Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction (American Literature Readings in the 21st Century)

A MERICAN LITERATURE R EADINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women's Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W. H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway's Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur

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Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer's Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut Edited by David Simmons Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682-1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion By Denise Mary MacNeil Norman Mailer's Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest Edited by John Whalen-Bridge Fetishism and Its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities By Mary Jane Hurst Repression and Realism in Postwar American Literature By Erin Mercer Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning By Timothy W. Galow Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary By Georgina Colby Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction Alison Graham-Bertolini

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V W  C A F Alison Graham-Bertolini

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VIGILANTE WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

Copyright © Alison Graham-Bertolini, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11090–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graham-Bertolini, Alison. Vigilante women in contemporary American fiction / by Alison Graham-Bertolini. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the twenty-first century) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–11090–8 (hardback) 1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Vigilantes in literature. 3. Heroines in literature. 4. Women in literature. I. Title. PS374.V56G73 2011 813'.6093522—dc22

2011005275

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

1 10 15

Terminology Conclusions Chapter One

Chapter Two

Great Vengeance and Furious Anger: The Female Avenger Zora Neale Husrton’s “Sweat” (1926) Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s “Gal Young ‘Un” (1932) Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House (1964) Conclusions Women Warriors and Women with Weapons Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memories Of A Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975) Rita Mae Brown’s High Hearts (1986) William Faulkner’s Warrior Woman In The Unvanquished (1934) Conclusions

Chapter Three The Woman Who Snaps, The Woman Who Kills Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife (1975): Rewriting The Marriage/Adultery Plot Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury Of Her Peers” (1917) Alice Walker’s “How Did I Get Away With Killing One Of The Biggest Lawyers In The State? It Was Easy” (1982) Conclusions

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17 21 32 39 51 55

61 73 80 90 93 98 102 114

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Chapter Four

The Female Bandit/Outlaw June Arnold’s Sister Gin (1975) Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1987) William Faulkner’s Female Bandit in the Unvanquished (1934) Conclusions

129 132 144 154 160

Conclusions

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Notes

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Works Cited

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Index

185

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Thanks to John Lowe, Emily Toth, Pallavi Rastogi, Solimar Otero, and Lisi Oliver, who generously gave of their intelligence and knowledge. Thanks to my wonderful writing group from Louisiana State University who read and commented on unfinished chapter drafts. Thanks to my dear friend Jean Templin who provided encouragement from afar for this project and always lent an ear when I needed one. Finally, heartfelt thanks to my husband, David Bertolini, who unfailingly gave his support, humor, and technical know-how, and without whom this book would not have been possible. I gratefully acknowledge permission from The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature to reuse material from the article “Graham-Bertolini, Alison. ‘The Decentering of the Male in ‘Gal Young Un.’” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature XIV, 2006.

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Introduction

Vigilante literature written by women models personal and collective empowerment. In such fiction, female protagonists recognize the extent of their own exploitation and directly confront situations in which they or their loved ones are threatened, in which their humanity is neglected or ignored, in which the spaces that they call their own (both internal and external) are appropriated and injured, and where flight is not an option because memory is inescapable and the status quo is slow to change. This is the literature of the brave hearted, and of women who may be bruised, but who finally refuse to be beaten. Men have been physically “fighting back” in fiction since Don Quixote skirmished with mule owners for possession of a watering trough. Western epic and drama reverberate with scenes of bloody vengeance and righteous atonement. From Greek tragedy on, the theme of vigilante justice has been reproduced and developed, from Homer’s Iliad, to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, demonstrating the attraction of moral controversy as a literary focus. Retaliating against oppressive forces has always been understood and condoned by men, at least to some degree. Vigilante literature tells the stories of individuals who rectify injustice by taking matters into their own hands. Examples of this plot can be found in American literature dating from colonial times, when settlers made an effort to preserve their moral code without the aid of an established justice system. The popularity of this theme finds further currency in tales of the frontier and Wild West. More recently, Hollywood has capitalized on its popularity by drawing from the myth of American pioneer culture and the theme of the lone avenger. An analogous theme is emerging in contemporary fiction by women writers, who in the twentieth century began frequently employing female avatars of vigilante justice to challenge (in an illegal or extralegal fashion) those who violate the economic, social, or political rights of women. The goal, therefore, of this work,

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is to demonstrate, through an analysis of a collection of novels and short stories by contemporary American women, how female avengers, warriors, bandits, and killers extend and amend the vigilante tradition in the United States, and thus also amend women’s literary plots. There is a long tradition of militant women in history and myth, including Greek warrior goddesses such as Athena, Andromeda, and Hippolyta, historical warrior queens such as Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni tribe, and later figures such as Joan of Arc and Spencer’s Britomart. Arguably, the first work in Western literature to examine an act of woman’s vengeance was Medea, a drama written by Euripides (Jacoby 24). Medea “is a wife and mother driven to savage acts by a society that offers no legal recourse for women or foreigners” (21). In other words, the lack of legal recourse by which Medea can address what she perceives to be the dishonest, immoral, and iniquitous behavior of her husband leads her to take extralegal actions as a pathway to justice. Despite this rich classical tradition, which was continued during the Renaissance and within Elizabethan drama, vigilante literature that focuses on women’s revenge became much less common in the nineteenth century. Jacoby’s Wild Justice traces the way such stories became unfashionable. She claims that while “Justice is a legitimate concept in the modern code of civilized behavior . . . Vengeance is not” (1). Jacoby further posits that the constricted interest in revenge is attributable to a shift in cultural values that situates the desire for revenge as a form of mental illness (17), a behavior seen as deviant in the modern age. This shift, Jacoby reasons, is likely the result of changes in the justice system, which has evolved from a system of deterrence/protection to a system of punishment. In fiction written by American women of the nineteenth century, it is difficult to find examples of vigilante women committing illegal acts intended to correct the status quo. Instead, although resistance and rebellion against oppression are in evidence, women’s fiction from this period reinforced existing social constructs by validating the patriarchal family structure of “strong, benevolent husband-father and physically weak but morally strong wife-child” (Entzminger 2). Despite this fact, a growing antagonism toward patriarchal hierarchies may be traced in women’s fiction. Such portrayals replicate the reallife experiences of women who were largely relegated to the domestic and romantic spheres, but who found ways to broaden their horizons

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INTRODUCTION

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from within. As more women began writing novels, fictional heroines increasingly began to communicate the burden of domesticity and social expectation, using subtle and/or otherwise masked strategies of resistance within their work. One method commonly used by authors seeking to expand the “women’s sphere” in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was to condemn their heroines to states of mental or physical illness, as a way for them to avoid emotional entrapment. Examples include the nameless narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the mother character, Anna Holbrook, in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio. Women writers also invented heroines who attempt to end their lives to escape physical and mental constriction, such as Edna Pontellier from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Esther Greenwood from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Such novels depict the ironclad boundaries that once limited women’s options and that women’s fiction has increasingly come to challenge in response. Today, women authors are often no longer content to turn their anger and frustration with social oppression upon their heroines, by condemning them to madness or suicide. Rather, women writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries amend and further the typically dismal outcomes of women’s fiction by allowing their heroines to turn their resistance outward, to oppose the laws that restrict their personal rights, or toward the person or people who most represent oppression in their lives. This is a shockingly revelatory development that permanently extends the scope of the women’s plot in Western literature. American women in the current age identify with the female vigilante because the character type models personal freedom and full personhood— a freedom that women have historically been denied. As vigilantes, women stand up for themselves, their loved ones, and/ or their country, even when it means defying the law. They choose when to assert themselves and for what reasons. They rely on their own system of morality and, in doing so, identify flaws in the existing justice system in the United States. Transformative and aggressive acts of female vigilantism do not have a secure place in our current model of femininity, so their effect on the social order is radical and change inducing. As I demonstrate in the chapters to come, vigilante fiction helps its readers to imagine and strengthen compelling and distinctive identities of their own, by providing pioneering models of strong women that can be emulated.

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Carolyn G. Heilbrun describes the importance of fiction in terms of identity formation: We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or chanted, or experienced electronically . . . whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives. (37)

Heilbrun accurately notes that fiction writers build on plots and stories that have come before, to encourage readers to “live through the text” by imagining new outcomes and inventing avenues for change. In addition to allowing an immersion in the fictional world of the characters, subversive texts by women compel readers to examine their own social situations and confront their own possibilities for growth. As a result, such texts eventually have an impact on the hegemonic social order by inspiring the revision of oppressive laws, politics, and economic situations. This project thus demonstrates how the “implicit revolt” of the Victorian “angel1” is made explicit in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction of the vigilante women, and how female authors are expanding the possibilities for their own lives and the lives of other women. Female vigilantism is most often a recuperative act that addresses systematic flaws in the American system of justice. Contemporary heroines commit illegal, extralegal, and, at times, deadly acts in their quest for justice, including the destruction of property, banditry, robbery, armed combat, and/or even murder. However, because the women who commit these acts do so for ethical reasons and to establish or protect their own right to full personhood, their actions assume a significance that manifests as an equitable view of individuality. The importance of this study, then, is to pinpoint the androcentric notion of vigilantism, eschew its appropriation into its binary opposition of a female version, and focus instead on the transformative and dynamic properties of vigilantism that support and empower the potential for equitable and viable female agency. It is significant that although physical violence is sometimes a factor in female vigilantism, this is not always so. The two terms violence and vigilantism are not interchangeable. Instead, in the works examined herein, women writers address the collective ills of society through small, yet disruptive, and sometimes physically violent actions performed by women who appear to desire change. Although many

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INTRODUCTION

of these acts and their consequences can be seen as part of the much wider struggle for women’s rights, they are, in fact, singular; they may be performed in the isolation of a farmhouse, or within the artfully decorated walls of a high-rise apartment building. Despite this fact, such acts are united in their widespread application and appeal. The perpetrators of illegal acts of resistance in fiction are vigilantes because of their collective desire for social change. Historically, the term “vigilante” has been invoked to describe people involved in violent, destructive behavior as well as acts of good citizenship. Tom O’Connor, director of the Institute for Global Security Studies, provides perhaps the most comprehensive overview of vigilantism available. He writes, From a legal perspective, lawyers sometimes call [vigilantism] extrajudicial self-help . . . Philosophers, like French (2001), frequently equate it with vengeance, and tie it into some sort of definition that sounds like it came from a treatise on ethics—vigilantism being the righting of a criminal wrong by wrongful means. A recurring theme in philosophical treatises is that the sooner we recognize vengeance as an essential part of our inner human nature, the better. Sociologists are almost always silent on the topic, perhaps because the behavior is not mundane enough, as there seems to be an emerging convention in the last couple of decades where sociologists study the ordinary and criminologists study “rare events.” Criminologists, like Zimring (2003), don’t really study vigilantism per se. They only study it as a side issue whenever it seems convenient to tie in America’s vigilante tradition to something else, like capital punishment. A review of the literature would indicate that there is a good deal of consensus on the fact that vigilantism and a vigilante tradition exist, but there also appears to be no adequate theoretical framework from which to analyze the phenomena in systematic fashion. (1)

This overview helps us to understand how scholars from various disciplines, including law, philosophy, sociology, and criminology, define vigilantism. O’Connor also points out that no single definition of vigilante or vigilantism exists. In general, we can conclude that vigilantism provides a way alternative to lawful channels to establish order and legality, as well as a common purpose, within a general population. In Vigilantism: Political History of Private Power in America, William C. Culberson defines vigilantism as “a communal desire and willingness to enforce existing law or to precipitate a new

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necessary and proper order by popular rule, in order to meet social exigencies” (6). He explains, “The popular change might be precipitated openly by one person or many, but it is a constructive collective enterprise” (6). This is a valid working definition of a complex and not-easily-definable term. Moreover, it references the acts of people who operate individually, but whose intentions to elicit change fall under the rubric of a larger collective movement, such as the vigilante women discussed herein. Their acts are rooted in a communal desire for impartial treatment and so should be understood as collective. The current era of vigilantism thus involves individualized lawbreaking for the sake of a common goal. The main difference between traditional male vigilantism and female vigilantism that is articulated in this project is that male characters typically turn to vigilantism for abstract reasons— reasons that at first glance appear universal but, in fact, reflect a male image dominated by ego. As a result, the prevailing stereotype of the indomitable male is reinforced in fiction. On the contrary, in vigilante fiction written by women, heroines are characterized in a way that is much more fluid. The specific triggers for female vigilantism shift from abstract values concerning the law to the much more concrete and determinable, such as the casting away of an abusive spouse. In stories of female vigilante justice, women reach beyond prescribed social roles to take action, sometimes for their own protection, sometimes for the protection of others, sometimes for a moral ideal. Such stories are shocking because the laying aside of typical “womanly” behavior reveals the “assumedness” of femininity. Within such acts, the heroines of these fictions demonstrate their ability to act in a “masculine” manner when necessary, thus exploding gender myths of what constitutes “masculine” and “feminine” conduct. The texts included in this study, which have been culled from varied cultural contexts in American fiction, reveal how female vigilantism operates as a motif, one that offers the possibility of transformation within modern ideologies of gender, race, and class. The “categories” of vigilante presented here undeniably overlap, so that the discussions in these chapters overlap as well. The themes that emerge— including the metaphoric link between the home and the female body, the way that women combine aspects of the traditional male persona with the traditional female persona to create a unique new persona of empowerment, the influence of cross dressing, and the idea that the

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INTRODUCTION

7

heroism inherent in care-giving facilitates the reframing of gender roles— accentuate the constructedness of gender norms and, in certain instances, suggest the legitimacy of violence as a tactic of empowerment and self-defense for women. In some cases legendary vigilante women are also considered, to provide a map of possible sources for representational figures. Chapter One, “Avenging Women,” focuses on she-warriors2 in fiction who exact revenge, independent of the law, for injustices committed against them or their loved ones. Although there has been a slight resurgence of this theme in recent popular culture with the release of films such as Thelma and Louise (1991),3 Hard Candy (2005),4 and The Brave One (2007),5 female avengers are not as common as one might think, especially in realist texts. As noted earlier, Susan Jacoby posits that thwarting the desire for revenge is a social phenomenon that occurs because vindication, as a concept, has been vilified. Jacoby points out that those who are “guilty” of vindictive emotions are often considered to be “unnaturally” motivated (7). This is especially true of women who have been cast as the domestic angel. Moreover, writes Jacoby, prevailing attitudes endorse a belief that “good” people desire to see the “reform” of criminals, they do not wish “vengeance” upon them (7). Refusing to admit to vengefulness ensures that the myth of the morally superior female is maintained. Yet, as “gender” is demonstrated to be less a genetic reality and more a learned system of behavior, the division between the sexes becomes less defined, and ingrained ideologies begin to change. The texts analyzed in this chapter—Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ “Gal Young ‘Un” (1932), and Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House (1965)— all feature a strong avenging female. Within their heroines, Hurston, Rawlings, and Grau combine aspects of a traditionally “male” persona with aspects traditionally associated with the feminine or female persona. The authors thus overturn stereotypes and binaries by creating unique sites of empowerment. Although these unusual combinations lead in all cases to conflict, the reader is made aware that such conflict is an inevitable step in correcting ideology that privileges men. In addition, I demonstrate in this chapter how in the past two centuries women’s fiction has shifted, first, from an expression of the moral inequality inherent in our patriarchal society (resistance) to fiction containing characters who rebel, within the sanctions of the law,

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against physical, psychological, and social subordination, and, most currently, to a genre of fiction that centers on acts of vigilante justice meant to exact revenge for physical or psychological harm committed against women or their loved ones. The vigilante acts that the heroines of these fictions perform are often vital to helping them (re) establish a sense of autonomy and individuation, one separate from their antagonists. However, in addition to a sense of personal empowerment, these acts assume a further importance, both within the fictional world of the story (where violence often forces those in power to recognize social problems that would otherwise be overlooked or ignored) and within society, which is affected by the creation and message of such fictions. Key to this chapter is the differentiation of harm from punishment, a distinction that marks the virtuous avenger as different from one who practices “destructive” vigilantism. Unlike their male counterparts, female avengers most often commit a single act of illegal violence, specifically to retaliate against an antagonist (usually a man) who has repeatedly brutalized them (mentally and/ or physically). Chapter Two, “Women with Weapons/Women Warriors,” draws on the long tradition of goddesses, queens, Amazons, and other women who took up arms to defend a country or an ideal. The literary archetype has changed over the years, from the ruthless and self-reliant Amazons, to Spenser’s female warrior, Britomart, who fought in the name of chastity, to current depictions of female soldiers battling on the front lines of Iraq. In this chapter, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1989) and Rita Mae Brown’s High Hearts (1986) provide the backdrop to a discussion of women who choose to engage in battle, both mentally and physically. The chapter begins by differentiating between vigilante warriors who perform concrete, physical acts of violence that require them to disguise themselves as men, and women who battle oppression with other, less tangible, weapons, such as writing (which, at one time, may have required women to assume a disguise or pseudonym, but thankfully does so no longer). Although writing is an act of resistance, it is not illegal for women in the United States, and thus women who write are not considered vigilante by the definition previously established. However, both types of battle (physical and otherwise) are metaphoric for the new ground that women have gained in the struggle for gender equity.

