Monstrous Textualities

Writing the Other in Gothic Narratives of Resistance

Anya Heise-von der Lippe

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786837608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Monstrous textuality emerges when Gothic narratives like Frankenstein reflect the monstrous in their narrative structure to create narratives of resistance. It allows writers to meta-narratively reflect their own poetics and textual production, and reclaim authority over their work under circumstances of systemic cultural oppression and Othering. This book traces the representation of other Others through Black feminist hauntology in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Love (2003); it explores fat freak embodiment as a feminist resistance strategy in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984) and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle (1976); and it reads Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13) and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) within a framework of critical posthumanist and cyborg theory. The result is a comprehensive argument about how these texts can be read within a framework of critical posthumanist questioning of knowledge production, and of epistemological exploration, beyond the exclusionary humanist paradigm.

Part I

What Moves at the Margin

Introduction

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.¹

A specter is haunting the specter of communism: the specter of the nonhuman.’²

‘[E]verything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition’,³ states Derrida in his discussion of Hamlet in Specters of Marx. Haunting – the feeling that ‘time is out of joint’ – presents the basis for Derrida’s re-conceptualisation of an ontology for a constantly deferred present as hauntology. Like ontology – the homonym from which the term is derived – hauntology is also concerned with questions of being in the world, replacing, however, the predominant categories of ‘being’ and ‘presence’ with the figure of the ghost as something that is neither dead nor alive, neither absent nor present.

As Tiina Kirss observes, Derrida’s long-expected discussion of Marx after the fall of the Berlin wall in Specters of Marx was also accompanied by a ‘vigorous polemic’,⁴ making it a complicated theoretical position to work from. While it draws on Derrida’s concept of hauntology, my discussion here is more urgently concerned with a number of unexpected ghosts which clamour for a supplement to hauntology as a theory of being in the world for those whose presence is contested based on systemic inequities. My argument draws on an intersectional model of oppression⁵ that considers race, gender, class and ability as coexistent forms of identity, which can reinforce and amplify oppression and the omission from cultural representation. Taking hauntology’s orientation towards justice at face value, this part deals with the ghosts that have arisen from the active suppression of specific historical injustices – those faced by African American women – as easily dismissed individual memories and/or the Other excluded by Enlightenment humanism. I read representation of these subject positions as narratives of resistance that draw on liminal figures (monsters and ghosts) to make a point about their omission from cultural discourses and representations.

As Kashif Jerome Powell argues for the African American context, in terms of its representation, Blackness is already a form of haunting:

The presence of blackness … its representation and relation to the world, is characterized by the dense absence of subjectivity lost in the midst of chattel slavery. This absence is continually made present through thousands of stories that work to reify the borders of the black body. Blackness, then, is ontological positioned as an incessant and immutable return to abject conditions of loss and absence. It is incomprehensible, perhaps even non-existent, beyond its own phenomenon. As such, blackness cannot be described by ontology alone.⁶

As Powell argues, Black bodies are represented at the intersection of ‘presence and absence to articulate blackness as the ever-evolving relationship between the flesh-and-blood body and slavery’s ecologies of death’.⁷ He draws on Frantz Fanon’s assertion in Black Skin/White Masks that ‘[o]ntology does not allow us to understand the being of the black man, since it ignores the lived experience. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’, that is, Black people need to situate themselves in relation to ‘two systems of reference’⁸ – indeed, more than two, if intersecting categories such as gender, class and ablebodiedness, among others, are rightfully taken into account. In this context, Qwo-Li Driskill’s argument that there is a connection between biopolitics and colonialism offers a useful way of making sense of these entangled discourses of spectrality and embodiment. Driskill argues that:

[a]bleism is colonial. It is employed to maintain an ideal body of a white supremacist imagination. The ideal body is heterosexual, male, white, Christian, non-disabled, and well muscled. It is an ideal with a long and troubling history inseparable from racism, genocide, misogyny, and eugenics.⁹

These discourses of physical difference serve the hegemonic purpose of maintaining a status quo that grants certain privileges and advantages to those conforming to or at least coming close to the ideal. Historical inequities based on these constructions of difference are still present in contemporary societies, even where openly racist, sexist or ableist discourses seem to have been addressed and are no longer accepted by mainstream culture. The editors of Critical Multicultural Perspectives on Whiteness (2018) draw attention to race as a particularly persistent ‘[p]seudo-scientific … theory [that] was created to legitimise the slave trade, and chattel slavery, an economic system that required the cooperation of “free,” often poor colonial Whites’.¹⁰ This discursive construction of race, based on a perceived set of physical differences, served global economic interests and was, therefore, written into the laws of colonial nations such as the United States and many European countries pursuing their own interests in the Global South. ‘Whiteness is a representation of cultural hegemony’ that grants ‘unearned privileges’ to those considered ‘white’,¹¹ but its associations with power and a perceived concept of normality have made it almost invisible, resulting in marking almost everyone who is perceived as non-white or not conforming to the associated categories of normality as Other. The reminders of these troubled ontologies, although frequently repressed by mainstream culture, have a tendency to return as hauntologies that disrupt discourses of power based on Othering.

