The Songs of Joni Mitchell

Gender, Performance and Agency

Anne Karppinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472465948
• eBook ISBN: 9781317015123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica folk

An unorthodox musician from the start, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell's style of composing, performing, and of playing (and tuning) the guitar is unique. In the framework of sexual difference and the gendered discourses of rock this immediately begs the questions: are Mitchell's songs specifically feminine and, if so, to what extent and why?

Anne Karppinen addresses this question focusing on the kind of music and lyrics Mitchell writes, the representation of men and women in her lyrics, how her style changes and evolves over time, and how cultural context affects her writing. Linked to this are the concepts of subjectivity and authorship: when a singer-songwriter sings a song in the first person, about whom are they actually singing? Mitchell offers a fascinating study, for the songs she writes and sings are intricately woven from the strands of her own life.

Using methods from critical discourse analysis, this book examines recorded performances of songs from Mitchell's first nine studio albums, and the contemporary reviews of these albums in Anglo-American rock magazines. In one of the only books to discuss Mitchell's recorded performances, with a focus that extends beyond the seminal album Blue, Karppinen explores the craft of Mitchell's songwriting and her own attitudes towards it, as well as the dynamics and politics of rock criticism in the 1960s and 1970s more generally.

Part I

1 Sexual difference, texts and discourses

Feminist theory and sexual difference

At the heart of all feminist theorising lies the question, “what is a woman?”. Especially the Second Wave philosophers have eagerly looked into the dilemma of sexual difference, variously positing the origin of femaleness in some universal essence or claiming it to be a construction of cultural and societal forces. In the first part of this chapter I will consider these arguments, as well as their relevance for my own work. My standpoint is somewhere between these two poles; while leaning on Luce Irigaray’s philosophy, I have felt it crucial to move away from the rigorous dualism her thinking sometimes represents. Yet, the corporeal starting point of her thinking is more relevant for the present study than the purely performative stance postulated by Judith Butler and her followers. Although I deal mainly with texts and representations, I think it is crucial also to bear in mind the bodily aspect of music and the embodied experience of the artist. Furthermore, instead of strengthening the nature/culture dichotomy, in my view it is more fruitful to dismantle it and try to see culture as a natural process, rather than the other way around.

Theories of sexual difference

The bodily aspect of being has been one of the most fraught subjects in recent feminist theory. From the mid-seventies on, there has been a school of thought which, instead of striving for an all-encompassing equality of sexes, or concentrating on the proliferation of genders, places its emphasis on difference. Philosophers of sexual difference claim that without the acknowledgement of the specificity of female (and male) subjectivity, equality would be a house build on shifting sands, and that without promoting this specificity, no real equality can ever come into existence. As our culture still stands on certain preconceptions of the value of masculinity over femininity, it is crucial not only to develop alternative theories to dualism (as Judith Butler for instance has done), but to attach positive meanings to the pole which has so long been coded negative.

One of the most prominent advocates for sexual difference is the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, whose thinking has influenced feminist thought since the seventies and has also undergone some evolutions over time. The starting point of Irigaray’s early thinking is first of all the difference between the two sexes, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the differences between and within women themselves. In order to detach themselves from the patriarchal symbolic order, which, according to Irigaray, is founded on oneness (and on the phallus as its ultimate symbol), women will have to find a new way of thinking, speaking and being; a fluid pluralism, based on the fact that they are ‘neither one nor two’ (Irigaray 1985:26).

Irigaray thus posits herself against the Lacanian theory of subjectivity in which there can be no symbolic representation of the female sex. Throughout history, women have been subordinated under the rule of “phallologocentrism” of philosophy and later psychoanalysis, both of which have refused to give woman any positive markers – or indeed any markers at all. Woman has always represented the feared “Other”, the “sign of lack”, the unrepresentable. In her work, Irigaray has set out to redefine the female body and sexuality in terms of positive difference from the phallus: ‘[s]o woman does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural’ (Irigaray 1985:28, emphasis original).