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INTRODUCTION

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The heroines of these novels overturn the false assertions that nonviolence and passivity are feminine characteristics by disguising themselves and “passing” for men on the battlefield. Further, this chapter begins the discussion of why and how feminine selfsacrifice has become destructive and demonstrates how fiction helps to extend the boundaries of accepted behavior for women, by lauding women who refuse to surrender to unfair socially mandated restrictions. Chapter Three, “Women Who Snap, Women Who Kill,” engages in a discussion of why women come to accept oppression as their normal state of being and then depicts the lengths that they will go to in order to free themselves from patriarchal bondage. The three texts analyzed in this chapter demonstrate that in certain instances murder is the only life-changing, system-shattering deed to which women can resort if they hope to permanently change their circumstances. For example, Bharati Mukherjee’s first novel, Wife (1975), the story of an Indian American housewife who stabs her husband to death with a kitchen knife, raises questions of personal freedom and entrapment. The perpetrator of this crime has not suffered from physical violence at the hands of her husband but has endured longterm oppression stemming from restrictive social mandates. The story sets the stage for a discussion of Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) and Alice Walker’s “How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy” (1982), both of which feature women who are driven to kill the abusive men in their lives. Although this chapter neither lauds nor condemns heroines who kill, it does demonstrate how texts featuring murderous women shift our perspective so that behavioral boundaries for women are challenged. Some of the themes identified in earlier chapters reappear and are discussed in further detail. For example, the destructiveness of excessive self-sacrifice is considered, as is the way women novelists link social critique with the woman’s body, using the body as a symbolic site that literalizes the way women are violated. Chapter Four, “Bandit Women,” presents the argument that individual acts of resistance are political. Although the term “banditry” implies a taking away— a removing or stealing from—I reveal how female banditry demonstrates exactly the opposite. Using the female bandits of June Arnold’s Sister Gin (1975) and Fannie Flagg’s Fried

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Green Tomatoes (1988) as examples, I show how bandit women reject the self-destructive habits that American women have been conditioned to believe are “normal” and instead work to fulfill their own potential and motivate other women to do the same. Thus, they take back what has been stolen from them and share what they have learned with other women. By caring for those in need through the mechanism of “banditry,” women demonstrate the heroism inherent in care giving, a standard of conduct that I term “mothering morality.” This strategy, which rejects self-harm and encourages self-care, is then passed from generation to generation, from mother to daughter, a process that is encapsulated by the term. Finally, I include two short sections concerning William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, one of which is included in Chapter Two, “Women Warriors,” and the second of which is included in Chapter Four, “Female Bandits.” These sections focus on the two female vigilante characters included in this novel, Granny Rosa Millard and Drusilla Hawk. These characters provide an interesting counterpoint to the female-authored vigilante women discussed herein, because although they dominate the story, they are ultimately forced to surrender their power (Granny through death, Drusilla through marriage) so as not to challenge the gendered expectations of the entrenched social system.

T Femininity and Masculinity The middle-class ideology for femininity that “developed in postindustrial England and America” prescribed that “a woman . . . would be a Perfect Lady, an Angel in the House, contentedly submissive to men, but strong in her inner purity and religiosity, queen in her own realm in the Home” (Showalter 14). The angel figure, who was prominent in Victorian fiction, largely accepted that her role in life was to provide a moral and emotional center to the man’s public life. Such a figure was primarily valued for four feminine virtues: “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (Heinzelman 71). Even today, a “feminine” woman is often defined as one who appears “docile, soft, passive, nurturant, vulnerable, weak, narcissistic, childlike, incompetent, masochistic, and domestic, made for childcare, home care, and husband care” (MacKinnon 109). As Catherine MacKinnon attests,

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INTRODUCTION

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“Conditioning to these values permeates the upbringing of girls and the images for emulation thrust upon women” (MacKinnon 109–10). In other words, women are conditioned from childhood to believe that such qualities are desirable. Social class and ethnic origin are factors that undoubtedly have an impact on stereotypes of femininity. Black women in America, for example, have historically been less likely to be judged as feminine as the result of slavery and its aftermath. Enslaved black women were expected to be strong and capable, and to perform hours of backbreaking labor without complaint. bell hooks notes that enslaved black women so resented this denial of their womanhood that when slavery was abolished they overwhelmingly embraced the female role as defined by patriarchy, and in doing so became “both accomplices in the crimes perpetrated against women and the victims of those crimes” (hooks Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism 49). In a similar example, as A. M. Garcia perceives, women of Hispanic origin are often hyper-feminized, perhaps even more so than white women, because cultural and religious ideals in Hispanic communities have taught them to glorify “motherhood, subservience, and long-suffering endurance” (qtd. in Lips 15). Masculinity, however, incorporates the “universally human ideals of autonomy, self-mastery, and creative potency” (Toews, qtd. in Ladd 134n25). Men are also immured in a system of representation, since masculinity is often connected with aggressive behavior, sexual prowess, and competitiveness. Indeed, men are encouraged from the time they are boys to behave in a manner exhibiting such characteristics and are taught that such behaviors are normal. This is the standard “boys will be boys” argument, which is still frequently heard. Just as women are conditioned to be “angels,” “man as oppressor is not ‘born’ with his gender characteristics biologically and innately given. Rather, these are socially and culturally ‘constructed’ ” (Maynard 120). In attempting to explain stereotypes of masculinity, race and class must be also taken into account. For example, as a result of slavery and racism, black men have been stripped of power and control throughout much of American history. In response to the institutionalized restriction of power that black men have experienced for years, many of them have compensated by emphasizing the “competitive, success-oriented, aggressive aspects of masculinity,” including behaviors that glorify “physical toughness, violence, and risk-taking”

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(Lips 16). Similarly, Hispanic men often place great import on masculinity, or “machismo,” which involves attitudes or behaviors that display dominance, fierceness, and bravado, especially in relation to women. Notes Lips, “it is possible that, in a society that values masculinity over femininity, gender may take on a special significance for men of color and other men who have little access to socially valued roles” (17). It is admittedly difficult to theorize terms such as “masculinity” and “femininity” in a manner that applies across a variety of historical, economic, and cultural contexts, in addition to encapsulating the particularities of the individual experience. However, in considering such definitions it helps to recognize that, at least to some degree, all people are subjected to the physical, psychological, and representational restrictions that the gendered production of human identity enforces. Throughout this text, therefore, terminology that describes masculine or feminine traits, values, or behaviors generally refers to social and cultural ideals and behavioral norms for men and women in American society. If our social system is ever to realize the end of a hierarchical gender system, we must recognize the constructedness of “femininity” and “masculinity” and understand that agency is not the exclusive privilege of one sex or the other. The vigilante literature examined herein provides examples of what can occur when women come to understand that passivity is a characteristic that has traditionally been assigned to them as a way to ensure that the dominance and control of men is sustained. Further, it provides fictional examples of men who are thwarted in the belief that “masculinity” requires the subordination and control of women. Instead, these vigilante heroines take responsibility for their own behavior and encourage men to do the same. Patriarchy “Patriarchy” within this study refers to both the institutions that oppress women as well as the lingering psychic damage that such structures can impose upon and reproduce within the female consciousness. This definition is derived from those provided by multiple feminist scholars. Jackie Stacey, for example, offers a useful and straightforward summation of the meaning of patriarchy when she writes, “the term ‘patriarchy’ has been used within post-1960s feminism to refer to the

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INTRODUCTION

systematic organization of male supremacy and female subordination” (53). She continues, “The military, industry, technology, universities, science, political office, and finance—in short, every avenue of power within society, including the coercive power of the police, is entirely in male hands” (54). According to this definition, patriarchy is a set of structures or institutions that oppress women and are pervasive in every area of culture. This basic definition is extended by psychoanalytic theory, which contends that the oppression that results from patriarchy operates on a psychic as well as social level (57). Juliet Mitchell concurs, writing that “the broader patterns of patriarchal exchange of women between men in society are reproduced within the individual psyche” (qtd. in Stacey 58). Therefore, valuing the male more than the female and the masculine more than the feminine is a mindset we internalize, “not simply as a conscious belief we have been socialized to accept, but in the formation of our earliest sexual identities which take place through unconscious as well as conscious processes” (58). This explanation helps to clarify the investments women have in their existing identities, and why these constructs are absorbed by younger generations of women. Justice Justice, although universally important, is a difficult term to define. Philosopher John Rawls, who equates justice with fairness, claims that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought” (3). Carter Heyward defines what justice might be, if the goal of achieving political and ethical parity were realized. She writes, But what is justice? I ask you to think beyond the images of jurisprudence and legalism often associated with justice in patriarchal, androcentric society into a realm of radical relationality. In this realm, justice is right relation, and right relation is mutual relation. In a mutual relationship both (or all) people are empowered to experience one another as intrinsically valuable, irreplaceable earth creatures, sources of joy and love and respect in relation to one another. To experience ourselves genuinely as friends: this is justice. (Heyward 22–3)

Similar to Heyward, most feminist theorists are not arguing for “equality” between men and women (a position that often implies

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that women should adjust to social conditions developed by men), but instead, they acknowledge that differences between men and women do exist. The goal of an advanced society then, is “mutuality” or “the growth toward shared power” (160). This is perhaps the best explanation of why women in fiction take on the role of the vigilante— to attain a measure of power equal to that of men. Although this ideal might be an impossibility in our current age, it does, as pointed out by Kathleen Martindale and Martha Saunders, forecast a goal toward which we must always strive (160). Violence Defining violence is also difficult, because legal definitions of the term “tend to omit acts which many women would regard as violent” (Maynard 101). Most people tend to conceive of violence as an assertive public act such as a fistfight or gunfight, at least initially. As noted by Patricia Pearson, violence “is physical; it is direct” (11). Yet, she amends, such head-on violence is a “gendered style,” a “masculine display” of physical aggression (11). Liz Kelly uses accounts of women’s own experiences to explain the meaning of the term. She asserts that much of the violence women describe is not reflected by the legal codes of the United States, nor in psychological or other analytical forums used by professionals in a court of law (qtd. in Maynard 105). Despite this, the law’s definition of violence is often given more weight than women’s definitions. The extent of the impact of violence cannot, therefore, be adequately or accurately gauged. As such, “it is important not to pre-determine the meaning of the term” (Maynard 105). Violence occurs in various forms; it is not strictly physical. It includes instances of physical, verbal, and emotional violence, sexual assault, stalking or harassment, discrimination, and vilification, all of which affect the mental, emotional, and physical health of women. Such treatment can restrict a woman’s participation in life outside the home, obstruct her personal fulfillment, isolate her from friends and family, and lead to financial dependency, which in turn can lead to homelessness, financial ruin, and, in extreme cases, even death. Many feminists believe that the current culture of violence has caused all women to live in a state of anxiety and fear, and to modify their behavior accordingly. For example, women may fear verbal harassment by construction workers on a job site and so take

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INTRODUCTION

15

a different route to work, or they might not walk to the corner store after dark for fear of sexual assault. What is clear is that violence is a key factor in women’s oppression and has been used as a tool by men to establish and maintain social control. For the purposes of this inquiry, it is important to keep in mind the difference between physical violence and nonphysical violence. It is also necessary to reemphasize that vigilante acts are always illegal, but not always physically violent. For example, when Idgie Threadgoode, the main character of Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, steals canned goods from supply trains, it is an act of vigilantism, but not an act of violence. Alternately, Maxine Hong Kingston’s rewriting of Chinese cultural norms might be seen as a “violent” wielding of the pen but is certainly not illegal. Thus, as mentioned earlier, the two terms violence and vigilantism are not interchangeable.

C In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn G. Heilbrun observes that after teaching a semester of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels by women, her students were frustrated by “the absence of any narrative that could take women past their moment of revelation and support their bid for freedom from the assigned script” (42). Similarly, in the preface to the widely popular Women Who Kill (1980), Ann Jones explains that she began researching and writing about women murderers when at the conclusion of a seminar on women’s literature, a student asked, “Isn’t there anything a woman can do but kill herself?” (xv). Even today, more than thirty years after Jones’s observation, only a handful of novels sanction woman’s “bid for freedom.” This realization is critical to our understanding of women’s fiction and its development over time. In response to the lack of options for women in fiction, as well as in real life, women have developed new plots and outcomes for their heroines, one of which is the plot of the vigilante women. This plot, in turn, serves as a model to transform actual lives. Resolving conflicts via a quest for self-discovery and knowledge is one of the most important reasons that we read. Reading allows us to imagine new outcomes in our own lives, as we identify with the experiences of fictive characters. Texts about female vigilantism serve as a means of overcoming oppressive patriarchal dominance by allowing

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female characters to achieve freedom and fulfillment on their own terms. The chapters that follow offer an alternative version of women’s place, as conceived of and enacted by contemporary women authors who continue to break new ground for readers everywhere.

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CH A P T ER

ON E

Great Vengeance and Furious Anger: The Female Avenger

The revenge plot is not a new phenomenon in Western fiction. Rather, revenge can be considered “a fountainhead” of Western epic and drama (Jacoby 14), a subject that has occupied great writers for centuries. The theme is currently undergoing a revival, after falling out of favor for a number of years, relegated, as Susan Jacoby writes, “to the territory of detective and spy novels” (16). Lately there has been a resurgence of literature, television programs, and film that focus on revenge, especially the kind that is realized by the “virtuous avenger.” Peter A. French, in The Virtues of Vengeance, explores in great detail general criteria that define the virtuous avenger. French argues that vengeance almost always involves illegal retaliation carried out in response to criminal wrongdoing and thus often has a noble motive. Following Jeffrie Murphy, French outlines three conditions that he believes “convert harming someone into punishing him or her” (161). First, the harm must be identified as wrongdoing that requires a hostile response. Second is the proportionality condition, whereby the punishment must fit the crime. The third condition requires someone with moral authority to enforce sanctions. Of course, determinations about all three requirements are open to interpretation and, in fact, delineate the very dilemma of vigilantism: how does one differentiate between that which is lawful and that which is morally justifiable but not necessarily sanctioned by law? This is an ongoing debate. French makes clear that to be effective as punishment, vengeance must be communicative; that is, it must convey a message to the offender about why the punishment is in order. This point is important because for acts of vengeance to have a larger political impact, to be more than simply personal restitution, the avenger “must intend

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or expect some further or future consequence from performing the act” (84). In other words, the act must send a larger message that the behavior engaged in by the person being “punished” should not and/ or will not be tolerated by the general population. William C. Culberson also distinguishes between the virtuous avenger, defined as someone who practices “constructive” vigilantism, and the avenger who practices “destructive” vigilantism, one who “wants to close society and is deemed democratically bad” (112). Culberson, following Locke, stresses that most vigilante movements constitute a very short time frame; retaliation or punishment takes place, but then shortly thereafter the reins of government are restored. The short duration, writes Culberson, “is a mark of rationality; for violence is rational only if it pursues short-term goals”(11). Thus vigilantism is again understood as punishment for a specific behavior that is not addressed by the justice system of the community in question. Unlike French and Culberson, Eric Hobsbawm sees the avenger as anything but virtuous. He instead believes that avengers cultivate “terror as part of their public image” (63) and often sanction both terror and generosity as part of their modus operandi (64). Hobsbawm’s understanding of the avenger refers strictly to men and even more specifically to men who “avenge” or “fight” for a living, such as Virgulino Ferreira da Silva (1898–1938), a Brazilian outlaw who defied the government in northeastern Brazil in the 1930s (64–5) and is legendary in poetry and song: He spared the skin Neither of soldier nor civilian His darling was the dagger His gift was the gun . . . He left the rich as beggars, The brave fell at his feet, While others fled the country. (Zabele, qtd. in Hobsbawm 66)

The definitions of “avenger” provided by French and Culberson are useful for providing specific criteria that help us to differentiate harm from punishment and, in doing so, differentiate the virtuous avenger from one who practices “destructive” vigilantism. Female avengers in literature rarely conform to Hobsbawm’s definition: they are seldom depicted as “outlaws” or even as women who thwart the

