Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South

Women, Specularity, and the Poetics of Subjectivity

Claire Raymond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351872539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria gótica, romántica y de terror

Looking at works by Carrie Mae Weems, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston, Claire Raymond uncovers a pattern of femininity constructed around representations of sadistic violence in American women's literature and photography from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dickinson's poetry is read through its relationship to the Southern Agrarian critics who championed her work. While the representations of violence found in Carrie Mae Weems's installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Morrison's Beloved, Dickinson's poetry, O'Connor's 'A View of the Woods' and 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find, ' Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Café, and Hurston's Mules and Men are diverse in terms of artistic presentation, all allude to or are set in the antebellum and Jim Crow South. In addition, all involve feminine characters whose subjectivity is shaped by the practice of seeing acts of violence inflicted where there can be no effective resistance. While not proposing an equivalence between representing violence in visual images and written text, Raymond does suggest that visual images of violence can be interpreted in context with written evocations of violent imagery. Invoking sadism in its ethical sense of violence enacted on a victim for whom self-defense and recourse of any kind are impossible, Raymond's study is ultimately an exploration of the idea that a femininity constructed by the positioning of feminine characters as witnesses to sadistic acts is a phenomenon distinctly of the American South that is linked to the culture's history of racism.

Chapter 1

Empathy and Risk: Photography, Writing, the Softest Voice

There is a risk in the tactic of revealing the sadistic substructure of patriarchal racism. At risk, in this venture, is the very articulation of the figure witnessing the victimization of the other: indeed, she seems to be given the story to tell, or image to show, in exchange for entering a fragmentary moral badlands. In representing the witness watching the victim, Weems, Morrison, O’Connor, McCullers, Allison, and Dickinson’s works walk a performative tightrope—performing violence for an arguably still patriarchal audience while also critiquing that violence. But it is the power of the critique afforded by representation of violence that interests me most. Morrison’s Sethe, in Beloved, bemoans her capacity for clear sight—her capacity to see sadism and still not lose her mind. She asks why her mind won’t fold into what she imagines would be the comforting nullity of madness.¹ Even Sethe’s desperate and apparently mad act of slitting the throat of her baby, Sethe herself understands as a reasonable response to the scopic logic of the sadism of enslavement. It decrees that Sethe can only stop schoolteacher’s sadistic program by being more sadistic than he is, out-hurting the hurter. Importantly, this evocative claim (of out-hurting the hurter) does not refer to Sethe physically attacking the man who “owns” her, schoolteacher. It refers to her understanding of the power of the visual image, the gruesome tableau of slaughter with which she greets schoolteacher when he arrives to force her back into slavery.

Sethe performs in front of schoolteacher the only act of violence more extreme than his desire: the slaughter, as sacrifice, of an innocent infant. By performing in front of schoolteacher the visual excess of his desire for violent sadistic pleasure, Sethe stops him, briefly but crucially, from performing sadism. Morrison’s description of the act of a mother murdering her infant daughter functions as both commentary on and meta-performance of sadism. That is, just as Sethe acts violently to turn back the sadist, so also Morrison performs written descriptions of sadism extreme enough to turn back the residual pressure of racism that persists generations after slavery.

If Morrison makes clear that Sethe does not enjoy her capacity to clearly witness sadism through rememory, a process of acute, painful re-articulation of sadism, Horvitz, in Literary Trauma, turns to Jessica Benjamin’s very problematic belief that “‘domination is anchored in the hearts of the dominated,’” reviving Benjamin’s argument that domination is a “two way process.”² Benjamin and Horvitz contend that victims of sadism, although traumatized, also are actively in complicit, tacit agreement with their torturer. But the literary and photographic representations of sadism on which I focus in this study make clear that the victim of trauma is anything but willing. Sethe, for example, is depicted as passionately driven to escape this role of victim. Likewise, Dickinson’s violent poems depict victims seeking a space—usually posthumous—in which they can at last escape suffering. Dickinson’s poems of course do not deal with death in fact but with a topos called death in which the speaker gains a private secure place, safe from sadism. In the frame of the texts interpreted in this study, the complicity of the victim hypothesized by Benjamin would seem to be illusory. Indeed, the effort to escape victimization drives the representations considered in my study.