One aspect of Irigaray’s thinking that is central to my own study is the multiplicity of female desire and female language she has set out to promote. As Rosi Braidotti lucidly points out, the basis of Irigarayan thought is the image of the ‘lips of her sex which touch each other, move apart, and are each other’s double’: the replacing of the “lack”, the “zero” with a positive metaphor of proximity and multiplicity. Furthermore, woman is ‘in herself an excess, a too much which cannot find its place in traditional discourses’ (Braidotti 1991:249). Braidotti also stresses the political aspect of Irigaray’s work:

Irigaray defends the notion of “difference” in a conditional mode. This means that woman does not yet exist and that she will be unable to come into being without women’s collective efforts, which empower and symbolise her specific sexuality, jouissance, textual practice and political vision. (1991:250)

The quote above illustrates Irigaray’s belief that woman is not yet, just as ‘no language yet exists that is capable of affirming the multiplicity of the female’ (Braidotti 1991:259). Or, as Elizabeth Grosz (2005:174) puts it, ‘[s]exual difference is not the differences between the sexes as we know them today, or as we know them from the past’, because there has never been a space for women as women ‘in culture, in representation, exchange, ethics, politics, history or writing’. Grosz sees Irigaray’s agenda as ‘a deflection and broadening’ of historically given forms and materials of knowledges: it is thus a creative – rather than destructive – process (Grosz 2005:165).

Like other thinkers who endorse écriture féminine, Irigaray calls for a new symbolic order for and by women that is based on the mother/daughter dyad and should be developed in the relative safety of a separatist space (Braidotti 1991:250–251). The relationship between mother and daughter, ‘the site of origin and also of differentiation’, the site of rivalry, envy, passion and recognition should also become the birthplace of a new kind of female subjectivity (Braidotti 1991:259). In Grosz’s view, Irigaray’s philosophy has set a new direction for feminism: instead of ‘the attainment of a sameness with men … it is now understood as a proliferation of alternative and different discourses, knowledges, frames of reference, political investments’ (2005:175). The ‘proliferation of alternative discourses’ would seem to point in the direction of Butlerian performativity. However, as Stone (2006:85) persuasively argues, Irigaray’s own theory – especially in its later development – shuns the idea of such volatile multiplicity; rather, it cleaves to the notion of duality as the natural characteristic of humanity; to affirm multiplicity ‘is to see it as the common, unitary, character of all bodies’.

One further aspect in Irigaray’s theory of female desire is the concept of fluidity. Mutual touching (instead of seeing) blurs the boundaries between subject and object. The concept of fluidity in fact underlies Irigaray’s philosophy of corporeality itself. As Stone (2006:103) illustrates, sexual difference is founded on the difference of rhythms which ‘regulate the circulation of the fluid bodily materials which coagulate into successive, transitory forms’. For Irigaray, female bodily forms move to a cyclical, irreversible rhythm, whereas male forms are distinguished by a more continuous, yet punctuated rhythm.

Negotiating nature, culture, essentialism and evolution

In her book Mother/Nature Catharine Roach looks at the representations of nature in cultural texts, especially when it is linked to the image of Mother Earth, and by association, to real-life women. According to Roach, the patriarchal society has a penchant for binary oppositions arranged in hierarchy: male over female, white over black, culture over nature. ‘Patriarchal societies mandate a social order based on such hierarchical dualisms in which control or domination of the subordinate is justified as in the best interests of all concerned (even of women and nature, for such “wild” entities clearly need management)’ (Roach 2003:49).

No one, Roach (2003:48) argues, is closer to nature than anyone else, yet because of their reproductive abilities, women have been aligned in the Western imagination with Mother Nature – and like the inimitable Gaia have been reduced to two possible representations. Nature is either a nurturing mother or a destructive hag; woman a demure virgin or a whore (2003:113). If this is the reality of the patriarchal state of affairs, can anything be done to change it? Luce Irigaray advocates the concept of sexual difference as the only possible way – albeit a long and complicated one. Her philosophy has its roots in F.W.J. Schelling’s idea of nature as a process of self-differentiation, ‘endlessly dividing into polar oppositions, then seeking to go beyond these oppositions by subdividing each of their poles’ (Stone 2006:8). So understood, nature creates sexual difference between men and women, but on the individual level passes beyond it by introducing subdifferentiations.