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law on a regular basis. They are more commonly driven to commit a single act of illegal violence, specifically to retaliate against an antagonist (usually a man) who has repeatedly brutalized them (either mentally or physically). Thus, they can be considered “virtuous avengers,” whose defining qualities align with the main criteria put forward by French and Culberson. Today, the virtuous avenger is a relatively common manifestation of the vigilante woman in fiction. Simply stated, she is a woman who exacts revenge, independent of the law, for injustices committed against her or her loved ones. In doing so she fulfills the three criteria of moral avengers determined by French: (1) she identifies the wrong that has been done to her and recognizes her lack of legal recourse for retribution; (2) she determines how she can respond with a punishment that fits the crime; and finally, (3) she determines that she herself has the moral authority to enforce sanctions, because no one else is willing or able to act in her place. Moreover, women avengers intend to convey a message to the offender about why the punishment is in order so that their acts of vengeance have a larger political impact. As we can see, female avengers do not act merely in self-defense but take the action a step further, to exact some sort of restitution for the suffering inflicted upon them. The violent acts committed by the heroines of these fictions are often vital to helping them (re) establish a sense of autonomy and individuation, separate from their antagonists. However, in addition to a sense of personal empowerment, these acts of vengeance assume a further importance, both within the fictional world of the story (where violence often forces those in power to recognize social problems that would otherwise be overlooked or ignored) and within our actual society, which is affected by the creation and message of such fictions. In a sense, the actions of the female avenger may be understood as an individual modification to the rule of law warranted by society. I will discuss the social critique conveyed by these stories and demonstrate how violent rebellions in fiction engender political response. The texts examined within this chapter, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ “Gal Young ‘Un” (1932), and Shirley Ann Grau’s “The Keepers of the House” (1965), all include a female avenger. In each text the home is a deciding factor in the decision of the heroine to seek justice or revenge. A metaphoric link between the home and the female body sheds light on this

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phenomenon, by pinpointing how the female body, like the interior of a home, is often conceived of as a “container” (Schipper). As noted by Luce Irigaray in the aptly titled “Volume without Contours,”1 the correlation of woman to the container can be troubling, because of the suggestion that the container is “closed.” This is not the case, Irigaray finds, because there is something about women that always exceeds enclosure. Margaret Whitford explains Irigaray’s theory of containers as follows: His desire is to immobilize her, keep her under his control, in his possession, even in his house. He needs to believe that the container belongs to him. The fear is of the “open container,” the “incontournable volume,” that is to say, the volume without contours, the volume he cannot “get round” . . . or enclose, possess and capture in his nets, or master and appropriate. (28)

In the stories examined herein, the symbol of physical space is directly linked to each woman’s sense of self and autonomy, and each protagonist takes it upon herself to demonstrate that she will not be immobilized or allow the containing space to belong to another. Thus, the fervent response of each protagonist when her home is threatened is logical, because all are enacting a symbolic defense of themselves. Gillian Brown takes this theory a step further by linking “domestic ideology” with women’s “definitions and redefinitions of selfhood” (I). She argues that women in the nineteenth century linked their selfworth with the upkeep of the home, and that an ideal home life was often thought to be a reflection of internal peace and order. Yet even today, the home (and all that the word implies) continues to be linked to the psyche of women, because it is a reflection of the women’s ability to “do it all”—that is, have a career, maintain a healthy marriage, raise a family, and provide a stable and loving home life for the family unit. It is no wonder that in light of these expectations many women come to regard the domestic sphere as an indicator of the health of their individual psyche; for example, a woman might feel violated if her home is invaded, upset if the home is disorganized, or otherwise unwell if the house is damaged or in any way nonfunctional. This phenomenon is reflected in the violent actions of the female protagonists analyzed in this chapter, all of whom become violent only when threatened with violence from an outside source, a source that in each case might very well make losing their homes a reality. Joshua Price

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makes the link between the self-esteem of battered women and the upkeep of the home explicit. He writes, Building a successfully peaceful home is tied for some to their sense of self, to their sense of accomplishment in this life. Social actors (husbands, wives, lovers, and so on) become enmeshed in deep ways in (depending on their social position) building a home, occupying it, providing it, having dominion over it. If a woman desires the safety of home and accepts her role as producer of it, then being battered confronts her fiercely, blatantly, with failure. Since she is invested in the production, she may understandably come to have a sense that the failure is not just the batterer’s, but also hers. (39)

The home, in other words, is a place of “psychic investment” (39) for women, who can experience a sense of failure if they find themselves unable to maintain the domestic ideal. In the texts examined in this chapter, men who seek to maintain their power threaten or deliberately undermine the protagonist’s autonomy, presented in the image of the home. At first, each heroine attempts to fix her situation while “playing by the rules”—that is, she tries to establish accord within and by the existing social system, and she tries to maintain her “feminine” countenance while doing so. Yet ultimately, each avenger finds that no “legitimate” channels exist for attaining justice, let alone atonement, for the harm that has been unfairly inflicted upon her. Thus, each avenger remakes herself, crossing the threshold of what is considered appropriate behavior for women (and thus the threshold of her “container”), and ultimately takes extralegal action to punish her assailant, restore a sense of justice to the fictional world she inhabits, and reclaim her personal identity and personal space.

Z N H’ “S” () “Sweat” (1926), by Zora Neale Hurston, is an example of a growing body of work in which the heroine avenges herself against patriarchal dominance by flouting conventional mores of femininity and taking extralegal action to punish her assailant. Delia Jones, the protagonist of this story, earns the title of “female avenger” by neglecting to take action to prevent her abusive husband’s deadly encounter with a poisonous snake, and by declining to come to his aid after he is bitten.

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Despite the retaliatory implications of Delia’s refusal to act, the mitigating circumstances surrounding the decision to allow her husband to die suggest that Sykes’s death is justifiable and would likely be perceived as such in a court of law2. The death of Sykes, I argue, is thus intended to symbolize more than a preemptive strike against a single attacker. Rather, the death is symbolic of a strike against larger systems of power that subordinate and confine black women. In crafting Delia, Hurston deconstructs the division between masculine and feminine, by combining gendered characteristics to create a protagonist who is not limited by stereotypical norms. The reconstruction of gender identities opens up a new stage for becoming human and highlights questions of representation and identity through discourse. By exceeding the assumed limitations of her gender, Delia is able to reestablish a sense of autonomy and individuation such as she experienced before her abusive marriage, restore a sense of justice to the fictional world she inhabits, and reclaim her personal identity and space. The story opens with a description of Delia’s admirable work ethic. She is a “washwoman” who “collects the soiled clothes on Saturday” and spends every Sunday evening sorting the clothes and putting “the white things to soak” (Hurston Sweat 189). Delia is the breadwinner of the family. She has used her meager earnings to purchase and care for her home, and to buy the horse and buckboard she uses to tote the laundry. Delia’s financial independence is the first reversal of conventional gender roles evident in the story. Sykes works intermittently but cannot manage his money. He relies on Delia to support him financially, eating her food, living in her house, and spending the little money he does earn on indulgent “trips to Orlando” (192). However, the “penniless” Sykes is none too happy about Delia’s selfsufficiency. In her introduction to the “Sweat” casebook, Cheryl A. Wall notes, “Delia’s work is both an economic necessity and a psychological threat to her husband Sykes. . . . Sykes . . . asserts his manhood mainly by intimidating and betraying his wife” (8). Sykes first attempts to undermine Delia’s source of income by criticizing her decision to wash the laundry of white people. He substantiates his accusations of wrongdoing by proclaiming that Delia is dissolute for working on the Sabbath: Yeah, you just come from de Church house on a Sunday night, but heah you is gone to work on them clothes. You ain’t nothing but a

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hypocrite. One of them amen-corner Christians— sing, whoop, and shout, then come home and wash white folks’ clothes on the Sabbath. (Hurston 191)

Sykes comprehends biblical law as a direct translation of God’s commandments, an Old Testament understanding, instead of as a basis for human compassion and insight. Wall correctly notes that although Delia’s faith helps her to “weather the storms of her marriage,” it at the same time, “imbues her with a meekness that makes her more vulnerable to her husband’s cruelty” (8). Sykes’s critique of Delia’s religious faith is nothing more than a thinly veiled ploy to maintain power; he wants to regulate her behavior by invoking the threat of eternal damnation. Delia’s subordinancy is not surprising— she is expected to be reverential toward her God and her husband, both of whom maintain the traditional patriarchal advantage. Peter Kerry Powers writes, “One means of establishing patriarchal control has been to insist on the demure and disembodied spiritualism of women.” Holding women to an alternate standard again insures that men have a psychological advantage. Powers continues, Hurston makes it clear that . . . Christianity . . . shows all too little force of spirit . . . Hurston has little use for the intricacies of salvation and damnation. She plainly admires . . . men who set their face toward the world and act, men who make a difference here and now, which may mean, indeed, making a difference in blood. (234)

Certainly, in Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, Hurston displays the attitude noted by Powers when she writes, Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely on is a creature of their own minds . . . Strong, self-determining men are notorious for their lack of reverence. (Dust Tracks 277–8)

Thus, Hurston relates to those whom she sees as strong and selfsufficient here on earth, rather than to those who believe their rewards will come in heaven. Delia is beginning a journey toward liberation, and the religious components of this story suggest that achieving liberation through simple economic emancipation is not enough.

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In “Sweat,” Delia must find a way to balance her spirituality with her need to defend herself from Sykes, as noted by Wall (8). She manages this by delineating a clear difference in the intensity of vice based on motive, by distinguishing between those who act from “good” intentions and those who act from “bad” ones. For example, Sykes implies that Delia’s faith is hypocritical; yet, it is Sykes who invokes the unspoken rule of the black community (not to associate with whites) and the tenets of the Bible (not to work on the Sabbath) as ways to achieve his own corrupt ends. In this way Sykes supports and condones religious hypocrisy that originates in the white community, which necessitates Delia’s laboring on the Sabbath. He does not have Delia’s best interests in mind when leveling his accusations but instead attempts to diminish her accomplishments to establish his own superiority and control.3 Such behavior is typical of an abusive partner and underlies the inhumanity of Delia’s mistreatment. Sheryl J. Grana’s definition of household violence identifies control and power as elements used by batterers to rule other members of a household. Grana asserts that batterers impose rigid rules “so that they can know who fits where in the hierarchy at all times” (137). Sykes’s attacks become increasingly physical after Delia begins to answer back. Delia’s use of language from this point forward showcases the gap between her docile demeanor and her internal agency; her rebellious words unlock the door to a communicative violence that threatens not just Sykes but the larger systems of power for which he stands. In response, he sullies the clean laundry and declares his intention to permanently drive her away from her home. The imagery here is straightforward— Sykes intentionally defiles what is pure. He threatens to “put [his] fist up side [her] head” (Hurston 191) if she resists. The fear and terror he instills in Delia are tactics commonly used by batterers to maintain their dominance over both the symbolic and physical spaces that women occupy. But again, Delia does not react to Sykes’s threats in the manner that he expects. Her “habitual meekness . . . slip[s] from her shoulders like a blown scarf” (191). She stands defiant, with “her bare knuckly hands bravely defying the strapping hulk before her” (191), and she cries, “Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it” (191). It is the possibility of losing her home that finally compels Delia to stand up to her tormentor. Her defiant stance and reference to her hard labor defy Sykes’s (and readers’) expectations of femininity—that is, the values and behaviors deemed

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“normal” for a woman to uphold in 1920s American society, especially a woman of color. Delia next grabs an iron skillet from the stove, a gesture that demonstrates her steely unbending will (a characteristic typically seen as masculine) through an object typically associated with the “womanly” activity of cooking, the skillet. The whip, carried by Sykes to threaten Delia, stands in stark contrast to Delia’s chosen weapon. The whip is described as “limp” and so can be understood to have lost its phallic threat. Moreover, the weapon is flexible, much like Sykes’s notions of morality. He “bends” the laws of man and God alike to satisfy his own selfish desires. Delia’s ideas of right and wrong are much more rigid, as symbolized by the iron pot. Her brandishing of the pot so surprises Sykes that he does not strike her “as he usually did” (191) and is instead driven from the house. In this scene, Delia meets Sykes on his own aggressive terms, in a manner that thwarts his gendered expectations. Further, her acts render Sykes impotent within the patriarchal system of power. This is one of a body of female revenge stories in which defense of a protagonist’s home serves as grounds for defiance and/or outright revenge against the person seeking to occupy or otherwise harm the home of the protagonist. But why is personal property such an important factor in establishing female empowerment? Many critics have written on the public-private divide and how women are almost always relegated to the private sphere. Mineke Schipper, for one, affirms that women are associated and equated with the home the world over. She demonstrates how proverbs and metaphors equate women with the home to “localize” or “chain” them to “the place where they belong or ought to remain so that they do not fall a prey to the greedy hands and eyes and penises of men other than their husbands” (365). She also convincingly identifies the home as one in a long list of feminized “container” metaphors, a metaphor that she believes “might well be the central metaphor for ‘women’ all over the world” (352). She explains, the container metaphor is associated with the various ways in which women are seen as serviceable and needed: the children they conceive, carry in their wombs, and give birth to, and the work they are expected to do for their family in general and for their husband in particular . . . Most frequently, containers refer to the womb, and its wished-for accessibility or inaccessibility, depending on the situation. (352)

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If we understand the home as a metaphor for women, or more specifically, for the female body, we can begin to understand why female protagonists are preoccupied with the urge to defend their stake. This is certainly the case for Delia whose sweat has paid for the home that she cherishes. Moreover, this metaphor explains the ominous feeling that overtakes the reader when Sykes first appears in the doorway of Delia’s home, laughing at her fright (Hurston 25); she is suddenly vulnerable, both bodily and psychologically, to assault. In addition, owning a home, for many women, signifies social prominence, and thus power. For black women the struggle for property ownership takes on added dimensions as we consider the double onus of being both female and black, a burden that has left black women twice as marginalized, and thus even less likely to own property than their white counterparts, even in contemporary America. Black women who are property owners in literature are often fiercely protective of their spaces (see work by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor, among others) and work hard to keep their homes neat and respectable, even when they are poverty stricken. Roger D. Abrahams states that in African American culture, “the locus of respectability is the home; the operation of the household is both the real and the symbolic means by which . . . social values are put into practice” (84). In other words, a black women in her home both creates and maintains the social-symbolic structures that constitute the meaning of enforced social values, which are passed down from mother to child. Delia, for example, is proud of the fact that her sweat has sustained both her and Sykes and has paid for their home. She states, “Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat! . . . Mah tub of suds is filled yo’ belly with vittels more times than yo’ hands is filled it. Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it” (Hurston 189). Kathryn Lee Seidel argues that owning property gives Delia the right to declare herself a person, rather than feeling that she exists as a piece of property owned by another human being (whether it be a husband or a white “master”). Seidel notes, Sykes has not shared in the labor that results in the purchase of [the] property, he remains in a dependent state. He is angry with Delia whom he feels challenges his authority by denying him access to her

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home; his only reason for this assertion is that he is a man and Delia is his wife. (172)

This passage clearly points out the power of patriarchal myths that establish a right of ownership based on gender, rather than work ethic. And here again we can detect a link to the female body— Sykes assumes he can possess the home just as he can possess Delia’s body. Irigaray explains, “women is still the place, the whole of the place where she cannot appropriate herself as such . . . she is that everywhere elsewhere from whence the ‘subject’ continues to draw his reserves, his re-sources, yet unable to recognize them/her” (53). The masculine subject in this case is Sykes, who relies on and violently consumes and corrupts Delia and the “place” she has created. Sexual objectification is at the center of Delia’s gendered oppression. Sykes repeatedly objectifies Delia to render her servile to his desires and interests. He criticizes her appearance, claiming to hate “skinny wimmen” (Hurston 191), and later pronouncing that he no longer “wants her” because of her “Stringey ole neck” and “rawboney laigs” that could cut a man to death (197). Sykes objectifies his new mistress, Bertha, in a similar manner, by complimenting her “portly shape” (195). In essence, Sykes is commenting on both women’s potential to be of sexual service to him. Although the assemblage of men on Joe Clarke’s porch is sympathetic to Delia’s plight, they too comment, almost exclusively, on her physical appearance rather than her character. Says one man, “she wuz a right pretty li’l trick when [Sykes] got huh,” and another replies, “she was ez pretty ez a speckled pup!” (Hurston 193). The men agree that “Too much knockin’ will ruin any ‘oman” (193). They additionally comment on the appearance of Sykes’s new girlfriend. Someone asks, “How Syke kin stommuck dat big black greasy Mogul he’s layi’ roun’ wid,” and continues, “Ah swear dat eight-rock couldn’t kiss a sardine can Ah done thowed out de back do’ ‘way las’ yeah” (193). In this description Bertha is defined as a thing, and her sexuality is “standardized to male parameters” (Irigaray 60). Despite the focus on appearance, the group discussion reinforces the reader’s belief that Delia is in the right and that Sykes is a philandering, abusive, good-for-nothing. Sykes is described as “ain’t wuth de shot an’ powder hit would tek tuh kill ‘em,” and the men declare, “Their oughter be a law about him . . . He aint fit tuh carry guts tuh a

