but it excludes the needs of a great portion of the population).

Tactics and Strategies sometimes seem to mean the same thing, but they are actually different. Tactics are ways in which a writer can respond to and operate within the spaces that they are given to create, but also those that limit them. In literature we can layout the problem, expose it, deconstruct it, pose solutions and alternatives, much like Juffer does in the case of representations, space, and agency of single mothers. She also does this by demonstrating, in her example of the Puerto Rican mothers, the effectiveness of forming networks and groups for help. They are finding a way to work within the system. Strategies are different from tactics in that they actually reorganize space rather than just responding within it, like Naomi Klein's example of re-organized sweatshops "taken" from the bosses by the workers. With strategies you don't only pose an alternative, but you create one that no longer works within the system. In relation to literature I think that writers are able to be strategic and tactical by not only writing their ideas down but using their agency and putting them into ACTION.

Writing as an Edge Species

Chapter 10 of the Theory Toolbox begins by asking does the race, gender, ethnicity, class, or sexual preference of a cultural producer like an author, a filmmaker, or an artist, or that of the reader as subject, make any difference in the interpretation of mass media, history, or literature? Do the categories of sexual, racial, economic, and ethnic difference make a difference in our reading and writing of the world? Can a straight white male banker from London even read or understand the poems of a poor lesbian from Haiti? Is any identification possible from such disparate subject positions? These are all very good questions that lead me to wonder if it is possible for an outsider to write as if they are on the inside, or to write about characters who are in the inside, and avoid scrutiny for doing so, for "pretending" to have that knowledge. How can someone from the outside ever write with the knowledge from someone on the inside, and if they do are they judging, misinterpreting, or using this as a strategy for their own means?

Binyavanga Wainaina's How to Write about Africa would seem to answer yes. This article tells you exactly how not to write about Africa by exaggerating, or maybe not really exaggerating but just exposing, how people do take advantage of writing about Africa: "Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshiped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed." This leaves me with the impression that maybe the only people that can acceptably write about Africa, whether about the good or the bad, are people from the inside: people who have been born there, grew up there, and lived there their whole lives. This also brings me back to earlier topics of whether the author matters or if the text is the most important thing to look at when interpreting and examining writing. I personally thought that the reader, the author, and the text matter. So does this mean that I could never write about a different culture even if I studied it because I am an outsider? And does this depend on if I am writing fictional or nonfictional stories? Does Wainaina only mean fictional stories when she talks about how outsiders use common themes of Africa to portray one certain image, or is nonfiction included in this also?


I went to a conference on undergraduate research this week and one of the keynote speakers was Anne Fadiman. She spent 8 years researching and writing a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures. This book chronicles the struggles of a Hmong refugee family from Laos, the Lees, and their interactions with the health care system in Merced, California. Lia Lee, the youngest daughter, is diagnosed with severe epilepsy. Through miscommunications about medical dosages and parental refusal to give certain medicines due to mistrust and misunderstandings, and the inability of the doctors to have more empathy toward the traditional Hmong lifestyle or try to learn more about the Hmong culture, Lia's condition worsens and she becomes brain dead. In the Hmong religious belief of shamanistic animism, epileptic attacks are perceived as evidence of the epileptic's ability to enter and journey momentarily into the spirit realm. This ability is often considered an honorable condition and many Hmong shamans are epileptics and teachers. The book discusses broader themes of Hmong culture, customs, and history; American involvement in and responsibility for the war in Laos; and the many problems of immigration, especially assimilation and discrimination. While particularly sympathetic to the Hmong, Fadiman presents the situation from the perspectives of both the doctors and the family, whom she spent much time with over the course of her 8 years of research. And in the end, Anne says that Lia did grow up to be a teacher. She taught Anne and changed her life, and at that university she was teaching all of us.