In embracing the biological as well as the cultural aspect of female experience, thinkers such as Luce Irigaray have run the risk of being branded essentialist. Essentialism generally means ‘the belief that things have essential properties or characters which are necessary to their being the (kind of) things they are’, and within feminist philosophy, it refers to the view that women and men are constituted by certain essential – and differing – characteristics (Stone 2006:6). Over time, the concept of essentialism has gathered negative overtones, mainly for what is seen as its reductionist nature and its Aristotelian (and Freudian) “anatomy is destiny” ethos, the ‘regressive return to the embrace of patriarchal thought’ (Braidotti 1991:128). One of the weaknesses of “essentialist” thought has been its insistence that there is a universal female experience – something which all born to a female body share – which tends to blur other differences, including racial, ethnic and class differences, as well as duplicating the patterns of exclusion and oppression which feminism should contest (Stone 2006:23).

Some constructivist theorists have gone as far as to fade the body out of the discourse altogether, positing that because the language of biology – like our bodies themselves – is so entrenched in culture as to be virtually inseparable from it, ‘identity as a descriptor of persons is cultural in character’ (Barker and Galasinski 2001:52). The only way to experience and inhabit one’s body is through cultural representations (Stone 2006:23).

There is, however, a serious pitfall in the constructionist thinking as well, especially when it comes to women’s identities and experiences. In a culture that bears a strong masculine bias, repressing sexual difference will lead to ‘sexual indifference’ – the disregarding of female embodiment and experience – something which only men can afford to do (Dame 1994:142). Furthermore, trying to transcend the male/female binary, constructionists end up perpetuating the mind/body (and nature/culture) binary, which again does women no favours. Thus, one of the main agendas of the theorists of sexual difference has been the blurring of boundaries between these dualisms, as well as the promotion of the “negative” pole (see e.g. Defromont 1990:120, Young 2005:17).

In her book Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, Alison Stone suggests a bringing together of stands of thinking from Irigaray and Judith Butler. Instead falling into a binary form, bodies are endowed with a natural multiplicity:

each body is naturally composed of multiple forces (pre-conscious impulses to pursue particular kinds of activity), where this character of multiplicity is universally shared by all bodies. This idea of bodily multiplicity conflicts with Irigaray’s belief in sexual duality in several ways. One is that multiplicity is common to all bodies, so it cannot serve as a principle which introduces sexual differentiation between them.

(Stone 2002:7)

Here, Butler’s radical notions of performativity and cultural “freedom” meet Irigaray’s more conservative theories which nevertheless steer clear of the nature/culture dichotomy, and give bodies more room to manoeuvre (Stone 2006:54, 70). For Stone, it is important to lay aside some of the most blatantly essentialist strands of Irigaray’s thinking and cleave to the non-biological conception of sexual difference, ‘which describes human bodies as made of rhythms, forms and fluid materials, remaining close to our lived experience of our bodies’ – even at the risk of being mired in philosophically abstract territory. Sexual difference, as long as it is based on discussions of growth and self-differentiation, is a valid concept for Stone (2006:110). Yet, there are some contemporary feminist thinkers who are ready to take an even bolder route towards biology, taking on board the fraught discourses of Darwinism.

Elizabeth Grosz has also found the notion of open-ended growth helpful in her quest for new symbolic currencies; she is in search of a new understanding of corporeality that would not associate woman as ‘the body for men while men are left to soar to the heights of theoretical reflection and cultural production’ (1994:22). Therefore, in Volatile Bodies she advocates an idea of nature and culture that gives space for them both to move, expand and intertwine (1994:20–21). In Time Travels, she takes on a radically (at least in the feminist context) Darwinian approach to the dichotomy and claims that the nature/culture divide is untenable simply because the two concepts are not binary opposites.

According to Darwinian precepts, culture is not different in kind from nature. […] Culture cannot be viewed as the completion of nature, its culmination or end, but can be seen as the ramifying product and effect of a nature that is ever-prodigious in its techniques of production and selection, and whose scope is capable of infinite and unexpected expansion.

(Grosz 2005:30–31)

Aware of the androcentric viewpoint of Darwin’s theories of evolution, Grosz calls for a re-evaluation of his work, in the same way feminists have already embraced the problematic ideas of Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Grosz 2005:16–17).