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bear” (193). Even the well-respected Joe Clarke appears to have a low opinion of men who abuse women. He remarks, Tain’t no law on earth dat kin make a man decent if it ain’t in ‘im. There’s plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It’s round, juicy, an’ sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an’ grind, squeeze an’ grind an’ wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat’s in ‘em out. When dey’s satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats ‘em jes’ lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey thows ‘em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin’ while dey is at it, an’ hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin’ after huh tell she’s empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein’ a canechew an’ in de way. (193)

The men are critical of Sykes, yet, to some degree, the men’s forthright objectification of Delia undermines their sincerity. John Lowe notes, for example, that Joe Clarke’s statement is ironic because this same character is portrayed as a wife beater in “The Eatonville Anthology” (185). Further, attests Lowe, Joe Clarke is Hurston’s model for the character Jody Starks in Their Eyes Were Watching God, a man who treats his wife, Janie, like a piece of property (185). The chasm between principled intention and action is often revealed by the avenging female in twentieth-century literature. In this case, the men gathered on Joe Clarke’s porch reveal a paradox in their refusal to act on Delia’s behalf. They recognize Delia’s lack of recourse and suggest taking action, independent of the law, to attain justice for Delia. Old man Anderson advises, “We oughter take Syke an’ dat stray ‘oman of his’n doen in Lake Howell swamp an’ lay on de rawhide till they cain’t say Lawd a mussy . . . an’ we oughter kill ‘im” (Hurston 193–4). The men all seem to agree that this would be a decent course of action, but the heat melts their resolve. The narrator comments, “A grunt of virtue went around the porch. But the heat was melting this civic virtue” (194). Yet, ultimately, the men fail to follow through with their threats, because they too are invested in preserving the status quo. As black men in the 1920s, they have very little socioeconomic power, but they do maintain a slim collective advantage over black women, which is simply a consequence of their sex. Culberson explains, “Privileged groups historically resist change, preferring and relying on the status quo to

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guard their privileges. With privilege on one side and change on the other, conflict is a normative element of societies” (Culberson 6). In other words, rectifying the existing hierarchy would threaten the small amount of power that the men of the community wield over the women. It is interesting that the male characters are the first to conceive of acting outside of the law in opposition to Sykes. Two things stand out about the group’s conversation: (1) the intention of the men to act as a unit, what Richard Maxwell Brown refers to as the “mob aspect” of typical male vigilantism (93); and (2) that the members of this “unit” are those in the community “with the greatest stake in the social status quo . . . leading businessmen, planters, and professionals” (93), such as store owner Joe Clarke himself. Brown attributes such public crusade to the characteristically conservative aspect of standard vigilantism—that is, “the perpetuation of established patterns of local community life, especially in . . . areas where crime and disorder loom as a threat to honest, upright persons and their idealistic concepts of life and property” (93). Alternatively, in literature focusing on female vigilantism, the so-called good intentions of the conservative norm are exposed as inadequate, as is the case in “Sweat.” The men on Joe Clarke’s porch publicly claim to support Delia but, in fact, have no desire to upset the dualism that keeps them privileged in relation to women. The men thus resign themselves to doing nothing (often considered a passive “feminine” response4), while Delia finds it necessary to take action in a re-rendering of traditional androcentric vigilantism. She works to “carve out a niche of privilege” within the existing social order (Culberson 6). The story thus skillfully expresses the problem of law as a tool of redress for women. Sykes’s behavior grows progressively more intimidating as Delia refuses to back down and surrender her home. He exploits her great fear of snakes by bringing a rattlesnake to the house. This action can be understood as yet another attempt to reestablish masculine dominance, because the snake is a living and virulent symbol of phallic power. Moreover, the serpent is particularly relevant in Christianity as a symbol of deceitfulness, and of Satan; the snake tempted Adam and Eve and caused their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The “forked tongue” of the snake is commonly used as a metaphoric expression for dishonesty. Hurston incorporates the symbolic connotations of the snake in “Sweat” by having Delia refer to the snake

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as “ol Satan,” and by linking the snake (the devil) with Sykes directly in the following passage: One day as Delia came down the kitchen steps she saw his chalky-white fangs curved like scimitars hung in the wire meshes. This time she did not run away with averted eyes as usual. She stood for a long time in the doorway in a red fury that grew bloodier for every second that she regarded the creature that was her torment. (Hurston 196)

The “creature that was her torment” links the phallic imagery of the snake with the man who has dominated and controlled Delia throughout her 15 years of marriage. The phallic threat is clear; the snake sits, caged, before the door of Delia’s sanctuary (representative of her physical self), waiting to penetrate and do harm. Wall too points to the snake as “Sykes’s symbol,” a symbol that “images his sexuality and his evil” (11). In fact, even his name sounds like the hiss of a snake. Delia takes courage from her faith and refuses to give way. She tells Sykes in no uncertain terms of her hatred for him (an action that could be considered both unwomanly and unchristian) and insists that he leave the house. Sykes’s amazement makes it difficult for him to “whip himself up to the proper fury to try to answer Delia” (197). He is clearly frustrated and perturbed by Delia’s response to his latest intimidation tactic (Irigaray might postulate that this is a symptom of castration anxiety [169]— Sykes fears that without Delia to validate his image of himself as master, his identity will be destroyed), so much so that he is soon driven to rid himself of Delia entirely through the act of murder. While Delia is attending an evening church service he places the rattler in her laundry basket. Upon her return, Delia manages to escape the snake, and in a simple twist of fate, the snake bites Sykes. Delia watches through the window as Sykes enters the bedroom where the snake lies coiled on the bed, and she does nothing to warn him of the snake’s whereabouts. After Sykes is bitten, she refuses to come to his aid or call for help. Instead, she waits quietly, allowing him to “reap his sowing” (Hurston 192). Thus, it is Sykes’s own phallic authority that ultimately destroys him, coupled with Delia’s passive resistance, her refusal to act on his behalf. Delia’s behavior is doubly ironic because by assuming a state of passive inactivity (her refusal to act), she invokes the gender-specific femininity that Sykes has desired of her, while simultaneously ensuring that Sykes is killed.

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In the final moments before Sykes’s death, Delia approaches Sykes and makes eye contact, and the story concludes with Sykes’s grim realization that Delia knew of his plan and had retaliated by orchestrating his demise (200). Peter French, author of The Virtues of Vengeance, summarizes Locke from “Second Treaty of Government,” who claims that “for vengeance to be successful, the target must understand that he or she is suffering injury or being killed as a penalty for his or her actions that triggered the revenge behavior of the avenger” (34). This is the case in the final scene of Hurston’s “Sweat.” The final line of the story not only reveals Sykes’s awareness of Delia’s choice but also emphasizes the point. This revelation accords with French’s own understanding of vigilante vengeance, which similarly claims that “the avenger must somehow communicate to the target the reasons for the infliction of punishment” (69). The revelation of the morality behind the act of vengeance is a necessary part of the attainment of retribution and restoration. Throughout “Sweat,” Hurston makes an ethical distinction between vices by differentiating between people who act from “good” intentions and those who act from “bad” ones. Further, she makes visible the unfair and dangerous treatment of black women and their lack of legal recourse in the 1920s. Just as the reader forgives Delia for washing clothes on the Sabbath (because she must work on the Sabbath to survive), so too do we recognize that Sykes’s death is necessary for Delia’s survival. Therefore, the reader’s sympathies lie with Delia throughout the story, despite her imperfections. We see Sykes’s murder as a pardonable crime, because, similar to washing clothing on a Sabbath, the trespass is a matter of life or death. Further, Hurston employs her narrative skill to invert the traditional theme of the death of the oppressor. The snake, which represents phallic authority, is ultimately responsible for the death of the patriarch, while Delia is only technically guilty of inaction. However, in an ironic twist, inaction, a typically “feminine” position that lacks an outcome, has led to this death, a quantifiable result. Hurston forces Delia’s inaction to momentarily assume a masculine causality (her inaction leads to death). Hurston thus positions Delia within the indeterminate realm between the signifier and signified, preventing her from having to fully enter the symbolic realm of the male, while simultaneously allowing the character to assume an agency of her own. Delia maintains a position that is situated somewhere between the conventional concrete meanings of masculine action and feminine inaction and is thus not

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confined or restricted by their implementation (both linguistic and actual) in the social order. Hurston thus defines a new order of the feminine that revises our traditional assumptions concerning woman as innocent victim. Ultimately, then, this story reveals a larger social dysfunction that needs rectification. With the death of Sykes, who is symbolic of a much greater masculine oppression, Hurston provides an opening for Delia and the social order to bypass the stalled status quo into the as yet unsignified world of female vigilante justice.

M K R’ “G Y ‘U” () The female avenger in fiction does not necessarily need to commit murder to achieve personal and political vindication. As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, proportionality of crime to punishment is a factor for modern female avengers. A just reprisal is, in many modern novels, attained through the illegal destruction of the offender’s property. “Gal Young ‘Un,” by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, is one such example. As in “Sweat,” the avenging female of this story finds that she must combine aspects of her feminine power with characteristics traditionally understood to be masculine, to create a unique new persona of empowerment. The “ability to bridge the distinctive literary traditions of masculine and feminine” points to the constructed nature of such categories and allows us to “interrogate their modes of operation”(Flanagan 21). In other words, Rawlings is addressing the need for women to be both nurturing and aggressive, and to belie stereotypes that suggest this combination is not possible. The metaphoric link between the home and the female body persists within this story as well. The connection between the protagonist and her home demonstrates how the female form can become a site of disturbance that conveys a social and political critique to the reader. The 1932 publication of “Gal Young Un” in Harpers Magazine earned Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings “wide attention as an interpreter of the female experience” (R. L. Tarr 11), as well as the O. Henry Memorial Prize. By the time the story was published, Rawlings had established a successful career as a professional writer, which afforded her the opportunity to develop the unmistakable feminist sensibility that emerges in this text5. While working as a journalist in the early 1920s, Rawlings wrote a series of articles entitled “Live Women in Live

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Louisville,” lauding women working successfully in professions largely dominated by men. Soon thereafter, while working as a journalist in Rochester, New York, she wrote critically of the “Wives School” of a new Mechanics Institute that taught “homemaking” to its all-female population. In an article about the school, Rawlings scathingly wrote that the curriculum was “calculated to develop an all-round, oldfashioned cave-woman wife” (qtd. in Tarr and Kinser). Here, as elsewhere, Rawlings demonstrates her awareness of the great inequality between the lives of men and women. In response to the charge that Rawlings’s writing is overly domestic, Tarr and Kinser comment, Rawlings’s vision of female opportunity went well beyond the domestic sphere, even though she too found comfort and reveled in the accomplishments of that realm. The essential aspect of her satisfaction in the domestic, however, is that she was able to choose to pursue the activities of kitchen and home, largely because of her later success as a professional writer. (10)

Rawlings’s sensitivity to the asymmetrical gender roles and gender politics of the day becomes clearly evident in “Gal Young ‘Un,” as the story of the main character, Mattie Syles, unfolds. As Peggy Whitman Prenshaw writes, “What Rawlings most deeply resented and found personally debilitating— and fought against all her life—was the powerlessness of the average woman, the powerlessness even of exceptional women in her society” (16). Similarly, Tarr and Kinser emphasize “Rawlings’s inclusive vision of women as the arbiters of their own futures” (8). Mattie Syles is a widow who marries a young and attractive conman, Trax Coulton. He moves into her home, spends her savings on a whiskey still, and then spurns her for a younger woman. As in Hurston’s “Sweat,” it becomes increasingly evident that the gravity of the injuries done to the avenging heroine justifies her vindictive response. When the story begins, Mattie lives a solitary but relaxed and comfortable existence a few miles outside of town. She does without male companionship, having survived both her father and husband. The narrative opens with a description of the house she has inherited, immediately highlighting its significance. The “tall square two-story” is set back from the road and hidden behind two live oak trees (Rawlings 148). To the local population, Mattie Syles “looks . . . like the house.” She is described as “tall and bare and lonely, weathered gray” like the house’s

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“unpainted cypress” exterior. The metaphoric connection between the stark gray house and the stark gray woman is unmistakable. The description of Mattie’s body as tall, bare, lonely, and gray casts her as a container, a vessel like her home, with vague interior workings. But Mattie is no ordinary container, symbolic of the home and of the womb. Mattie is a widow who lives alone, thus vulnerable to male intrusion. As Schipper attests, access to the female container has to be barred from undesirable intruders . . . in order to close the womb off against external threats, it is advised that vulnerable female containers be safely guarded, and preferably put up in a father’s or husband’s house. In addition to serving as extra protection for the womb, the house also metaphorically coincides with the womb, as in the following Oromo proverb . . . “A house without a centre-pole is like a woman without a husband.” (353)

In this story, Trax first encounters Mattie outside of the home (indicating her lack of “protection”) and quickly determines that she lives alone (with no male to “guard” her). Trax immediately begins calculating how Mattie can be of use to him. Certain that Mattie will feed and care for him, he gains admission to the house, where he observes and records the details of the home “like hoarded money” (Rawlings 152). Writes Schipper, The door is the most common metaphor, not only for virginity but also for controlling the womb. The closed or locked door represents . . . the encouraged and praised chastity of daughters and wives who practice restraint of their own accord. Widows’ doors are especially problematic, because they lack the indispensable marital control. (354)

Trax’s easy access to the interior of the home reveals exactly how easily he will be able to take advantage of Mattie, emotionally, sexually, and economically. Mattie responds to his “casual intimacy” by apologizing for the time it will take her to “fry bacon and make coffee” (152), thus begins her shift from competent, emotionally sound woman to a grotesque parody of the feminized body. Terry Eagleton defines the grotesque in fiction as a signifier that is “intrinsically double faced, an immense semiotic switchboard through which codes are read backwards and messages scrambled into their antithesis” (Eagleton 145). Mikhail Bakhtin describes the

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grotesque bodies of carnival as sites of “fertility, growth, abundance, and degradation,’ and finds that such characteristics are the “prelude to regeneration” (qtd. in Yaeger “Amphora Princess” 201). Patricia Yaeger has suggested that in Southern literature, linking descriptions of a woman’s body with grotesque imagery creates “a site of disturbance, uneasiness, and pleasure” that is translated to the reader as a form of social critique. Such imagery permits writers to “map an array of social crises” on the body so that the “excessive, corpulent, maimed, idiotic, or gargantuan body becomes the sign of a permanent emergency within the body politic” (Dirt and Desire 222). To put it simply, the grotesque body signifies social dysfunction and transmits the unease associated with social dysfunction to the reader. In this case, Mattie’s body can be understood as grotesque, not in the sense that she is deformed or maimed, but as an icon for one who is used and taken for granted, overlooked by society at large. She distorts herself in her attempts to masquerade as feminine, to become sexually attractive to one who sees her as simply a tool. She “serves him lavishly . . . and his gluttony delights her.” When she tries to tell him about her life he “scarcely listens” (Rawlings 153) and neglects to even ask her name (154). Yet she is so taken with the glamor of having him in her kitchen that she finds the sensation akin to “ecstasy painful in its sharpness” (154). Trax’s intrusion into this space creates disturbance and unease in the reader, for we are sensitive to the unfair hierarchy of power that privileges the young handsome scoundrel above the middle-aged widow and compels her to please him, to sacrifice for him, to allow herself to be polluted by his intrusion. Mattie is so flattered by Trax’s attentions that she forgets to be cautious, freely giving of herself, her home, her property, and her bank account. She, in essence, experiences a crisis of identity, distorting her identity and choosing to renounce her independence to fulfill what she has been taught is her designated feminine role. Trax courts Mattie with the awareness that her property would perfectly support his bootlegging business and thinks derisively, “he could even use the woman” (158). Mattie throws open the door to her home, and in doing so she symbolically abandons her strength and self-reliance. As Schipper attests, “The metaphor of a door either refusing or giving access to a female container serves as a yardstick for female morality” (354). Mattie assumes the role of the sexually available passive and defenseless female as though she is putting on a cloak. Her new behavior stands in stark contrast to the image we initially receive of

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her—that of the strong and competent widow surviving alone in the Florida backwoods. Her efforts, however, demonstrate exactly the opposite; that is, they reveal Mattie’s dependence on specific modes of behavior to convey femininity. Such conduct is thus shown to be a prop that has nothing to do with actual womanhood. In light of this revelation, it is not long before her false femininity deteriorates, much as Mattie and Sykes’s relationship does, like a garment bleached too often. The way that Mattie’s name changes as the story progresses reflects the changes in her countenance. The storekeeper is the first person to name Mattie—he thinks of her as Mattie Syles and refers to her aloud as “Mis’ Syles—Jim Syles’ wider— ol man Terry’s daughter” (156), that is, in terms of the men with whom she can be associated. The shopkeeper regards Mattie in a manner that is stereotypically gendered, as demonstrated by the title “Mis’ ” and his admonition to his wife to “take up some time” with Mis’ Syles next time she enters the store (156). Mattie cultivates the feminine role while Trax courts her, believing that this is what she is “supposed” to do. These are the discourses in which she has been taught to believe. She succumbs to his every wish without a thought for the consequences and waits on him hand and foot. As if to undermine the naturalness of such a role, Mattie occasionally oversteps, trespassing into the territory of the male; for example, when she staggers “into the room with her generous arms heaped with wood,” her strength immediately contradicts the stereotypical role of weak and inept female. Alternately, as with Delia Jones, Mattie’s strength demonstrates the instability of the construction of the weak and vulnerable female in need of protection. Such gender-shifting makes clear that gender roles are entirely constructed. As will become more evident in the chapters to follow, vigilante females are never wholly feminine or masculine, and in this case, evidence of the fusion leaks through Mattie’s feminine disguise. The “courtship” that takes place between Mattie and Trax provides an opportunity for Mattie to experience her long-dormant sexuality. During the courtship Mattie is highly attuned to the sexual imagery found in nature. She notices “fresh green bamboo shoots” in the garden and stops to “press apart the new buds of the oleander in search of the pale pinkness of the first blossoms” (159). Her awareness of the cycles of nature seem to reinforce her belief that her relationship to Trax is “natural,” and that she must accept her proper “place” in the order of things, much like a blossom that waits to be pollinated.

