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The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. - Review - book reviews
Style, Spring, 1999 by Mary C. Madden
Barbara Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. viii + 215 pp. $22.00 cloth.
Barbara Johnson's The Feminist Difference is heralded by a striking cover: a glossy reproduction of an androgynous-looking creature wearing a softly-constructed blue-black jacket and hair as short as a typical man's, with no bust evident or any stereotypic female jewelry; thus, Johnson initially confronts us with a visual representation of both difference and similarity even before she engages us in the shifting verbal text of "difference" as experienced in the feminist sphere. Is the representation consciously meant to suggest androgyny? Are women able to analyze in just which ways they are unlike men, apart from obvious anatomical differences? What effects do cultural representations of race and gender have upon women's perceptions of their differences among themselves, as well as differences from men?
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Barbara Johnson suggests in The Feminist Difference that it is literature above all else that may offer the vast capacity for mystery essential in confronting the uncertainties and contradictions of feminism. Johnson embraces literature as a type of cultural work which makes accessible those ideas which are necessary and yet impossible to articulate fully except through the ambiguous territories possible in story and poetry.
Johnson launches her feminist critique with an examination of literary differences with respect to psychoanalysis, race, and gender. Juxtaposing works such as Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," she frames her analysis in these terms: "Is Female to Male as Ground is to Figure?" In this trio of narratives, the initiative toward therapy is generated by what Johnson identifies as a discommoded man rather than by the woman herself. Aylmer, in Hawthorne's story, wants to erase the birthmark and obliterate sexual difference by erasing woman to ground or blankness. The figure in "The Yellow Wallpaper" becomes recursive in a startling way; in the end readers do not know which side of the paper she is on and thus also do not know where to locate themselves. Johnson believes that both stories are narratives of a woman's complicity in her own destruction, a destruction related to the repression of ambivalence and to the repression of writing. Mixed feelings are not permitted; what the woman ultimately rejects, then, is herself as complex woman.
In "The Quicksands of the Self," Johnson complicates the questions of race raised in the narratives by Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut. In Larsen's novel, Quicksand, the mulatto named Helga learns to act out the logic of self-erasure in merging with a man as the omnipotent other. Race is shown to be a kind of self-object from which a self is able to derive both positive and negative mirroring. Racial pride and prejudice, however can be seen as institutional structures, not merely interpersonal phenomena. Larson is lauded for recognizing that the mother, who bears the burden of creating a positive mirror for her child, may herself suffer from the impossible ways in which her "difference" is inscribed in the social order. Johnson next focuses upon Bigger in Richard Wright's Native Son. Bigger not only kills; he writes. Bigger's letter hides the unmistakable traces of its black authorship, but the detectives are blind to such clues. Johnson believes that it is because the rape plot is so overdetermined that Bigger becomes a murderer and that most readers do not recognize the almost invisible plot about black women in Wright's fiction. The difference is not recognized. Johnson caps her discussion of racial "difference" with an astute analysis of Toni Morrison's Sula as a recontextualization of Freudian concepts of envy, castration, and the penis in the framework of American sexual and racial arrangements. According to Johnson, one of the most revolutionary things Morrison does in Sula is to deconstruct the phallus as law, patriarchy, and cultural ground. Home, in Sula, is where the phallus is not. Johnson praises Morrison's striking literary technique of dissociating affective response and event. Things do not always happen when they happen. Neither reaction nor intentionality can naturalize trauma into a narrative which is consecutive.
The chapters in "Gender and Poetry," the second section of Johnson's book, investigate the use of euphemism, understatement, and the passive voice in Afro-American poetry; connections between gender and poetry in Charles Baudelaire and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore; and muteness envy in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Jane Campion's The Piano. Johnson argues that black writers such a James Weldon Johnson and Phillis Wheatley chose to employ passivity and euphemism as affirmation rather than process difference which involved accepting premises of racial separation and equality. In her analysis of Baudelaire and Desbordes-Valmore, Johnson clarifies the manner in which the concept of femininity itself acts as a mold for controlling and shaping women's behavior. Such molding is not uncomplicated: Desbordes-Valmore herself, for example, constructed the myth of her un-constructedness. Insightfully, Johnson declares that "secrets" such as Baudelaire's male masochism function because men are read rhetorically and women are read literally. Rhetoric here becomes the domain of male self-difference reframed as universality. Johnson observes that to be differently empowered does not necessarily have to mean empowered as different. Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) may not connect easily with Johnson's arguments for this French poet's "place" in the canon of feminist poets; nonetheless, Johnson's analysis will pique reader interest in rhetorical differences between the sexes.