In Morrison’s work, which forms the main literary focus of this part of the book, the conceptualisation of Black presence/absence as hauntology is complicated by the intersectional nature of identity constructions that form the basis of her fictional as well as her critical exploration of race and gender as intertwined categories of oppression. Morrison’s writing is informed by what Jeffrey Weinstock has termed the ‘“spectral turn” of contemporary literary theory’.¹² Generally speaking, ‘[g]hosts return to exact revenge, to complete unfinished business, to request proper burial, and to warn the living of danger’.¹³

As Weinstock notes, ‘[g]hosts are unstable interstitial figures that problematize dichotomous thinking’¹⁴ and, as such, have become ‘a privileged poststructuralist academic trope’.¹⁵ Historically, María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren argue, ‘ghosts have played vital roles in oral and written narratives … across cultures’ – however, since the end of the twentieth century, ghosts have also become ‘influential conceptual metaphors’.¹⁶ Their work draws on Mieke Bal’s definition of a conceptual metaphor as ‘evoking … a discourse, a system of producing knowledge’.¹⁷ In this contemporary theoretical guise, often referred to as ‘the specter’, the liminal position of the ghost between ‘life and death, materiality and immateriality’ raises important questions about:

the temporal and spatial sedimentation of history and tradition, and its impact on possibilities for social change; the intricacies of memory and trauma, personal and collective … and the exclusionary, effacing dimensions of social norms pertaining to gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and class.¹⁸

As Del Pilar Blanco and Peeren argue, ghosts are also related to ‘powerful affects like fear and obsession’.¹⁹ As Weinstock argues, ‘the phantom calls into question the linearity of history’.²⁰ Its impossible presence/absence undermines hegemonic historical discourses. ‘The ubiquity of ghost stories in our particular cultural moment is connected to the recognition that history is always fragmented and perspectival and to contestations for control of the meaning of history as minority voices foreground the “exclusions and invisibilities” of American history.’²¹ Such narratives harness blatant figurations of Otherness – the monster, the freak, the ghost, to name but a few – to draw attention to cultural processes of omission and oppression, and to present narratives of resistance against them.

As both an author of fiction and an academic, Morrison is clearly aware of and, to an extent, also an influential part of these discussions – especially considering the cultural impact of her novel Beloved (1987), which can only be described as a key text of African American literature on slavery and its consequences. While Morrison’s critical as well as her narratological concept of haunting can be traced back to Derrida’s concept of hauntology, her texts also provide a specific African American perspective that adds important, situational questions that I will explore in the following. Beloved focuses on the continued hauntological presence of slavery and is certainly her most renowned ghost narrative. The later novel Love (2003) transfers the cultural questioning of Blackness as a hauntological presence to a different historical and cultural time frame. Hauntology also plays a role in Morrison’s critical work, most prominently her discussion of an Africanist presence in Playing in the Dark (1992).

My discussion of these texts will draw on critical posthumanism as a theoretical framework to rethink such narratives beyond ingrained historical conceptualisations of the human as an exclusive, culturally ingrained category. As I have argued elsewhere,²² this challenging of the humanist subject position connects the posthuman to the ‘negative aesthetics’²³ of the Gothic, which has always been concerned with drawing attention to the constructedness and precariousness of what is considered ‘normal’ in a specific cultural context. The ghost and the monster function as reminders of the fact that normality is a brittle, discursively constructed surface that may crack at any time. Focused on visualising these breaks and gaps, Gothic narratives revolve around the monstrous and the spectral as both narrative figures and theoretical concepts. Steeped from its earliest beginnings in the counter-Enlightenment exploration of superstitions, supernatural elements and the pre-rational sublime, the Gothic offers a narrative aesthetics particularly prone to highlighting outside perspectives and exploring processes of Othering.

In the Gothic, ghost stories are anchored in time – the past – and space – the haunted house, which, in its metaphorical use as the representation of a specific family, can also be an indicator of past ‘family transgressions’,²⁴ for which punishment may be visited upon the descendants. In Morrison’s specific take on this theme in Beloved the haunted house stands for more than the trauma of one family or a single past transgression. While the violent death of Sethe’s daughter lies at the heart of the haunting, the novel also traces personal tragedy to its roots in the wider historical context of the inhumane system of slavery, suggesting that American culture is haunted by its violent past and present. ‘What’d be the point?’ of moving away, Grandma Baby Suggs asks in the novel. ‘Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief.’²⁵ Morrison’s concept of ‘rememory’ that separates memories of past traumatic events from the experiencing subject, serves as the theoretical framework of this concept of haunting. As JaeEun Yoo argues, this dimension of haunting is typical of the postmodern Gothic that stages haunting as a transgr...