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Yet despite her awareness of the budding life around her, Mattie’s femininity is defined by her maternal feelings toward Trax rather than feelings that are overtly sexual. Mattie does not want to ravish Trax but instead wants to “gather” his sleeping form and hold it to her “capacious breast” (159), much like she holds the cat. Mattie’s expectations concerning what is “natural” are thus cleverly undermined by Rawlings, who demonstrates the flaws in the gendered system to which Mattie subscribes. Mattie is unable to accept the fact that Trax treats her poorly and she attempts to compensate for his inability to meet her expectations of “husband” and “man of the house.” She begins by making excuses for his behavior; for example, “When a group of men came together, he ignored her. . . . [S]he decided that Trax was too delicate to want his wife mixing with men who came to drink” (163). Next, she assumes significant aspects of his “role,” by working the still and serving his customers: She waited on Trax’ old customers as best she could, running up the slight incline from the still-site to the house when she heard a car. Her strong body was exhausted at the end of the week. Yet, when she had finished her elaborate baking on Saturday night she built up a roaring fire in the front room, hung the hot water kettle close to it for his bath, and sat down to wait for him. (165)

In this passage, Mattie slaves at both of their jobs, trying to maintain some semblance of a marriage structure in which she desperately wants to believe. In fact, Mattie is combining aspects of the traditional male persona with those of the traditional female persona, demonstrating that many of the patriarchal imperatives to which the pair adheres (Mattie as submissive, passive, sex-object, cook, housekeeper; Trax as business-oriented provider) are constructions. Trax refuses to meet the obligations of his patriarchal role, in particular those of the responsible wage earner and dedicated, loving husband. But Mattie continues to endure mistreatment at the hands of Trax, hoping that “her distraught mind had been busy with imaginings” or that something will change (168). She is not able to think beyond the gender bias that has been ingrained in her. It is not until Trax brings home his underaged mistress Elly, the eponymous Gal Young Un, that Mattie accepts the reality of the situation and realizes that Trax has completely taken advantage of her.

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Once Trax brings his mistress to live in Mattie’s home, Mattie can no longer explain away what has occurred and is occurring. Her response then changes from trying to justify Trax’s actions to angry acquiescence: Matt watched them, standing solidly on big feet. She had not been whole. She had charred herself against the man’s youth and beauty. Her hate was healthful. It waked her from a drugged sleep, and she stirred faculties hurt and long unused. (171)

Mattie somehow understands that hatred is the healthier reaction. Aristotle, for one, endorses the view that anger can be praiseworthy. People who cannot experience this emotion are “unlikely to defend themselves and will endure being insulted.” In fact, “Persons deficient in anger are no better than slaves” (qtd. in French 94). Mattie finally sees the reality of the situation and understands that instability will not bring about a loss of identity, as she has feared, but instead will prevent her from losing herself. When she acknowledges that she has not been “whole,” she is admitting the insufficiency of the gendered behavior she has chosen in the hope of pleasing Trax. When Trax refuses to leave, Mattie threatens him with physical violence. Trax responds, Leave me tell you, ol’ woman, I’m too quick fer you. N’ if you hurt Elly . . . if you crack down on her— with them big hands o’ yourn— if you got any notion o’ knifin’. . . I’ll git you sent to the chair or up for life –an’ I’ll be here in these flat-woods— in this house— right on. (Rawlings 174)

Trax threatens to acquire the house, and this proves to be the last straw. Mattie “settles” the injustices that have been done to her by destroying Trax’s still, setting fire to his car, and driving him away with a shotgun. As noted by French, “the avenger . . . is the causal conduit by which the wrongness of A is recognized and identified as morally requiring a response, a response that Y must make” (80). Mattie, the “Y” in the schema identified by French, recognizes the moral inequity of how she has been treated and responds by taking action. Rodger L. Tarr argues that within this scene Mattie simultaneously “asserts her womanhood and takes Trax’s manhood” (Rawlings 11)

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by carrying out these acts of redemptive violence. Tarr is correct in one sense, because shortly after the incident Mattie believes herself to be “strong and whole . . . fixed, deep-rooted as the pine trees” (181). However, Mattie’s violent response does more than simply allow her to assert her womanhood. Her rebellion fractures the ideology inherent in the female-male dichotomy once and for all and thus becomes not only a step in reforming her own existence, but also a step toward the logic of gender equality. With her romantic fantasy destroyed and Trax gone for good, the basic elements of Mattie’s life return to normal. Perhaps it is this shift that leads to Mattie’s change of heart regarding Elly. In a final alteration of understanding, the narrator tells us that Mattie “is able to conceive of them [Trax and Elly] separately” (182). She recognizes that Elly is truly just a young girl in need of assistance. At this point, she accepts Elly back into her home and, in doing so, oddly enough, fulfills her womb-centered desire. The reader is left with the impression that Mattie has found a companion at last (where she once looked to Trax for companionship) and that Elly has found someone to look after her (where she once looked to Trax for care). In this way Mattie’s retributive violence has had a positive impact by allowing for new combinations, unifications, and areas for exploration, such as the tentative alignment of Mattie and Elly as a community of individuals able to negotiate the normative structure dictated by their society. As care giver, Mattie models a new female-inspired morality that rejects normative sacrificial conventions of identity for women and encourages a broader perspective. Ultimately, “Gal Young Un” is remarkable, especially for its time period, because it disrupts the premise of patriarchy. The text demonstrates how the maternal relationship that Mattie establishes with Elly is empowering and cathartic for both women and allows Mattie to embrace (and perhaps convey) a new morality to her charge. Rawlings is sensitive to the discrepancy of power between the male and female characters within the story and uses the text to overturn this hierarchy.

S A G’ T HE K EEPERS THE H OUSE ()

OF

Published in 1964, Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House is an example of a fictional plot that involves female retribution via the

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destruction of personal and public property. The story takes the vengeance sought by one such as Mattie Styles a step further, broadening the scope of retributive justice from a specific singular target to something that implies a much wider accountability. The text demonstrates the problems that result from pervasive white male privilege in all classes of society and ultimately suggests that social conflict, whether legal or illegal, is an inevitable step in correcting ideology that privileges men more than women, light skin more than dark, and the upper classes more than the lower or working classes. The Keepers of the House is an impressive rendering of how miscegenation infiltrates every level of society. The text exposes the pretense that integration necessarily results in racial harmony. Grau focuses on the history of one Southern aristocratic family, the Howlands, and traces their development across generations. The surname “Howland” was that of Grau’s own grandfather and so contains significance for Grau beyond the confines of the fiction (Schlueter 53). The text is divided into four sections and an epilogue, all of which are narrated by Abigail Howland Mason Tolliver. Abigail explores the lives of her grandfather William Howland and his black mistress/wife Margaret Charmichael, a story that ultimately culminates with the revelation of a family secret that disrupts and disassembles the values and systems that Abigail has internalized. Abigail, who is self-admittedly tangled in the “invisible threads of her home, town, and county” (Grau 6), struggles to understand and free herself from “the pressure of generations” past (5). The two central sections of the text, entitled “William” and “Margaret,” convey the thoughts and experiences of her grandfather and Margaret, as mediated through Abigail’s consciousness. The text is skillful for the way it simultaneously details Abigail’s reception and confrontation of family secrets in the present, while also forcing readers to contemplate how their own understandings of the text shifts, as new information is revealed. My analysis of the text will focus mainly on the final chapters of the novel, in which Abigail rejects the role of Southern lady and turns avenger. Her story reinforces some of the important themes of vigilante women that I have mentioned previously, specifically, the metaphoric link between the home and the female body, and the need for social conflict as an inevitable step in correcting political ideology that privileges men. Abigail’s vengeful acts ultimately make visible the social dysfunction of Madison City and point to the inadequacy of outdated gender roles in modern times.

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From childhood, Abigail has heard stories of the brave and vengeful deeds of her deceased relatives. In 1815 the first William Howland was killed by a band of raiding Indians after clearing and settling the land. With no organized system of justice in place on their frontier settlement, his sons take it upon themselves to track and kill the Indians responsible for the murder (12). Abigail also recalls hearing a story dating from about six generations earlier, about bandits who entered the home, killed the family’s youngest daughter, and then lit a cooking fire in the center of the big main hall. The Howland men return just as the fire is gaining strength. They drive the bandits into the swamp and slaughter them, one by one. The charred staircase railing is preserved in the home as a permanent reminder of the tragedy (132). Such stories clearly have an impact on young Abigail and are reflected in her behavior. As noted by Schlueter, “the past . . . constantly impinges upon the various forms of the ‘present’ offered in the novel” (54). When a classmate insults Margaret’s half-caste children, Abigail’s half-siblings, Abigail does not go to the teacher but instead pours a bottle of India ink into the child’s hair at the first opportunity (Grau 145). In this instance, as in the culminating scene of the text, we witness the “archetypal conflict of the frontier values of the past coming into conflict with the more urban— and urbane—values of today, and the ability of these concepts . . . to endure” (Schlueter 55). Abigail’s rebellious attitude, however, becomes more and more restrained as she matures. By degrees, she assumes the role of proper young Southern lady, following in the footsteps of her mother, and she acquires all of the prejudices that accompany such a role. As noted by Oleksy, “Abigail’s early sources of informal education . . . are her mother, the neighborhood ladies, and the Bible” (176) . Further, and more insidious, is the fact that Abigail learns her first “skill,” detecting “signs of Negro blood,” by listening to the ladies talk and gossip amongst themselves (176). Thus, Abigail is shaped by the problematic sanctions and expectations of her community, leaving tales of moral vengeance to her forsaken childhood. The one exception to this veil of propriety occurs when Abigail is expelled from college for attending the shotgun wedding of a female classmate. Abigail’s grandfather makes some phone calls to pull some strings on her behalf and, lo and behold, Abigail is readmitted to the school. She attests, “I had no idea of his influence and the extent of it. I had absolutely no idea of what he could do”

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(190), explaining her lack of understanding regarding her grandfather’s political and economic achievements. This incident reveals the extent of her grandfather’s power and influence and uncovers what has until this point in the novel been invisible: that Abigail’s relationship to the larger world, especially the world of law and social power, is entirely mediated through her relationship to her grandfather. As the close female relative of a wealthy man, Abigail is “sheltered” by his legal and economic identity, just as she is sheltered by his home, the patriarchal walls keeping her safe from harm, but also from knowledge. The second chapter of the text presents the consciousness of William Howland as interpreted and explained by his granddaughter, Abigail. This section and the following section entitled “Margaret” “provide historical perspective . . . in an omniscient manner that suggests an attempt to find out the meaning of history” (Schlueter 56). We learn that when William Howland first sees Margaret deep in the woods, washing clothing in a stream, he is reminded of a legendary woman of the woods, Alberta, “the great tall black woman who lived up in the hills with her man . . . and drank likker all day” (Grau 74). The description suggests that there is something mythic and free about Margaret; unlike the other women whom William has known, she is not tethered by social propriety or by the walls of a home. William sees her as “tall, very tall” and decides that she was “not pretty,” because “the Indian showed in her high cheekbones” (76). Although William does not look at Margaret with malice, he does objectify her in this instant, framing her as exotic, primitive, and peripheral to the world of privilege with which he is familiar. Thus his narrow-minded point of view becomes evident, as these labels immobilize Margaret as being always “different,” always other. The section entitled “Margaret,” also mediated through Abigail’s consciousness, counters the prior chapter with Margaret’s point of view. Her story begins with a family history. Her mother was “an outcast by her own desire . . . sheltered by her family because she had no place to go, but part of nothing” (82). Her father was a white road surveyor, a man who lived in a tent for the brief duration of time that he was in the state, someone whom Margaret has never even met (77). Margaret lives, for the most part, with her maternal grandparents in their floating house. Each spring when the tidewaters crest, the land where the house stands becomes flooded. So each year the extended family secures the house with ropes and moves to

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higher ground, leaving the house to float upon the water until the tide recedes (76–7). All of these images (the outcast mother, the unknown father, the floating home) represent the transient nature of Margaret’s existence. The floating house of Margaret’s childhood is certainly metaphoric, but not in any sense of the domestic ideal. Instead, the floating home links Margaret with the natural world of changing seasons and migrating animals. Her body, like the house, is subject to movement, conditioned to change and adapt as needed. Her primitive existence suggests a link to the mythology of the earth and the earth goddess; she possesses an awareness and sensitivity to the world around her that seems to embody nature itself. But the association between Margaret and Mother Nature becomes troubling when one considers how Margaret is treated by the white community, suggesting that Mother Nature has also become “an object of control and exploitation” (Aisenberg 136), vulnerable to the pollution and corruption of mankind. Margaret is emblematic of “the overlooked, the throwaway” as described by Patricia Yeager. Yaeger argues that Southern female writers create icons (such as Margaret) to depict “human beings whose lives are not properly registered, who are disposed of, taken for granted, not present (in terms of the dominant culture— not really there)” (Dirt and Desire 69).6 Even after Margaret becomes a member of the Howland household, first as a servant, later as the lover and companion of William Howland, she radiates a feeling of impermanence, overlooked or taken for granted by all who occupy the home (with the exception of William himself, although even he will not acknowledge their marriage publicly). Although she “keeps house” in the domestic sense (conferring an alternative dimension to the novel’s title), she is never thought of as a permanent member of the family. Abigail’s willingness to overlook and ignore the clearly visible relationship between Margaret and her grandfather is especially troubling for its misogynistic implications. Both women ultimately depend on William for care and financial assistance, but the fact of their skin color ensures that they will forever be treated differently by the community. It is not until after William Howland’s death that Margaret returns to New Church, the town where she was born, to spend the remaining four years of her life. She moves to a small home given to her by William before his death, the first home that has belonged to