For example, in Dickinson’s poem “I never lost as much but twice, / and that was in the sod,” the trajectory of the speaker’s abjection is intertwined with her objection, her protest.³ The speaker loses to “God” in the poem, and Dickinson scandalously uses “God” to signify a sadistic and masculine enforcer of death and burial. This transmutation of the accepted, standard-usage meaning of “God” (typically signifying benevolence, absolute goodness and life) is given no explanation in Dickinson’s poem. The poem depicts a space in which cruelty and suffering occur de facto, unexplained. Suffering in the poem is inflicted on the speaker for the pleasure of the poem’s designated locus of power, “God.” Dickinson’s enraged speaker stands above the grave that represents metonymically her unjust suffering and rages against the systematic domination inflicted on her by “Burglar, Banker, Father.” The content of her rage is its context: the unexplained, unjustified fact of the speaker’s abject position, her repetitious losses.

Here, Dickinson’s “poor” speaker subjects to scathing revelation the unjust terms of her victimization. However, her victimization significantly is not primarily suffering inscribed onto her body but instead suffering inscribed onto the body of another that she witnesses. Dickinson’s speaker here describes with mathematical precision the equation of her sadistic deprivation. Imposed by a patriarchal force, enacted along the axis of her body’s vulnerability, her proximity to the grave, a mechanism of loss drives the poem. Significantly, the speaker in this poem is not the primary victim, in the sense that she is the one who buries others: hers is not the buried body. Rather, the buried other, rendered humiliatingly into “sod,” is the representation of embodied victimization in the poem. Here, the thin line between the witness and the victim is very thin indeed, for the speaker in Dickinson’s poem takes no pleasure in the suffering of the other. Her suffering is simply the experience of the other’s suffering.

And yet Dickinson’s speaker is an implicitly upright figure contrasting with the even more abject embodiment of those dead others she mourns. The speaker is liminal—feminized insofar as she differentiates herself from the overwhelmingly powerful and masculine “Burglar, Banker, Father,” and she is also feminized in that socially, in the poem’s world, she is powerless and “poor.” Here is the representation of a feminine character who is socially abject but is not an abject body—she is not buried and made “sod.” The speaker is made to suffer by the masculine force codified as “Burglar, Banker, Father,” specifically because she sees the suffering of the other inflicted by this trinity. The speaker is at once impotent and omniscient, capable of reaching the “door of God” but once at that door, able only to beg.

Dickinson creates the speaker by deploying the rhetorical strategy of describing a sadistic father, radical insofar as Dickinson could only expect a male audience (despite female readership) to determine the critical reception of her work; indeed men did determine the critical fate of Dickinson’s poetry, as I will explore later in this book. In choosing this extended metaphor of death as sadistic father (“God” as sadistic dealer of death) Dickinson codifies and represents a structure of sadism as a given, unexplained, of the world the speaker inhabits. As Horvitz argues, “when the dominant culture is patriarchal and racist the psychodynamic of sadism is most often enacted with white men in the role of the oppressor with women of color as well as white women in the role of victim.”⁴ But Dickinson’s poem, like Morrison’s Beloved, O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, and Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, deploys a third figure, neither white male sadist nor female victim, but feminine witness, a witness that chillingly reports the system in which the vulnerable other is turned into “sod,” humiliated or destroyed, by the powerful sadist. The witness reveals the annihilating quality of sadism, but this feminine character also erupts into a place of ambiguous, ethical determination, fissuring the comforting paradigms of sentimentality. She is “poor” and enraged, yes, but the quality of detachment that permeates the poem informs an ethical problematic that the following study seeks less to resolve than to illuminate and elucidate.

Ethics, After Nietzsche

What might be the ethical parameters of such witnessing as these artists deploy, such womanly witnessing of sadism, linked by image and evocation to the antebellum South and its residue? In this study I am less concerned with tracing the history of American slavery and Jim Crow (other works superlatively accomplish that task) than I am with tracking the ethical problematic of the representation of sadism generated by that system.⁵ If the works on which this study will focus have in common references to slavery and the aftermath of slavery in the American South, I want to sound out the echo of that connection by unpacking the formal gesture shared between, for example, Weems and O’Connor, a gesture of shocking the audience with horrifying images, images that the two artists link to the event and the residue of slavery and its sadism in the antebellum South.