So is this similar to How to write about Africa or is it different? I was happy when Anne actually addressed this during her speech. She says that the essence of research is finding out something you don't know, but you shouldn't pretend as if you are writing from the inside. Anne is white, mid-upper class New Yorker writing about a Hmong family in California and obviously vying for the side of the Hmong and the need for intercultural competency skills in the medical field. She says that men can write about women, blacks about whites, straights about gays...etc and vice versa because people always have the right to research (and I believe she is only discussing research and nonfiction here, fictional portrayals from the outside may be viewed differently without research, I really don't know?)

And Anne never states this as a requirement to writing from the outside, but she does explain how being an edge species has helped her in her research. An edge species (i.e. skunk) is one that lives on the edge or border of two very different environments. She thinks that being looking from the edge has given her a better understanding and view than she would have had being at the center of any one culture. But even so, 1/3 of Anne's emails are negative and criticize her for writing about the Hmong, part of her story being from their perspective, because they want the Hmong people to be able to write their own story.

She left us with some advice when encountering people whose backgrounds are different from your own: Do not retreat into the safe comfort of your own culture when you are stressed. See things from the other point of view and see people as individuals and not only members of a culture. Accept that you have your own culture with baggage. Try to find things in common.

So, for those of you who will comment on my post, please tell me if you think Anne is doing just what How to write about Africa teaches not to do, or if there is a way to write about a culture from the outside?

Derrida and Ethnocentrism

From looking at Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences, we can see
similarities between both the theories of Derrida and Lacan (discussed in my previous post). They both argue that the signifier and the signified, totality and transcendental meaning, is always the metonymic play of figurative language. This includes metonymic desire specifically, even if we cannot pinpoint the exact center of that desire, Derrida argues that it is usually focused on discovering/defining Being as presence. Another similarity between the two theorists is that they think we understand ourselves through others, by what we are not, and this could be looked at as a violent action in many ways because we are loading signifieds onto signifiers in different cultures, species, genders, etc...in ways that may not be accurate  from a different viewpoint. It may actually be very prejudice the way in which we put meaning on things to differentiate ourselves from them.

In his article, Derrida says that ethnology "comes about within the element of discourse...the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them." Derrida argues that in order to deconstruct something, one must integrate and borrow  from the heritage of the very thing that is being critiqued. What I want to look into here is the concept of ethnocentrism which dictionary.com gives two different definitions for: 1) the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own ethnic group or culture and 2) a tendency to view alien groups or cultures from the perspective of one's own. I think that today, a lot of people would like to either deny or ignore the fact that they, whether they realize it or not, practice this more often than they would like. In the United States it seems that we are at a time when more often than not, people are pushing for equality and reduction of prejudice and stereotypes, yet so much of it still goes on. I think a big part of this has to do with that fact that many people are looking at the world and at others through their own perspective or the perspective of their own culture. You may ask, well how else could anyone look at something if not from their own perspective? Education is the key here, if you don't understand a signifier that belongs to a different culture, if you haven't tried to understand the viewpoint of someone from that different culture, then it really isn't fair to judge.

This brings me to what I learned about the hijab and the abaya on my trip to Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Sharjah for a Conference on Women as Global Leaders. This topic was actually brought to my attention even before I went on this trip from this blog post by my professor on ninja women in Iran and Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign. He explains my point perfectly when he says that "In European and American culture, the sign of the veil is typically understood as a symbol of Islam’s oppression of women. In this sense, the veil and headscarf is understood by the West as a sign of difference –how they are different from us. Many connotations are attached to this one symbol, and it is somewhat famously controversial, but the strongest connotation for Europeans and Americans is oppression." I personally, even if I didn't mean to, tended to view the hijab in the same way that most Americans do. I am so glad now that I traveled to the United Arab Emirates and was actually able to talk to and make friends with real women from the UAE that wear the headscarf and the abaya.

Although some women may not like to wear the hijab, my friends told me that they do not have to, although I would imagine there would still be pressure from the culture and families to do so. But all of the intelligent and strong women that I actually spoke with said they liked to wear the hijab and that it is not only an important part of their Muslim culture, but a very important part of their religious Islamic beliefs. Men that also follow their religious beliefs too wear their traditional clothing which includes the thawb (much like a long white robe) and a headscarf.