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her exclusively. The home is described as “new” with “four or five rooms and a wide lattice-covered porch. It [is] painted and neat, with a clean-swept dirt yard, and beds of petunias and lantanas growing at the front” (Grau 221). The tidy, organized home demonstrates the pride and pleasure Margaret takes in ownership, a feeling that Abigail can clearly sense when she visits. Abigail explains how the two women communicate without words and finds that she feels “at home and comfortable” in a situation that might easily be awkward (221). Margaret’s small house is unpretentious and pleasant, like Margaret herself, and its description as new and well-cared for counters any remaining connection between Margaret and primitivism. Despite this, Abigail continues to wonder exactly what attracted her grandfather to Margaret, asking herself, what was it about the woman “that was hidden to everybody else?” (220). Ironically, the answer is right in front of Abigail during her visit, when the two women share a silent, good-natured communion, happy and content in each other’s company (221). Abigail is unable to make the connection between her own regard for Margaret and her grandfather’s love. She concludes at the end of her visit that her grandfather’s reason for loving Margaret must have been the fact that she “had no claim on him” like the other women of his family, a thought that is disturbing for its lack of insight and prevents the reader from mistakenly assuming that Abigail’s revenge occurs for Margaret’s sake. At the conclusion of the novel, after a lifetime of “belonging” to men (first her grandfather who raised her, then her controlling husband), Abigail finds herself alone, facing a mob of angry townsmen who seek to punish her for her grandfather’s social “misconduct.” The townspeople are scandalized by their discovery that Abigail’s grandfather was legally married to his black housekeeper, and thus the legitimate father of her three children. At this point, her husband too, with his political future at stake, has abandoned her. Although the townspeople turned a blind eye to the very public relationship between William Howland and Margaret Charmichael while the former was alive, the discovery of a marriage certificate has upset the social order to such a degree that Abigail’s husband’s political ambitions are ruined and the white community of Madison City seeks to avenge the town’s perceived fallen honor. A mob gathers on the Howland property, kills the livestock, burns the barn to the ground, and prepares to destroy the family home where Abigail takes refuge with her two small children. As the critical moment approaches, the

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moment when Abigail anticipates that she will lose her ancestral home forever, she thinks, “All my life I have been trained to depend on men, now when I needed them they were gone” (275). As this realization sinks in, Abigail concocts a plan on her own, to ensure the preservation of her house and children. While the mob is busy watching the barn burn, she and a loyal black farmhand named Oliver douse the mob’s vehicles with gasoline and set them alight. Abigail then fires her loaded shotgun at the mob as they beat a hasty retreat back to their flaming cars. “One for one” she thinks, “like it was before. You kill my child in the kitchen and I murder you in the swamp” (285). A mutual invasion of male and female spaces is evident in this declaration, which simultaneously allows for the challenging of traditional gender markers. The fact that it is Oliver who remains loyal to Abigail during this time of conflict demonstrates in miniature the exact paradox with which she has been struggling throughout her adult life—how to come to terms with prejudicial attitudes toward those with black skin, when her own experience has taught her that blacks are equal to whites in every respect?7 Does she continue to adhere to a system that ameliorates her own identity with its expectations of gender, in addition to race, and class, or does she choose to accept the consequence of self-amelioration to maintain the racial and economic advantage she maintains over people of color and those of a lower social echelon? Because Abigail is white and of the upper class, she retains advantage in the hierarchical structure of her community (like the men on Joe Clarke’s porch have advantage over Delia), despite the compromises she makes in terms of her gendered subjectivity. If she rejects the gendered framework that restricts her own freedom, she must also admit to the unfair race and class relations that restrict the freedoms of others. Abigail’s need to protect her children and her family’s home is deeply rooted in her sense of self. She acts out of a genuine fear for her children’s physical safety, but additionally, like Delia in “Sweat” and Mattie in “Gal Young ‘Un,” she acts to protect her home, a structure that is intricately entwined with her own conception of who she is. Anthony Bukoski notes, “In Shirley Ann Grau’s fiction houses provide a loci for the psychological and emotional lives of families” (181). Olesky concurs, writing that Grau “often uses houses as a metaphor for the female body” and that “Abigail’s feelings of emptiness and loneliness find their echo in the description

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of the house” (171–2). The house, built in 1815, is Abigail’s birthright, passed down through generations of Howlands. By setting the cars alight and firing gunshots at the retreating forms of the townsmen, Abigail acts to protect both the living Howlands and the ghosts of the dead, compelled by what she claims is nothing less than necessity: “I stood on that cold windy grass and saw what I had done. I saw that it wasn’t bravery or hate. It was, like my grandfather said, necessity” (290). Because of Abigail’s strong ties to her heritage, Susan S. Kissel believes that ultimately Abigail does not think her actions out for herself but instead simply emulates “patriarchal family tradition” (47). Kissel’s point is that Abigail acts only as an extension of her grandfather, William Howland. By defending her grandfather’s decision to keep his marriage a secret, Kissel argues, Abigail is “perpetuating a system that [s]he knows is morally wrong and damaging to the psyches of the children” (48). Kissel agrees with the assessment of Pamela Lorraine Parker, who concludes that Abigail “fails in her search for self through her overidentification with her grandfather and her Howland heritage” (qtd. in Kissel 49). Although Kissel’s analysis is perceptive, I believe that opposing the community is a necessary step for Abigail in the process of healing her marginalized self and breaking from the social codes that she has internalized. The story is ultimately about more than Abigail’s “success” or “failure” to emulate the behavior of her forefathers— rather, her retaliation is a step toward independence, an impulse to fight back that for the first time in her life she does not thwart but allows to rage in all its infantile glory. A close reading of the epilogue indeed shows a regression of sorts— an “unlearning” of behavior that has kept Abigail trapped in the powerless position of “daughter” and “wife,” both merged into their legal and economic identities. For Abigail to become independent it is first necessary that she cast off the learned behaviors she has inherited and that have contributed to her gendered socialization. This is not an easy process for her. To do so effectively she must first unlearn all that she has considered essential to her identity. Her behavior thus changes, in a series of culminating scenes, from that of a controlled, orderly adult female, to that of an impetuous, angry child, to that of an undeveloped infant. Although this change might initially seem negative, she must move backward, as though she is becoming a child again, to correct her course in life

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and ultimately progress. In the following passages I detail Abigail’s regression and her subsequent transformation. The day after Abigail drives the mob from her property, she sees Oliver “sorting the ruins” of the barn into “little piles” (Grau 296), in essence, creating order out of chaos. Abigail follows suit. She begins sorting and sifting through her husband’s business records and hires a lawyer, Edward Delatte, to help her to run the estate. At this point Abigail is still depending on men to provide an appropriate behavioral model. She begins creating what she believes to be order from chaos by involving men on whom she must depend. Abigail, at this point, appears to be in a mild state of shock. She states robotically, “one thing after the other” (297), as she hires Mr. Delatte to ensure that her legal affairs are secured. Yet, as the shock of what has taken place diminishes, her behavior begins to change in a process that leads to a cathartic renewal. After learning from the lawyer that her estate comprises “half the town,” (299), Abigail has “a wonderful idea” (299) that sets off her psychological transformation. She withdraws all of the Howland investments from local businesses. She closes the town hotel, sells what remains of her livestock, and withdraws her business from the slaughter yards, ice-cream plant, and packing plant. Finally, she promises to stop selling timber to the lumberyard, knowing that these changes will bring the local economy to its knees. Abigail is exacting revenge on several levels. Her actions punish her husband by adding to the scandal that has interrupted his political career. By crippling the local economy, she punishes the townspeople who sought to harm her. Moreover, by refusing to be contained, she frustrates the patriarchal system that has kept her dependent on men for her entire life. Abigail spends time learning about her assets, because, she thinks, “there was something I wanted. Something that neither my grandfather nor John had ever taught me” (299). For the first time Abigail shows an independent will and begins making decisions for herself. The intensity of Abigail’s transformation increases when she decides to blatantly thwart social convention by interrupting an elegant tea party (thrown by the wife of a local doctor) to spitefully announce the drastic changes she has in mind for the town. As a prelude to this action she thinks to herself, “I’ve been to so many of these . . . John always wanted me to go and I always did what he wanted” (302). Then, she drops her bomb, revealing to the women how she plans to cripple

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the town economically, and takes pleasure in their discomfiture. “I just closed the hotel,” she tells them. “That’s a start. Didn’t you hear the hammer sealing it up? Did you drive by without noticing?”(305). The sealed doorway in this scene calls to mind the metaphoric importance of doors, discussed previously. In this case, the hotel, which is normally an inviting common area indicative of the town’s financial stability, is closed and barred, suggesting a new impermeability, caused by Abigail, that challenges ordinary configurations of space and social power. Moreover, Abigail allows her lawyer to stay in the guestroom of her ancestral home, amused by the thought of the scandalous gossip that will take place as a result (299). This intentional misrepresentation (which suggests illicit access to her “container”) is meant to shock and scandalize the community, to further disrupt the prescribed social order that has created and maintained false political and social hierarchies. In many ways, Abigail’s behavior at this stage can be compared with that of a spoiled child. She has the ability to wreak havoc upon the town’s finances, and so she does, to demonstrate the power of the Howland legacy and to seek revenge upon those who sought to harm her family, her home, and her reputation. In converting her need for vengeance into the language of commerce, Abigail reveals her ability to transgress the boundaries of her upbringing and decide for herself how she will live. Although her actions are destructive and impetuous, this newfound state of confusion, compared with her previous unconfused but false sense of security, indicates an advance in Abigail’s awareness, not a decline. She must regress, almost as though she is becoming a child again, to correct her course in life and move forward. When Abigail speaks aloud to her dead grandfather about her decision to take revenge, she first explains, “I had to do something” and “that was for you,” yet she concludes by declaring, “you won’t like what I’m going to do now, but this is for me” (307). This final statement to her grandfather establishes Abigail’s willingness and ability to take action beyond what she believes would be sanctified by her grandfather, had he been alive. It is revealing that Abigail carries out the remainder of her plan at her husband’s office, rather than within the sanctity of her home. As noted by Bukoski, “the character who turns away . . . from the emotional and psychological life of the family as it is represented in the house loses part of himself, loses himself perhaps” (188). Abigail must leave the protective wall of her family home to separate herself from her patriarchal heritage. Once in the office,

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Abigail “does a bit of damage” to her ex-husband’s desk, the townspeople, and to her half-brother, Robert Howland, who she threatens to expose as black, just as he exposed her grandfather’s secret to the press. It is true that at the conclusion of the novel Abigail has not healed, has not reconciled her problematic attitudes toward blacks, and has not restored order to her own life or to the community. Both race and class lines prevail. But her rebellions are cathartic on a personal level—revealing a side of Abigail that has never before been nurtured or encouraged to grow. In the final paragraphs of the story, Abigail finds herself laughing hysterically at what she imagines will be the consequences of her vindictive actions. She is conscious that people are looking at her as they might look as someone in a funeral (Grau 309). The symbolic death of the old Abigail seems eminent. She sees colors in the prisms of her tears, an image that highlights the dreamlike quality of her situation, the surreal experience of huddling “fetus like” on the floor as the story concludes (309). Yet, again, this ending need not be understood as something negative, as indicative of the paralysis of the heroine; it might rather be seen as the final step necessary for Abigail’s personal evolution. Her symbolic infanthood, as indicated in the image of the fetus, must lead to a rebirth. Birth is always engendered by some violent fracturing of self, accompanied by great pain. In her introduction to Helene Cixous’s and Catherine Clement’s The Newly Born Woman, a text in which the hidden and repressed side of culture is explored, Sandra M. Gilbert writes, “we [women] must fly away to be regenerated . . . To be immune to the hierarchical ‘principles’ of culture. To be newborn” (Gilbert xviii). Gilbert skillfully verbalizes the conditions necessary for women’s personal evolution. Within The Newly Born Woman Cixous advocates the importance of the feminine elements of language, the aspects of communication that threaten masculine identity and bring representation itself into question. Abigail’s hysterical laughter and colorful tears might thus be understood as what she is unable to speak about, that is, the “laugh of the medusa,” the irrational alter-language that “cannot fail to be more than subversive” (Cixous 1462). Olesky too recognizes the “prelingusitic form of communication” taking place in this scene (181). Cixous writes that within our culture, “There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth’ with laughter” (Cixous 1462). Certainly within this story Abigail must begin to

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“smash,” “shatter,” and “break up” existing institutions to carve out space for herself, space to occupy her own “house,” that is, her own body. If the ending is alternately understood as a failure, as Abigail’s paralysis, as some critics have attested, then Abigail is disappointingly reinscribed into the male world of the symbolic by suffering punishment for her vengeance. To interpret the ending as a failure is to deny Abigail the possibility of individuality. Cixous writes, “We must kill the false woman who is preventing the living one from breathing. [We must] Inscribe the breath of the whole woman” (1457). The notion of the whole woman is particularly important to this text, for it suggests a selfhood that encompasses feminine and masculine, black and white, and rich and poor. The Keepers of the House ends at the beginning. Not just at the beginning of Abigail’s new awareness, but additionally within the framing device of the plot, which circles back to the first chapter, where Abigail introduces the story and explains that she is planning to recount what has already occurred. The first line of the text is: “I want to tell you the story of my grandfather, and Margaret Charmichael, and me” (Grau 9). Instead of following with a linear story told from the singular point of view of Abigail herself, the storytelling itself becomes a tribute to the notion of fragmentation, the impossibility of synthesis, and the significance of letting each of the important characters speak for themselves. Thus, the storytelling itself, which occurs from three different points of view, is evidence of Abigail’s progression. She makes an effort to understand life from the alternative perspectives of her grandfather and his wife, even if her interpretations of them inevitably fall short of “truth.” The stories of William and Margaret as mediated through Abigail’s consciousness demonstrate Abigail’s willingness to embrace the personal and political experiences of the other. Therefore, the stories can be seen as her personal effort to dismantle divisive systems of domination. Abigail experiences a process of rebirth that takes place as she transforms from a woman controlled by the hierarchy, to a “newborn” soul who determines to think and act with an uncompromised will. This interpretation allows the patriarchal law to be exceeded, and Abigail’s vengeful actions to take on the further task of achieving lasting social change. As the changes in Abigail occur, she is finally able to occupy her ancestral home, which becomes representative of her very body. Abigail’s violent response to the town can thus be

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understood as healing and regenerative, despite the inappropriate behavior and racial attitudes that frame her revenge.

C When the American woman’s place in society is examined in its historical context, the need to precipitate a new social order via radical action does not seem outrageous. The restrictive ideologies that existed in the nineteenth century and beyond have been slow to change. Violence toward women that occurs as an instrument of patriarchal control continues to be commonplace and is often not adequately addressed by the justice system. However, the personal transformations highlighted in this chapter demonstrate how small systemic actions can foster larger political initiatives, as a collective consciousness demanding fairness for women emerges in literature. A few important themes emerge from this initial chapter that will be expanded in the chapters to come. First, we have seen that women who choose to avenge injustice must necessarily modify the conventional mores of femininity, combining them with characteristics traditionally associated with the male persona to attain a new female identity. This hybridization emphasizes the artificial construction of gender roles and rejects gendered characteristics that may otherwise be believed to be inherent. To clarify, following Irigaray, I am not claiming that men and women are alike or should be considered “equal” in every capacity. Differences between men and women clearly do exist. What I am attempting to demonstrate is that restrictive gender roles (such as the misnomer of passivity) have placed women at an unfair advantage in the hierarchical system of patriarchy. The women in these texts take action to destroy the entrenched chain of command, by claiming their “right to defend their lives, the lives of their children, their dwelling places, their traditions, and their religion against any unilateral decisions based on male law”(Irigaray 209). Attaining this new identity, an identity that the avenging female finds sustaining and fulfilling, often involves a violent and painful fracturing of the prior “assumed” identity, a violence that is experienced by the protagonist, and often leads (1) to a painful recognition of the injustice perpetrated against her, either by a single individual or by the larger system, and (2), to action rectifying the injustice. When the avenging female takes action to rectify injustice, she causes change on both the personal and political level, because her

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acts bring the dissatisfaction of a certain segment of the populace to the attention of those in power. For example, in Hurston’s “Sweat,” the need for Delia to assume the role of economic provider drives her husband Sykes to assert his dominance in increasingly violent ways, until Delia decides she has had enough of his bullying. Although she opposes his violent attacks, she quickly realizes that resistance will endanger her life even further. When Sykes is bitten by the venomous snake he planted in Delia’s laundry basket, she makes the crucial decision to let him die. This decision demonstrates that Delia has come to recognize the difference between those who act from a personal morality of good, and those who act instead to help only themselves. This is not an easy realization for Delia, but in the end this conclusion is what allows her to move toward her own future. Mattie Syles, the protagonist of Rawlings’s “Gal Young’ Un,” has a similar awakening when she realizes that the man she married has been exploiting her for her money and property. With the arrival of Trax’s mistress, Mattie finally admits to herself that she is being used and stops trying to please Trax once and for all. To rid herself of the menace that Trax has become she burns his still, sets his car aflame, and finally fires her shotgun at his feet, to prevent him from causing her bodily harm (148). These violent actions ultimately allow Mattie to reassert her autonomy by refusing to accept and support a patriarchal authority that has no regard for her welfare. Finally, in Grau’s Keepers of the House, Abigail does not take action until her barn is in flames, many of her livestock have been shot to death, and the comfort and security of her children are threatened. She must rely (perhaps for the first time ever in her life) on her quick wits to divert the attention of the mob away from her home and later to seek revenge to atone for the cruelty the townspeople intended. Her personal transformation shows the extreme “casting off” of values and social institutions that have been normalized and internalized to support a hierarchical society that privileges white over black, men over women, and rich over poor. The correlation between the female body and the home is a theme in all of the stories examined in this chapter, and in many of the stories discussed within the wider scope of this project. The conflict in Hurston’s “Sweat,” is driven by Sykes’s desire for Delia’s house, a house that she has “built . . . for her old days,” lovingly planting trees and flowers around its exterior, one by one (Hurston 192). This is a house that the narrator describes as “lovely to her” (192), one that Delia absolutely refuses to relinquish, even when it means risking her