Weems, Morrison, O’Connor, Allison, McCullers, and Dickinson invoke by direct and indirect citation the connection between the history of slavery in the American South and the performative act of women watching sadism. But they do not, strictly speaking, unearth new knowledge about slavery. Instead, they deploy the symbolic of slavery as rhetorical code for sadism (which in itself reflects that sadism was historically very frequently the treatment the enslaved received at the hands of the enslavers). O’Connor’s “A View of the Woods,” for example, culminates in a young girl being brutally beaten to death by her grandfather precisely because he does not see her as racially “pure”; that is, entirely stemming from his bloodline. O’Connor’s brutal short story exposes the regress to incest logically promulgated by racist policies against what was, in Jim Crow, called miscegenation.

“A View of the Woods” not only raises questions about the old man’s erotic pleasure in beating his granddaughter but also throws into relief a key problematic of watching sadism, that such watching may generate desire to act sadistically: early in the story, before he himself becomes the beater, the effeminized, powerless grandfather helplessly watches his son-in-law beat the granddaughter. Finally, at the story’s close, the grandfather steps into the role of the beater. The grandfather is feminized when he watches the little girl being beaten and feels powerless to stop her father from beating her.⁶ But when the grandfather becomes the beater, he is drawn by O’Connor as a bull-like figure, a bully, a figure terrifyingly claimed by masculinity.

The Image of Beating the Child

Freud’s essay “A Child is Being Beaten” differentiates just such categories: the body of the one who is being beaten, the body of the one who beats, and the gaze of the one who watches the beating.⁷ The resolution of the trauma of violence, for Freud, is to release oneself from masochism by refusing to inhabit the subject position of the beaten. But the problem with such a relational solution is that in a system like the patriarchy of slavery it is not always possible—structurally, socially—for the feminized subject to refuse to be beaten. Weems, Morrison, Dickinson, McCullers, Allison, and O’Connor reflect this site of the impossibility of refusal in their work by dramatizing and deploying the representation of the act of watching sadism. The solution to the problem of sadistic systems of racism and misogyny would seem to begin by representing the structure of the system, even as exposing this structure to sight as an act of representation carries the risk of replicating the system, repeating sadism as representation, as description, as image.

Consider this question of representation as reiterated through the lens of Lynne Tirrell’s analysis of ethics and context in art in her essay “Aesthetic Derogation.”⁸ Tirrell raises the possibility of the power of “words and images to create or to reinforce a social reality that is morally contested.”⁹ While I agree with Tirrell that the aesthetic context is a privileged space, it is also important to note that the very ethical ambiguity illuminated in Tirrell’s essay attends the work of the artists in this study. Diverging from Tirrell, I do not necessarily treat aesthetic context as an exception to ethics. While Catharine MacKinnon has been criticized for what is considered her unsubtle understanding of what representation is, her argument that depicting acts of erotic denigration could be ethically problematic cannot be disputed out of hand unless we believe that representation is an act outside the register of ethics, set apart from ethical concerns.¹⁰

For, clearly, some acts of representation are considered ethical or anti-ethical gestures. For example, consider the depiction of icons in Eastern Orthodox worship as a case in which the very act of creating and viewing the icon is believed by the faithful to be ethically correct, insofar as, for the Orthodox Christian, worship must be enacted through veneration of the icon, which is a sacred representation by virtue of being extant and being seen. Or, on the opposite side, pro-Nazi propaganda was surely a representation that no one now would argue occurred outside the realm of the morally reprehensible. If some representations fall clearly within the domain of ethical arbitration, then one cannot call simplistic Mackinnon’s theory that representation can be interpreted as an act to be judged ethically, regardless of whether one agrees with her choice of which images constitute violent acts in their effect as representation. My approach in this book is to consider the act of representing violence as itself a gesture that falls within the field of ethical concern and debate. It may not fall in a fixed and predictable way; regardless, the act of creating and consuming representation falls within the purview of ethics.

I have chosen to focus this study on work, such as Weems’s, that has achieved cultural prestige precisely because mine is a study concerned with ethics. And as Tirrell makes clear, we cannot interpret art as inhabiting ethical space unless we first interpret art as inhabiting a space of cultural power. In this study, then, I choose artists and writers who are arguably, if contentiously, considered central to our culture, at least in their status within their fields. The photographers and writers on whom this study focuses are women who have to varying degrees resisted the marginal status accorded the feminine in our culture (even as their work is not, in the main, interpreted as queer, they queer the traditional sentimental trappings of the feminine). My definition of sadism, as the annihilation of the capacity to speak and be meaningfully heard, makes central the way in which the antebellum South rendered impermissible, inaccessible, impossible the topos of agency and voice for the victim feminized by racist violence. In...