For Grosz, cultural variation and difference are the result of evolutionary forces similar to what we see in nature. Biology ‘impels culture to vary itself, to undergo more or less perpetual transformation’. She also sees nature not as a force restricting culture – but the other way around: it is the natural that is repressed and unacknowledged in our cultural forms, as well as being the impetus behind their variability (Grosz 2005:43–44). For Grosz, the work of constructionist feminists such as Drucilla Cornell hides ‘stuff, the real, biology, nature, matter’ by turning it into discourse, “mattering”. For feminists, it is crucial to pay attention to actual bodies: ‘[t]he biological, the natural and the material remain active and crucial political ingredients precisely because they too, and not culture alone, are continually subjected to transformation, to becoming, to unfolding over time’ (Grosz 2005:79). The only way to undo the nature/culture dichotomy is to re-evaluate nature, and in the process to re-evaluate bodies as well. Although more overtly biological in its agenda, Grosz’s philosophy bears a close resemblance to Irigaray’s later view on nature as a self-differentiating, dynamic force.

In the course of Time Travels, Grosz introduces a three-partite postulation on the characteristics nature bestows on culture and with which all cultures must subsequently deal. The first is the forward pull of temporality, the ‘force of development and aging on all living beings that impels an acknowledgement of human finiteness’ and drives societies to deal with the temporal limits of individuals. The second is the force of variation, ‘the proliferation of natural differences’ which poses infinite resources and challenges to societies, thus provoking innovative responses – which, in Grosz’s view, can be seen as a definition of culture. Finally, along with the proliferation of variation, biology also prompts sexual difference (as well as subsequent differences of race and class) (Grosz 2005:50–51).

Grosz’s philosophy suggests a new way of looking at culture and texts – one that is not based on the fencing out of nature, but which embraces the potential for growth and diversification through biological processes. This view is also echoed in Karin Littau’s theory of reading:

Whence the assumption that biological categories are fixed and determined, rather than similarly subject to change and historical evolution? What if sex as a category were too unstable or changeable to allow us to define across cultures and throughout history his or her being? After all, natural history shows that the only constant in biology is change. (2006:150)

Thus, out of the two sexes are born a multiplicity of selves. The strength of Grosz’s thinking lies in its refusal to posit the bodily over the cultural – because such positionings are untenable in her philosophy. Therefore I also find her theories useful in my own analysis, particularly as I am dealing with a songwriter whose work “overflows” many strict boundaries of musical expression. As mentioned before, the “Joni Mitchell” discussed here is a textual representation, as that is the only way I can access her life and music. Yet, I also believe that the boundary between the body and the text is porous: the cultural and the corporeal mingle in a musical performance – in the voice, in the playing of instruments, and in Mitchell’s case, also in the lyrics which remind us of the existence of the songwriter’s as well as the listener’s body.

Texts and discourses

The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to provide an overview of the kinds of tools I will be employing in my analysis. As my data falls into two separate areas –performances and critical reception – rather different approaches are called for. Furthermore, the performances themselves contain different types of “text” – music, lyrics and vocal and instrumental performance – which in many cases can be looked at as constituent parts of a whole (the song itself).

Perhaps because rock music has until recently appeared trivial or “primitive” to music scholars, the study of that genre has taken place outside the musicological circles, and thus often focused on lyrics. However, as the complexities of popular music have been accepted, it has also become obvious that rather than separating the words from the music, it is much more fruitful to consider them together – along with the whole spectrum of aspects pertaining to rock performances. The range of popular music analysis is illustrated by Lori Burns, who has listed the aspects to which the analyst should pay attention. These include story, narrative voice and perspective (‘to position the subject and to clarify his or her motivations, desires, or conflicts’), vocabulary and thematic content, figures of speech (metaphor, hyperbole and rhetorical devices), harmonic content (harmonic directionality and stasis, dissonance and consonance and harmonic closure), vocal melody and phrase design, harmonic and voice-leading structure (much disputed among scholars of popular music), texture and instrumental/vocal strategies (volume etc.), and rhythmic, metric and hypermetric organisation (regularities and irregularities) (Burns and Lafrance 2002:53–55).

In my analysis of Mitchell’s albums, these aspects will be considered with variable emphasis. Firstly, as it is my aim to examine the cultural and social aspects of Mitchell’s songs (e.g. how does she write about men and women; what kinds of autobiographical paths does Mitchell tread?), lyrics will inevitably get more attention than the musicological aspects of her work. However, lyrics only get their full meaning in the context of the performance. I am particularly interested in the way Mitchell as a woman writes a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Tunings
• Bibliography
• Index