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life. It is with this story that we first explore the link between the home and the female body and recognize that female protagonists must find ways to eliminate factors from their lives that tarnish and pollute their environments, for their environments in fiction are often symbolic of themselves. Mattie Syles, the protagonist of Rawlings’s “Gal Young’ Un,” has a similar attachment to her home, an “isolated and remote” home that Mattie has even come to resemble (Rawlings 148). The correlation between the protagonist’s home and body is perhaps most explicit in this text, as Trax comes to possess Mattie physically and mentally, just as he invades and takes control of her home. To find freedom Mattie must expel Trax both from the physical location of her home and from her heart. In Grau’s Keepers of the House, Abigail, as the literal “keeper” of the ancestral home, must find a way to extricate herself from the expectations of the sexist and misogynistic community in which she grew up. When she is finally able to recognize and address the source of her own questionable morals, she finds the strength to defy the expectations of the wider community and to assert her right to a more diverse perspective. In each of these texts then, the female protagonist’s autonomy is threatened or deliberately undermined by men who seek to maintain their patriarchal power. After enduring physical and emotional violence designed to impede their freedom and identity, each avenger remakes herself, crossing the threshold of what is considered appropriate behavior for women, to take extralegal action to punish her assailant, restore a sense of justice to the fictional world she inhabits, and reclaim her personal identity and space. Such texts take on additional importance when stories of female vengeance infiltrate the collective consciousness of our society, because the message can lead to a reassessment of social ideals regarding why and how sexual identity is polarized and hierarchized. As those who have traditionally been excluded from power form a common force, our attitude toward the injustice that we have been taught to accept as “normal” will begin to change. In the next chapter, I will further explore how false representations of women, representations that depict women as being unable to participate as active subjects, have been rewritten, revised, and reshaped by women authors, who turn these formerly destructive associations into powerful and positive impetuses for their heroines.

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CH A P T ER

T WO

Women Warriors and Women with Weapons

American women have long been engaged in the arduous battle of claiming equal rights, dignity, and strength of character. Contemporary American novelists who write of woman warriors take part in this battle by extending the boundaries of accepted behavior for women and, in fact, by lauding women who refuse to surrender to unfair socially mandated restrictions. American novelists employ the archetype of the women warrior in both the literal and metaphorical sense: their characters demonstrate the physical prowess and range of emotions (including anger) of women but additionally depict women’s metaphorical battle with restrictive public mores to effect social reform. Thus, the primary goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how the physical “battles” engaged in by fictional female warriors are symbolic of the new ground gained by real women in the struggle for equality. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1989) and Rita Mae Brown’s High Hearts (1986) feature female warriors whose actions highlight social and psychological reasons for which women go to war. The texts reveal that one of the reasons women pursue battle is to escape from domestic confines and powerlessness. But this is not the sole message that can be gleaned from women who engage in armed combat. The women in these stories are compelling because they venture beyond the limiting stereotypes of female passivity and victimhood. The heroines “fight” their enemies in a multidimensional battle, demonstrating women’s defiant refusal to ameliorate their personal needs for the sake of men and overturning massive stereotypes of the “submissive” female. These woman warriors refuse a position of self-sacrifice and instead choose to claim their power. They do not shy away from violence when violence becomes necessary for

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self-preservation, or to protect their loved ones. Instead, these protagonists characterize forceful and assertive womanhood; interrogate male-defined standards of sexuality, race, and class; and demonstrate the incommensurate discourses that undergird contemporary systems of justice. Women warriors thus engage in a type of moral rationalization that differentiates their thinking from that of men but is no less political in its intended outcomes because it refutes subjugation of personal value. This chapter reveals how female-authored depictions of women warriors expand social notions of femininity in American society, so that the capabilities of women can be understood as much broader than traditionally assumed. Women, from a young age, are trained in the art of self-sacrifice. They are taught to be submissive and to subordinate their personal needs to those of their husbands, children, and the larger community. In this chapter I ask, what powers do written representations have to deform the narratives of self-sacrifice that have shaped female subjectivity? The argument I make in response to this question is twofold. First, I establish that nonviolence is a “characteristic” that has traditionally been assigned to women as a way to ensure that the dominance and control of men is sustained. More precisely, by relegating women to the role of nonviolent domestic angel,1 men ensure that they retain public authority, while women are unwittingly forced to concede their power for the sake of “propriety.” The second important component to this chapter will include an exploration of the motivations2 assigned to female protagonists as they answer a call to arms. What compels women characters to involve themselves in such a quintessential practice of masculine posturing? My argument is that she-warriors have different motives from men for engaging in battle, and that this is evidenced by the texts included herein. Language is inextricably bound up in this distinction. Following French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, I argue that because the language system itself is patriarchal, men have the ability to harness the abstract, the symbolic, to their advantage, while relegating women to the dimension of the quantitative or concrete. They do this by defining women and relegating them to preconstructed roles. Because there is no other choice but to use language to create meaning, the women authors featured in this chapter take the determinations commonly assigned to women and turn them from being essential attributes of womenhood to tools that disrupt the continuity

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of abstraction and objectification. Women warriors thus harness the power of the quantitative (the home, the newborn, the corpse), while simultaneously breaking the signification of fictional labels, by venturing into a symbolic realm that is typically reserved for men at war (honor, legacy, death). A “warrior” is simply one who battles, armed or unarmed, in combat. For my purposes, I have chosen to define the warrior as one who battles with weapons, and as one who battles with an honorable or justifiable intent when employing weapons of war. He or she must adhere to a respectable code of conduct that usually includes qualities such as faith, loyalty, and courage. The medieval knights’ code of chivalry is one such example. The weapon of choice for the warrior can be very broadly defined and is not restricted to tangible objects that can be held in one’s hands (as I shall discuss more fully in the pages to come). For example, a woman warrior’s arsenal might contain anything from her sexuality (used in a defensive manner or in a manner designed to sustain life or liberty) to a gun. Such weapons can provide clues to the differences between male and female warriors in fiction, while helping us to avoid essentialist notions of gender. “Essentialism” refers to the belief that people have an underlying and unchanging essence that exists as a result of biological, physiological, and/or genetic causes (Twine 99). Psychological, sociological, or cultural factors that may have an impact on why people behave as they do are ignored or not taken into account. To argue that men are more aggressive than women and that this is inevitable because of hormonal differences is an example of how biology is used to claim that a particular social difference and/or behavior is unchangeable. It is essentialist to assume that women are nonviolent by nature, as pointed out by a multitude of important scholars. bell hooks, for example, states in an interview, I [am] frightened by the kind of “construction of difference” that makes it appear that there is some space of rage and anger that men inhabit, that is alien to us women. Even though we know that men’s rage may take the form of murder (we certainly know that men murder women more than women murder men; that men commit most of the domestic violence in our lives), it’s easy to slip into imagining that those are “male” spaces, rather than ask the question, “What do we do as women with our rage?” (hooks Outlaw Culture 211)

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hooks recognizes that humans are not “inherently anything” (Outlaw Culture 210), so relegating rage and anger (and the physical acting out of these emotions) to one sex is erroneous. Betty Rosoff concurs, arguing, “Attempts of genetic determinists to show a biological basis for individual aggression and to link this to social aggression, are not only unscientific, but they support the idea that wars of conquest between nations are inevitable” (Rosoff 46–7). Finally, Jeffner Allen perceptively asserts that nonviolence is a trait that has been assigned to women because it is self-destructive. She argues that it is a tactic designed to keep women powerless, forcing them to remain nonconfrontational and passive rather than display strength (qtd. in K. Martindale 109). Why have women been relegated to the role of the acted upon, instead of the actor? This is where our language, a signifying system that structures subjectivity and meaning, must be considered. The language of “war” and “warriors” reinforces essentialist notions of power, as evidenced by the terms used to describe conflict. Terms such as “power-over, submission, inequality, injury, contamination, and destruction” endorse male domination and female subordination, because the “female” is troublingly associated with enemy forces that must either be controlled or destroyed (Workman 6). As noted by Cixous and Irigaray, who critique the Lacanian system of language, language itself is a patriarchal construct. Lacan argues that for every human being, socialization begins to occur when a child enters into the system of language (known as the “Symbolic”). This process is demarcated by prohibitions and restraints that are associated with the figure of the father, who represents the phallus and is equated with power and authority. Cixous believes that naming the center of the Symbolic (the Phallus) highlights the patriarchal propensity of language, because this means that female sexuality is always defined by the presence of a penis, and not by anything intrinsic to the female body or to female sexual pleasure. Lacan’s description of the Symbolic does seem to privilege men. By placing men and women in different positions in relation to the Phallus women are subordinated, because men more easily misperceive themselves as having the Phallus, as being closer to it, or having at least some aspect of it, whereas women (because they have no penises) are further from that center. Although this is somewhat of a simplification, this explanation demonstrates the major theory as to

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why men have assumed the ability to harness the abstract (the symbolic), while relegating women to the dimension of the literal. Most feminist critics agree with Cixous and Irigaray’s basic premise concerning power dynamics in our language system. Margaret Homans, for example, explains in her discussion of women and language that “the literal” is associated with the feminine, while “the more highly valued figurative is associated with the masculine” (5). She notes that the “differential valuations of literal and figurative originate in the way our culture constructs masculinity and femininity . . . To take something literally is to get it wrong, while to have a figurative understanding of something is the correct intellectual stance” (5). Aisenberg posits a similar theory, explaining that woman is associated with “nature” while man is associated with “culture,” a conception that she asserts has “situated woman exclusively in the body.” She continues, “Although Nature and Culture may at first glance appear interdependent, complementary terms, they are in fact, hierarchical. Culture includes language, and therefore the ability to transcend the bodily self” (136). In other words, culture and language allow us to imagine selfhood according to the Lacanian schematic of the Symbolic, which affords us the right to self-definition and subject-hood, rather than allowing the racial, sexual, or national fantasies of others to fix our identification. As feminist critics have been known to say, if women are not the makers of meaning, but rather the bearers of meaning that has already been established by men, we are at a severe disadvantage. However, women warriors, who are frequently associated with quantitative earthly concerns, are not necessarily at a disadvantage. Aisenberg, quoting Paula Gunn Allen, clarifies how the differences between the more general categories of male and female hero in fiction can be positive. If extended, this analysis helps to explain the differences between male and female warriors. She writes, The heroine is ordinary, in the positive and specific sense that she remains concerned with ordinary life; Paula Gunn Allen informs us that even warrior-heroines in Native American fiction do not partake of the customary detachment of soldiers. Rather, they retain an “attachment to self, to relatives, to earth and sky.” They neither become nor worship abstraction. Not concerned, for instance, primarily with her own immortality and the honor she must win to ensure it, the heroine need not court death as does the hero. Instead, freed from the hero’s

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obsession with his own mortality and desire to transcend it, she can view the future not as an end, but as beginning. She is attached to life. (qtd. in Aisenberg 191)

Soldiers often become emotionally detached from reality as a strategy to endure the horrors of war. In other words, those immured in violence learn to focus attention on the abstract rather than the concrete, material, or real. Yet Aisenberg and Allen find fictional women in war to be less concerned than men with abstract notions such as honor and legacy, notions that men focus on to transcend their own mortality (a thought that in itself is an abstraction). We can intuit that the difference she posits has to do with the fact that men are unable to give birth. Women are “attached to life,” writes Aisenberg, a statement that can be understood both literally and metaphorically, because women literally bring forth life (sharing an umbilical attachment to their progeny that demonstrates the metaphorical bonds of motherhood that can keep women firmly centered amidst the actual). Women’s bond to life in the actual world tends to be emphasized in the fictional world. As child bearers, women are thus more regularly shown in fictional accounts to be focused on their ability to generate rather than to destroy, to preserve life rather than to be the catalyst for its cessation. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Rita Mae Brown’s High Hearts provide two excellent examples of fictional women involved in battle who remain focused on the literal without sacrificing their desire to attain the more figurative goals that are commonly associated with men. Moreover, their grounding in the literal helps them to achieve a sense of full personhood and accomplishment. The literary observations of Aisenburg and Allen are supported in real life in the work of psychologist Carol Gilligan, who reports that men’s and women’s interpretations of what is fair and just differs. Her groundbreaking investigation, In a Different Voice, provides evidence to substantiate her suspicion that men and women have learned to approach and respond to moral dilemmas differently. In essence, her argument asserts that women tend to understand moral dilemmas in terms of relationships (they question who will be affected by their decisions and in what way), while men tend to universalize ethical concepts by tying their moral compass to the “formal logic of fairness that informs the justice approach” (Gilligan 73). Gilligan’s conclusions support the theory that men have learned to be more concerned

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than women with the abstract. Thus, it is no wonder that such cultural distinctions are commonly reflected in our fiction. We might conclude that as a result of social conditioning, men are commonly depicted as fighting to serve an ideal, while women are generally shown to be fighting for a specific reason, usually to protect themselves or their loved ones. The authors featured in this chapter overcome their limitations and turn associations with the quantitative into powerful and positive impetuses for their heroines, crafting characters who are concerned not only with legacy and honor but also with the human bonds of love. Kingston and Brown thus articulate a radically new kind of relation between female bodies and war, casting women as active subjects who agitate the signifying system. As a result, a new way of operating within the symbolic system becomes evident— a system that rejects destructive self-sacrifice and values the quantitative at least as much as, if not more so than, the abstract. Thus, the physical “battles” these fictional female warriors engage in are symbolic of the new ground gained by real women in the struggle for equal treatment. What is absolutely extraordinary about the texts examined herein is that Kingston and Brown turn the association between women and the literal into a powerful impetus for their woman warriors. Thus, as I will show, their narratives provide “a passage or bridge between what is most earthly and what is most celestial” (Irigaray 190) and, in doing so, are able to rectify the mistaken notion that unrequited sacrifice of self must be lauded in women. The heroines of these texts not only battle for practical reasons—for love of family and for preservation of bodily self—but also defy traditional gender roles by harnessing abstract concepts for their own purposes.

M H K’ T HE WOM AN WAR R IOR : M EMOR IES O F A G IR LHOOD A MONG G HOSTS () The hare draws in his feet to sit, His mate has eyes that gleam, But when the two run side by side, How much alike they seem! (The Ballad of Mulan Liu 77)

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“No-Name Woman,” the first chapter of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, begins with a secret. The narrator’s Chinese American mother divulges the story of an aunt, who years ago in China was forced to drown herself after giving birth to an illegitimate child. The story is meant as a warning to the narrator, who has recently begun to menstruate. She is told, “it [pregnancy] could happen to you, don’t humiliate us” (5). The narrator’s mother implores her to keep the secret of her aunt (to protect the good name of her father) and to continue her aunt’s “punishment” by deliberately forgetting her very existence. Yet the narrator is not content to let the family secret, or her departed aunt, rest. The story that Maxine subsequently invents is powerful: it resurrects ghosts and changes history. A deed that was considered deserving of punishment by an entire village becomes, in the mind of the young narrator, an act of strength and a demonstration of courage. In the narrator’s version of events the nameless aunt is coerced into a sexual relationship against her will and yet refuses to reveal her lover’s name even after she is condemned to die for the affair. Kingston presents us with a perfect example of female self-sacrifice taken to an extreme. The subtle differences between self-sacrifice and heroism are made evident in this story, because while self-sacrifice is solely about the other person, the one for whom something is sacrificed, heroism is about the person taking action or committing the act. Although the No-Name Woman likely believes she is being heroic for shielding her lover, she is not lauded by her family nor recognized as brave. Instead she is seen as defiant and self-serving for protecting the male’s honor and for taking her own life. She has “violated the proper order of things” (Simmons 50) because she has failed in her central duty, “to guard her reproductive powers for the service of her husband’s male line” (50). After her suicide, Brave Orchid tells her daughter, “The next morning when I went for water, I found her and the baby plugging up the family well” (Kingston 5). Simmons perceptively notes, “the aunt’s suffering and death is alluded to in only one sentence. Even in this single reference the emphasis is on the insult to established order rather than on the agony of the aunt” (Simmons 51). The notion that women must sacrifice everything for the sake of the life of another is a misconception, an inaccuracy that has exacted an incalculable cost on countless women. The idea is a misnomer of nonviolence taken to its radical extreme, for such a mindset not only requires women to remain docile but also suggests that they must give of themselves to their own detriment, to the point of death.