American and European culture tend to view the hijab as a sign of oppression only because it is not how they themselves choose to dress, and this is a form of ethnocentrism. And although many women of the Arab world do suffer oppression from the governments of certain countries (for example, in Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to drive or travel without a male escort) this really has nothing to do with their religious decision to wear the hijab. And since no one can or has discovered the center or truth of relgion, who is to say what religion is wrong or right or what people are wrong for following what they believe in. Women in the UAE make up more than 60% of college graduates and, after visiting and learning from women of the region, most do not feel nearly as oppressed or inferior in their culture as Americans and Europeans naively believe.

See the below videos if you would like to learn more about how actual women who wear the hijab view it:

Metonymic Desire

According to Lacan, in his The Agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud, the unconscious contains the whole structure of language and is not merely the primordial instincts (or the id) that many people confuse it to be. He talks about how language is structured by the signified and the signifier, the big Other and the little other, and he also demystifies Descarte's, "I think, therefore I am," but what most strikes me, and is most comprehensible to me in this difficult text, is his conclusion about psychological symptoms and desire. Lacan's thesis is that the symptom of existence is metaphor and desire is metonymy. We don't actually know what we really want and the objects that we think we want create the desire in the first place. Our subconscious is always produced by a metonymic chain of desire but we can never truly be satisfied because we will continuously look for the next desire, what we actually desire, and the next after that and the next after that.  The metaphor is how all these metonymies get condensed into objects of desire. We believe that we will be more complete if we fulfill the longing of X object, but the X itself creates wanting (desire or lack of having) in a person and leaves the person more incomplete than anything.

Human kind never seems to be 100% content, whatever they aren't or whatever they don't have creates a continuous chain of additional longings. This is very similar to Freud's concept of displacement in dreams and how Kate Chopin shows the metonymy of desire in her Silk Stockings.  The pair of silk stockings that this poor woman desires metaphorically represent wealth, comfort, stability, etc. . .(a lot of what Freud terms as Condensation). When she goes on her crazy spending spree, that she really can't afford, all the other objects she buys are not symbols of wealth, comfort, etc...only the silk stockings are. Each other thing is a metonymy for the silk stockings and represent an insatiable, metonymic chain of desire similar to Lacan's theory and, as I already mentioned, Freud's theory of how dream works are a type of constant displacement.

As I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, it seems that Lacan's conclusion about the metaphor symptom and metonymic chain of desire is evident in Hawthorne's analysis of Puritan society, or rather our analysis of what we think is Hawthorne's analysis. The scarlet A takes on several meanings throughout the text (adulterer, admirable, etc...) but the people of the story don't notice the metonymic chain of desire that this signifier implies. The townspeople desire to punish Hester for her sin of passion yet by putting themselves contrary to her, by positioning what they are by what they are not (like Hester), they also desire the same indulgent passion that is foreign to them. This can be seen in their desire to purchase Hester's rather extravagant embroidery symbolic of rich, sultry, "sinful" indulgence. Although they see the same signifier of embroidery on Hester's A, they do not see their unconscious, metonymy of desire for indulgence and sexual freedom in their desire for her embroidery. Also, we know that the Puritan society does deem her embroidery as some sort of sinful taboo because they won't use her embroidery for the white veils of brides.

Lacan says on page 171, "The intolerable scandal in the time before Freudian sexuality was sanctified was that is was so 'intellectual'. It was precisely in that that is showed itself to be the worthy ally of all those terrorists whose plottings were going to ruin society." Such "terrorists" (and I think Lacan is being funny here) as Hester Prynne who challenge the boundaries of society. This is exactly how the puritans intend to use the A to punish and restrict Hester, yet metonymic desires pop out throughout the text and this leads me to think that Hawthorne is making a critique of this Puritan mindset and persecution of otherness. 

