The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. - Review - book reviews

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?

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.

"Muteness Envy" is perhaps Johnson's most brilliant chapter. In a comparison of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Jane Campion's The Piano, Johnson crosses genre boundaries to meditate upon the signification of viewing female muteness as a repository of aesthetic value. Women are silent about both their pleasure and their violation; the idealization of such silence "helps culture not to be able to tell the difference between the two" (137). For the mute Ada McGrath (played by Holly Hunter) in The Piano, her "voice" is the piano. Like the urn's, Ada's muteness is not absolute; in fact, Ada's muteness is a will, a voice, a resistance recognized by Stewart, her husband-to-be. But does Ada's character manage to escape the objecthood foisted upon her by the male bargains framing the structure of her life? Opposing reactions to The Piano have involved viewer debate over whether the film is about sexual violence or sexual awakening. Johnson concludes that the film persuades us to value the better of the two men Ada becomes involved with rather than to question the whole structure of Ada's society as she "escapes" into rather dull colonial wifehood.

A third section, entitled "The 'Voice,' of the Author" examines questions of reliable representivity and identity - including Johnson's own problematic attempts to speak and read as a lesbian, thereby processing herself through media-induced images or her own idealization of what a lesbian should be. As a reader, one might wish that Johnson's own problematizing of authorial identity had been presented in the beginning of the book rather than at the end. She compares two of Morrison's novels, Sula and Passing (finding the latter novel registering on her lesbometer as more erotic than the former); she also briefly analyzes the veil of lesbianism in the film Thelma and Louise and the more direct eroticism between the two female actors in The Accused.

In an analysis of The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, by Patricia Williams, Johnson firmly declares that Williams, black and female, is not determined so much by those factors themselves as by an ideology of style which itself powerfully reinforces ideology. Johnson here presents a stunning deconstruction of the rhetoric of law as exemplified both in the case of Williams and that of postmodern feminist attorney, Mary Jo Frug. A New England School of Law professor, Frug was murdered when she went out for a walk - literally in mid-sentence - during work on an essay examining how legal rules sexualize, maternalize, and terrorize the female body to such an extent that heterosexual monogamy becomes the safest choice for a woman. In submitting an article about Frug's political "erasure" as a lesbian gap, Johnson experienced extensive criticism and obfuscatory revisions from editors; she argues convincingly that legal editing involves strong resistance to opening up meaning as a question.

Possibly one of Johnson's most important contributions to current conversations about gender, race, and society is her engaging discussion of contemporary writers and thinkers (particularly female) grappling with what might be termed the "subject position." For a feminist, one "difference" is that the subject position is constructed by others, and style can be defined then as the style of the other addressing her. Johnson here brilliantly integrates various theories of Jacques Lacan, Gayatri Spivak, and others in discussing the manner in which subject can be assigned. She contrasts Descartes's famous dictum with her paraphrase of Patricia Williams's analysis of herself as a floating signifier: "I am where I am thought by, and think, the other" (182). She also concludes that if, as theorists such as Jacques Derrida claim, the human subject is indeterminate, then women especially lack the definable identity essential to claiming a political force under the rule of law.

Johnson emphasizes that it is essential to examine differences among women rather than just differences between women and men. Acceptance of the multivalence of women themselves can provide empowerment and spark political action for women. Barbara Johnson's scholarly but eminently readable, conversationally-styled book provides an immersion point for such empowering ambivalence. Because the book consists of a collection of essays, it suffers occasionally from a slight lack of integration in the discussion of "difference." Analysis of the racial component of feminine difference is deftly handled in several sections; however, one might wish for more general theorizing on this component throughout the essay collection. Additionally, though postcolonial theorists such as Spivak are referenced, the complex insights afforded by postcolonial theory do not seem as productively embedded in the examinations of links between literature, psychoanalysis, race, and gender as might have been useful with a topic as broad as "the feminist difference." Johnson reinforces the ideas of feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Diana Fuss; she particularly echoes works such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Barbara Johnson does more than this, however: in this book she powerfully extends the conversations regarding critical feminist concerns, and she skillfully negotiates the feminist passage between Scylla and Charybdis into the uncharted waters of contemporary political life by setting sail with humor and delight, trusting not in some phallic North Star but in the mystery of feminism and all of its fertile uncertainty. Ironically (and happily), ambivalence towards Johnson's book is unlikely.

Mary C. Madden

University of South Florida

Other Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Mary C. Madden (maddenm@ibm.net) is completing a doctoral program in women's literature/rhetoric and composition at the University of South Florida, after teaching English for fifteen years at both the college and secondary levels. A published poet and essayist, she has presented papers at CCCC and FCTE and has researched Virgina Wooif and Elizabeth Bishop extensively. Her paper on Virginia WooIf and satire was presented at the Ninth Annual Woolf Conference at the University of Delaware in June.

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