Take Roger Chillingworth for example, his revenge against Dimmesdale, who wronged his marital bond with Hester, becomes a wrath that seems almost hyper-sexual and sinful. I think that, on the surface, Chillingworth wants to punish their crime done against him, but his metonymic, unconscious desire is actually driving him. It is possible that he is so wrathful because of his own sexual impotency, which is why he actually seeks to punish Dimmesdale phsycially (his health), as well as mentally and emotionally, because Dimmesdale shamed him with his "manhood"; satisfying and impregnating the wife that Chillingworth could not. Further, it is what Chillingworth desires to declare as other (Dimmesdale and adultery) that he really desires because it is what and where he is not. Addtional evidence for his sexual incompetence is his old age, his blindness and impassiveness at leaving Hester for two years, and his stated physical impairment. The story never talks about any sexual relationship between the two, we know he was a devout scholar and that was his only real passion, and we also know, obviously, that Hester was never impregnated by him. So, Chillingworth's desire to ruin Dimmesdale does not come from his superficial desire to avenge his marriage, but from his jealousy and metonymic desire to avenge his sexual impotency.

This video is a an interpretation of what is going on with Chillingworth throughout the story. I consider this song by Hoobastank in this sense to be addressing Chillingworth's unconscious desire. Notice how the song says, "what should I do...I don't understand what you want from me...I may never know the answer to this mystery." I think this reflects the continuous metonymic chain of desires that the wanting person can never realize or know and the demands and consequences felt by this person.

The Signifier and the Signified: Language as a System of Signs

In Hans Bertens's Language as a System of Signs,  he describes Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857-1913) ideas about structuralism and its relationship to language: Language should be seen as a system of signs. Those signs are inherently arbitrary but form meaning by becoming conventions as we begin to associate or assign meaning to them. The form of the sign and the meaning cannot be separated because if you change the sign, as from "day" to "ray," it completely changes the meaning. Saussure calls the form,or sign, the signifier and the meaning the signified. Berten goes on to explain how Levi-Strauss shows that these signs do not naturally signify an object or an idea because we are the ones that create the signified by culturally differentiating what it is not.

This relationship between the signifier and the signified reminds me of a certain chapter in Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues called Reclaiming Cunt, where the speaker tries to change the signified of the signifier "cunt" from something insulting to something sexually empowering. Click here to listen to a reading of Reclaiming Cunt. Last year I was in a reading group that focused on The Vagina Monologues and, at the time, this was probably the one chapter that I did fully not understand, feel comfortable with, or agree with. But after learning more about language and its system of signs, I see that Eve Ensler herself understood this theory and was right in calling out the arbitrariness between the word "cunt" and its typical connotations. I also now appreciate this chapter because, as it is signified today, "cunt" is typically derogatory and extremely insulting towards women.

But how people use "cunt" today is quite different than in the 13th Century and this illustrates how the signified is determined by convention. So theoretically, yes, Eve Ensler could completely reclaim "cunt" because if popular culture began using the word in a more positive manner, then the signifier "cunt" would take on a whole new signified because, as I said before, their relationship is absolutely arbitrary. Below is a video that really drives this point home and gives you two different perspectives to look at (Caution: "Severe" language).


Notice how the man in this video does not address the concept of language itself as a system of signs, as does the woman (and by the way I think she is really funny in this clip and her attitude reminds me of Hawthorne's sarcasm in The Custom House). Think of her as a theorist, and him as American culture. However, he does bring me back to a previous blog of mine about authorship and whether or not history and culture play an important role in meaning. And of course they do, you wouldn't want to call someone a cunt if it was offensive to them, just because, for you personally, the signified is empowering. Language does change over time, but I think it is a much more difficult process for curses or insults. At least, it is a difficult process to completely reverse the meaning, as Eve is attempting with the sign "cunt." For example the signifier "suck" used to be used as a derogatory sign insinuating oral sex (an act that deemed one lowly or vulgar). But now, children and adults alike use the word to signify when something is bad or goes wrong. So should we use the word "suck" this way? It seems to me that the time, convention, and culture do such an efficient job of changing language that a signifier can shed an old signified and create a new one. Unless you asked a scholar who has heard about the old signified of "suck," it is probably perfectly acceptable to use in popular culture.

Ideology in Disney's Pocahontas

Ideology is used as a way to mystify real, concrete conditions into intertwining beliefs that make possible certain kinds of cultural consensus or knowledge. Ideology tends to be prescriptive in that it contains notions of how things ought to be. Anything that is ideological in this sense seems to solidify our "common sense" notions of right and wrong in relation to various topics such as freedom, progress, justice, etc. . .even though our ideal notions usually do not reflect reality.

In this post I will attempt to demystify some ideologies portrayed in the Disney animation Pocahontas: peace and nature, intercultural relationships, beauty, and the concept of the heroine.

The song "Colors of the Wind" compares the Native American's appreciation for nature with the Western dominance and destruction of nature. As we learn, peace with nature is indisputably good, and anyone who doesn't agree is barbaric. And even though we can see the paradox that it is the western civilization that is barbaric and not so much the Native Americans, the lyrics to the song "Savages"  uses drama and racism and shows the savageness of both groups of peoples (as well as using offensive stereotypes). From this movie we learn an alternate version of history where these two different cultures, who aren't actually so different from each other, learn to respect each other as equals. But the true history of this time period (which I won't detail as I am sure you have taken classes in American History) demystifies this ideal of peace, love, and nature that Disney promotes. Especially relating to what I said above about how Disney portrayed both groups of people as savages, when really it was mainly the Westerners who massacred and took advantage of the Native Americans. Also, although the Europeans are portrayed as "wrong" or "bad" in the film, it is ultimately the Europeans who we are tricked into commending at the end of the movie for growing from their mistakes and learning how to treat the Native Americans with respect and equality.

Out of all Disney "princess" animations, Pocahontas is said to be one that progressively promotes intercultural relationships. Pocahontas and John Smith seem to overcome their differences and fall in love. But this progressive move for Disney seems to not be quite so progressive when Pocahontas is the one Disney "princess" that doesn't get to keep her "prince-charming" at the end of the movie. So although it's possible to fall in love inter-racially or inter-culturally, Disney tells us that a lasting relationship is nonsensical. Pocahontas must stay with her people and John Smith must go back to his.

Lastly for this post, the ideology of beauty and what that word means in relation to women and physical appearance is blatantly expressed here, as it is in all other Disney princess films. As it is portrayed here, "beautiful" means slender and big-breasted with long flowing hair: your standard barbie. Also in relation to women, while Pocahontas is an independent and strong heroine, the men in her tribe don't take her seriously, no one considers her opinion in an arranged marriage, and she is merely being shifted between different patriarchs (whether her father, Kocoum, or John Smith).

Subjectivity to Culture Gives Importance to a Liberal Education

It is the opinion of Stanley Fish (shown to the right) that "all objects are made and not found, and that they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion" (331). To the right, Fish is giving a speech about the importance of a liberal arts education. In this video he emphasizes many points that he makes in his How To Recognize a Poem When You See One. Readers, and authors, are created from their cultural situations and this will always influence interpretive communities. Some think that readers make meanings, but it is also true that meanings make readers first. And since cultural meanings change over time, so do readers and the meanings of literature.

This is exactly why the liberal arts are critical in education. It not only teaches the history of meaning, but the way it transforms and holds importance now (Fish uses the example of Hamlet in the video) . Without this type of education, we lose out on that fantastic phenomenon and become prey to cultural influences. This may be consequential. For example, we wouldn't know when we were being manipulated by marketing or what that manipulation says about ourselves and our culture. If we can't analyze our past and present, how can we make anything productive of our future? In addition, if we don't know how to acknowledge the different opinions that diverse interpretive communities hold, how will we know opinion vs. fact if an authority figure only gives one cultural community's point of view?

I think that this is a major reason for continuing ignorance about racial, gender, social, sexual, etc... issues that people are faced with everyday. A lot of hatred in this world is a result of misunderstandings and miscommunications between different interpretative bodies (whether political or social) that have not been educated about where meaning and subjectivity comes from and why people hold different views about the same issues. The focus is aimed too much on the fact that they do think differently, not why or how an understanding could be obtained.

This is such an important topic, because even when one learns about the roles of the author, the reader, and culture it is still impossible to look at a work with complete objectivity because we are made subjects before we ever begin to interpret other subjects. Therefore, we will always still be influenced by culture in some way. For example: wearing one brand of clothing vs. another. We will choose this based on our opinion of ourselves and our opinion of others who wear the same brand and what that brand represents culturally. And even though we remain subject, at least we can be aware of it, and therefore aware of its meaning and what that says about us as selves. When we have the ability to analyze ourselves this way, we can change for the better!

What does it matter who is speaking?

In response to T.S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, Roland Barthe's, in The Death of an Author, proposes that a "text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination" (148). It is the reader, rather than the author, that gives meaning to a text. But if this is true, then can we forget the author entirely and, therefore, forget the context in which his or her words were written? Can we look solely at the words in The Custom-House sketch and take it seriously when Hawthorne wrote them as satire? No. Of course it is possible to make an interpretation (psychological, gender-based, etc. . .) of the text itself if one chooses, but to ignore the historical context would erase the original purpose. It is quite possible that one could make a fool of oneself by quoting a phrase or using a symbol that actually means the opposite. Maybe this doesn't matter. We use Dr. Martin Luther King Junior as a symbol for Civil Rights and to promote American tradition, yet the concept of using him as such demotes what the man stood for. Maybe, as long as we take meaning from the words, it doesn't matter what the author originally intended for his work because we can use it for our own purpose.

Even if Barthes had agreed with Eliot, Hawthorne's sketch and Danticat's  Create Dangerously show us that pinpointing an author's intended meaning and context can be an impossible task. Hawthorne teases his readers with an image of himself that he claims to be true, but then he shows us that we will never know his true-self. Danticat presents the idea of the immigrant writer. Her friend, a Haitian novelist, published a book called I am a Japanese Writer. And when asked if he is a Haitian or Japanese writer he replied, ". . .I took the nationality of my reader, which means that when a Japanese reader reads my books, I immediately become a Japanese writer."

It would seem that the author is indeed dead. It is possible to grasp a text without considering the origin. But does the author really hold no importance? In What is an Author, by Foucault, he says that "if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions," and thereby, his work. With this, I think that the author does hold significance for a text and for the readers because it is how they classify and authenticate what they are ingesting. Although this proposition may not hold absolutely necessary, it is one of the functions of an author.

For example, the popular "reality" television series The Hills follows the personal lives of several young adults living in Los Angeles, California. Many a fan did defend the authenticity of the word "reality" and consumed the show as a "real" depiction of protagonists' lives. Others were less convinced and claimed that the young adults in the show were not the authors, or writers, of their own lines and circumstances. They claimed that a production team was behind everything. Possibly a little research could have cleared this up for many, but so many were enthralled with the experience of watching this "reality" show that they neglected to do so. Even if they knew that some aspects of the show were fake, they still clung to the word reality.

On the last season finale, the truth of the reality show was blatantly revealed and, shockingly, many couldn't believe it. This sharp reality (pun intended) hits the viewer just after they finish a nostalgic slide-show of past moments on the show. So can the concept of the author still affect readers/watchers? Discovering that the reality series was not so real changed the context in which the fans experienced the show. The "author" of the series was no longer the person on the show but a writer behind a desk. The author can still matter, to an audience of reality shows anyway. This is recognizable in the way that E News! has advertised the "scandal" that suggests the reality show The Jersey Shore may be scripted.

Below is a clip from the last episode of The Hills. Wait for the moment at 1 min and 10 seconds. If you wish, you may skip to this part.