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To support such an attitude is to ensure that patriarchal dominance and control are sustained by consistently undervaluing the worth of the female. The women warrior that Maxine creates in response to this narrative (and others like it) ventures to “unlearn the ways this kind of advice has been used to keep us responsible for the world, giving men the freedom to plunge into business and war without a thought for morality” (Costello 177). Moreover, her story suggests that nonviolence should be more broadly defined to include acts of self-defense (176) and, I would add, protection of the powerless. Maxine gains control of her world by reimaging outcomes to timeworn traditions. Thus, she is able to transform that which has restricted and hindered women into something positive and meaningful for her current reality. Years later, Maxine’s aunt who drowned in a well is a “weeping” “bloated” reminder of the powerlessness of women in Chinese society. Haunted by the No-Name Woman’s memory, Maxine refuses to let her be submerged within her subconscious, to “drown” a symbolic death in addition to the literal one she suffered. Instead, a merger of the spiteful ghost and the narrator’s consciousness occurs, so that her aunt’s “hunger” and need for redemption become her own. Just as Maxine’s aunt intentionally desecrated what was pure by using the family’s source of water to take her life, Maxine, in her family’s estimation, sullies their good name by resurrecting the story of her aunt’s impropriety. The “pages of paper” that Maxine devotes to her aunt are a battle cry meant to ensure both the reinscription of a memory (the redemption of unnecessary loss) and the avenging of an unjust death. Although her vigilante acts are imaginary, the “battles” her characters engage in are representative of the new ground gained by real women in the struggle for equality. Maxine thus becomes a woman warrior who uses her pen as a sword, introducing the structuring theme of the novel/autobiography. In the chapters to follow, the text skillfully expresses the problems facing Chinese American girls who are expected to conform to traditional roles by sacrificing their own wants and desires to please and pacify men (a metaphor for obeying “the rules”). Simultaneously, the story demonstrates how women find ways of overcoming cultural stigma and instill in their daughters the values and morality (patience, strength, and endurance) that will allow them to resist patriarchy without losing spirit. By conveying stories replete with images of fearless and powerful women, Maxine’s mother, Brave Orchid, provides

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her with a vehicle to attain autonomy and freedom for herself, both within her fantastic imaginings and within the “real world” that incites them. Maxine explains, I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from the war to settle in the village. I had forgotten that this chant was once mine, given me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman. (Kingston 20)

Two messages are conveyed by Brave Orchid: the first, that Maxine will grow up as a wife and slave, is tempered by the revelation that women have the ability to be much more. Elaine Showalter writes that “the power to imagine violence is a form of fictional control” (246). Maxine refuses to subordinate her own needs but rather demonstrates how her work as an author positions her as a savior of herself, and an inspiration to her female relatives and many other young women struggling to maintain identity within the Chinese American community. Initially, The Woman Warrior was marketed as an autobiography, a label to which many critics objected. The text is infused with subjective imaginings, fictions dreamed by the young narrator that not only expand the confines of her world but also stray far from a factual account of her childhood. King-Kok Cheung pinpoints the genre conflicts that Kingston’s text brought to the fore, especially within the Chinese American community. She writes, For a “minority” author to exercise such artistic freedom is perilous business because white critics and reviewers persist in seeing creative expressions by her as no more than cultural history. Members of the ethnic community are in turn upset if they feel that they have been “misrepresented” by one of their own. (119)

In other words, the white community tended to misunderstand Kingston’s work, believing her imaginative forays to be accurate records of legends and stories from Chinese culture, while the Chinese American community resented this misconception concerning their cultural history. In changing, adapting, and camouflaging

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the traditional myths of the Chinese oral tradition, Kingston introduced a markedly different arena of possibilities for Chinese women and girls. Kingston’s version of the legend of Fa Mu Lan casts young Maxine as a girl who must literally learn the art of combat to survive in a society that would otherwise require her to become “a wife and a slave” (Kingston 20). It is important to note the gravity of her motives— she “fights” not only for herself but also for her family, both literally (in the case of the story) and metaphorically, that is, abstractly, in the sense that she is blazing the way for other women of Chinese descent, who might see themselves as disempowered and defenseless in their host nation. Unfortunately, the fact that Maxine imagines her warrior self in a fantastic realm undermines, to some degree, the idea that change is possible in the actual world that we inhabit. Within her “autobiography,” Maxine creates a realm other than the real world of her daily existence. The “yellow warm world” in the sky (inhabited by the warrior Maxine) is clearly distinguishable from the reality of author Maxine’s daily life (Kingston 20–1). The primary difference is that in Maxine’s “sky world” she battles literally, “attacking fiefdoms” and “pursuing enemies”(37), whereas in her actual world her battles occur on paper. The differentiation between fantasy and reality is problematic to some degree, as pointed out by Sherrie A. Inness, because the fantastic setting of gynocentric power does not provide a significant threat to male hegemony (119). Locating physical action in a fictional world can do one of two things: On the one hand, preferably, it might suggest alternative ways of living, but on the other hand, it might suggest that such events could not take place in the actual world, and that such female musings amount to little more than games. Thus, The Woman Warrior illustrates problems of meaning in narrative, as discussed by Thomas G. Pavel. His influential text Fictional Worlds (1986) explores the idea that “the demarcation between fiction and nonfiction is a variable element and that as an institution fiction cannot be attributed to a set of constant properties and essence” (Pavel 136). Why is this important? Because stories are usually not an exact representation of the world, as mimesis would have us believe, but instead adhere to their own set of internal rules. Pavel, however, claims that there are relations of correspondence between fictional worlds and actual worlds that allow the worlds to overlap. When knowledge or wisdom is relayed to the reader via fictional concepts or

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ideas, the two planes of existence merge, so that messages conveyed in fictional text can be absorbed by readers and can thus affect behavior in the actual world. By the very act of immersing herself in the patriarchal system of war and warfare, Maxine exposes the underlying power dynamics at work, to make an indent, a shift, in the reigning ideology (Rabine 99). She impacts not only the imaginary world when she reveals her gender— by, as Cheung rightly concludes, “refashioning patriarchal myths and invoking imaginative possibilities” (119)—but also the actual world, because each written repudiation, each textual resistance, contributes to the reformation of our social consciousness, to chip away at the existing essentialized notions of hierarchical structure. Sidonie Smith comments, [Maxine’s] public inscription of the story of her own childhood among ghosts become the reporting of a crime— the crime of a culture that would make nothing of her by colonizing her and, in doing so, steal her authority and her autobiography from her. (Smith 67–8)

Smith aptly notes that while Maxine’s exploitation in the fictional world remains external, in her actual experience they remain internal— “endemic to the patriarchal family” (Smith 68). In the “White Tigers” section of The Woman Warrior, the division between the actual world and the story of the narrative is distinct. There are two worlds at work within the fiction; the first is the “possible” world that resembles our actual world, the second is the “fictional” world that parts from mimetic notions of reality by incorporating elements of the fantastic into the plot (the “world in the sky”; the water gourd that, like a movie screen, shows images from the world below; the sword that appears out of thin air; and so on). However, the division between what is possible and what is fictional is not always clear. Kingston cleverly blurs the line between possible and fictional worlds to demonstrate the notion of what might be, but more importantly to reveal the synthetic quality that serves as the foundation of all reality. For example, throughout her pregnancy, Warrior Maxine rides into battle hiding her belly beneath large armor designed for an overweight male. A minute after the child is born she returns to battle with the child strapped to her chest, the still-wet umbilical cord tied to the flag pole behind her. While these scenarios are not likely, they are not impossible either. Kingston reveals that

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narrative is never entirely separated from reality and fact (for often sentences of a novel taken out of their literary context can turn out to be true). What Pavel’s fictional world theory can help us understand is that “truth” is something that is constructed; it is a discursive practice that should not be fixed in any single realm. There is no hidden “reality” within the pages of a book that we can discover through a close reading; but instead, truth is contingent and multiple, constantly subject to change and revision. As Pavel demonstrates, the act of narration organizes matter into meaningful events that are governed by their own internal logic, and this internal logic exists separately from the actual world. Yet, we can draw useful conclusions from such texts, because the stories transmit meaning despite their fictionality. Pavel’s theory accounts for a version of fiction that is not mimetic. Writing and interpreting create meaning and thus affect “reality.” The knowledge and truth that come from reading and interpreting enhance our understanding of the world. Kingston’s version of the legend of Fa Mu Lan, also known as the legend of Hua Mulan or Fa Muk Lan, draws upon the original version of the Ballad of Mulan, as Cheung and other critics have established. In the original version of the legend, the heroine is motivated not by thoughts of vengeance or of personal glory but rather by a sense of filial duty that compels her to take the place of her aging father (123). What motivate Maxine to engage in battle are self-preservation and the deep love and loyalty she feels for her family. But in addition, she fights to avenge her family’s honor. Shortly before Maxine leaves for battle, her mother and father “carve revenge on her back” (Kingston 34), literally etching “a list of grievances” (34) onto her back, taking the abstractions of language and making them concrete by carving them upon her skin. Thus concepts that are often attributed to the male warrior (such as honor and/or the desire for vengeance) are literally inscribed onto the female, to create a hybrid combination of the feminine and masculine. Further, the motive of filial love correlates with Gilligan’s version of female incentive for moral action, which, she argues, most often stems from careful consideration of the impact of the woman’s actions on those closest to her. Although this claim is difficult to back up with scientific evidence (Gilligan relies on psychological analysis), it does appear to be the case for the she-warriors of Women Warriors, who establish the strength of women by highlighting the importance

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of loyalty and familial ties, as evidenced by Maxine’s heroic decision to take the place of her father in battle (Kingston 34). But how to answer critics who suggest that Mulan and other woman warriors defend the very system that subjugates them? Louise Edwards finds that the existence of the woman warrior “implies a potent criticism of male-dominated society” (qtd. in Simmons 58). She suggests that the very emergence of the woman warrior demonstrates that men have failed in their duty to protect and serve the principles of patriarchy, so that women must step forward to fill the gap. Although this assessment is logical, my response to such criticism is even more straightforward. “The Ballad of Mulan” has a profound impact on the young Maxine. The ballad inspires her to achieve more than her so-called destiny of wife and mother; it serves as a reminder that more is possible for Asian girls. Maxine’s decision to exceed social expectations becomes most evident in her stubborn refusal to accept her given role. She notes, “I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two.” When she is called “bad girl” she gloats to herself, thinking, “Isn’t a bad girl almost a boy?” (47). Maxine maintains her resolve to be different. Thus it becomes clear that although the heroine of the ballad might very well be defending a system that does not recognize her as an active participant, her actions (or the creation of such a character that engages in such actions) still have a lasting effect on future generations of women. This impact can be realized in Maxine’s response to the ballad, as well as in Brave Orchid’s decision to teach her daughters the ballad in the first place, not to mention the new generations of young Asian American girls who find a role model in Kingston’s adaptation. One aspect of the legend of Mulan that makes it particularly interesting within the context of this study is the theme of cross dressing. I use the term “cross dressing” because the character’s sexual identity is not called into question. As noted by Flanagan, the terms “transvestism” and “transsexualism” are “imbricated with issues of sexuality and eroticism” (3), issues that need not apply to the cross dresser.3 Cross-dressing characters engage in the behavior not for sexual gratification or because they self-identify as members of the opposite gender, but because they are compelled by social and economic forces to disguise [themselves] in order to get a job, escape repression, or gain artistic or political

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“freedom.” Each . . . is said to embrace transvestism . . . as an instrumental strategy rather than an erotic pleasure . . . [and will] resume life as he or she was. (Garber 70)

Garber labels narratives in which characters cross dress to achieve a specific goal “progress narratives” (70) and cites a number of examples from literature and film, such as “all of Shakespeare’s female-tomale cross-dressers,” Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in Some Like It Hot, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria, and Katherine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (70). Although her focus is children’s literature and film, Flanagan’s definition of cross dressing is similar to Garber’s. Flanagan writes, In instances of female cross-dressing, an inability to conform with conventionally defined femininity can indeed be an aspect of a character’s motivation in adopting masculine disguise. However, this lack of feminine identification is generally the result of patriarchal social structures which limit feminine behavior, and it is thus a logical response to a situation where femininity is equated with passivity and inactivity. Female cross-dressers also return to their former gender position with relative ease after their cross-dressing ceases, suggesting that their gender identities are not situated outside or on the margins of socially constructed femininity. (This is in spite of the fact that their cross-dressing temporarily shifts and redefines the meanings of masculinity and femininity within the narrative). (8)

While Garber believes that in most instances cross dressing confirms, rather than critiques, normative gender categories (71), Flanagan argues that the cross dresser “confounds the supposedly natural order between gender and natal sex, inviting questions about masculinity and femininity that necessarily destabilize these categories and reveal their constructed nature” (13). Cross dressing allows women to inhabit the physical and symbolic space normally occupied by men while maintaining their own particular point of view. This shift in gender identification extends the boundaries of conventionally gendered categories and, in doing so, makes such representations more acceptable. In The Woman Warrior, the heroine’s decision to disguise herself as a man transgresses the boundaries of socially and culturally defined gender roles in both traditional Chinese and American culture, disrupting established concepts of gender and sexual difference. Moreover, it is this illegal act that situates Maxine

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as a vigilante character, breaking the law to rectify an injustice— in this case the injustice of gender roles that prohibit women from undertaking the same activities as men. In Kingston’s imaginary world Maxine’s decision to disguise herself as a man and ride into battle is embraced. Members of the community honor her bravery with gifts: “The villagers came bearing bright orange jams, silk dresses, embroidery scissors. They brought blue and white porcelain bowls filled with water and carp” (35). When Maxine dons men’s clothing and armor and ties her hair back, the people remark on her beauty (36). Young men volunteer to ride in her army, and her strength as a leader grows. As noted by Wheelwright, although clothing is more neutral in our current age and thus has lost some of its power to differentiate gender, the rewards of male imitation for women remain. The business suit (think of Hillary Clinton’s famous pantsuits) is a contemporary example of how mimicking masculinity is accepted and advantageous, because it conveys a sense of authority and clout to businesswomen that they would not have in clothes considered more “feminine” (Wheelwright 19). Representations of women in male garb do more than simply provide lesser emulations of a masculine ideal. Instead, such representations challenge the presiding belief that women are passive, docile, and nonviolent by nature and, therefore, easily victimized—not because of what is initially concealed, but because of what is ultimately revealed. Maxine leads an army to victory and garners the full respect of her comrades in battle, which could not have occurred if she had led as a woman because of preconceived notions of gender. Later, when Maxine returns to her family, her son is “very impressed” by his mother’s bravery. She allows him to wear her helmet and hold her swords (45), suggesting that she will raise her own children differently, by teaching them new ways of understanding. Historically and in literature, cross dressing has provided a way for women to disguise their sexuality, and thus to remain “safe” from lecherous men. Male costume can ensure that women preserve their “purity,” and often their self-reliance and independence in “a self-conscious claiming of the social privileges given exclusively to men” (Wheelwright 119). In other words, it allows women to safely transgress their established “role” in society by camouflaging the gendered distinctiveness that limits them. Marjorie Garber argues that such costume creates a third space that disrupts the binary of

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masculine-feminine and thus becomes a “transgressive force” with “considerable power to disturb” (Garber 71). Throughout her early warrior training, the young Maxine’s gender is unimportant. The man and woman who train Maxine live together in a platonic relationship, rather than as man and wife, thus eliminating gendered binaries from Maxine’s life, at least at first. Moreover, although martial artists typically pass on their skills to sons or male disciples (Wong 45), in this case the elderly couple spends years exclusively on Maxine’s training. Early in the process, Maxine is still a girl who has not yet experienced her first menstrual cycle. This representation is in line with the tradition of warrior women (scanty though it is), which most often casts virginal women as heroines, emphasizing their purity of mind, body, and spirit (but also intending, in some cases, to highlight their sexual attractiveness and availability to men). Wheelwright comments, “The female warriors’ acceptance was often based on denial of her sexuality and great emphasis was placed on her virginity or sexlessness in popular representations” (12).4 Kingston, contrary to tradition, disrupts the standard portrayal of female warriors as “pure” by expressly mentioning Maxine’s first menses, demonstrating both its significance to the female narrator (who recognizes that she is now capable of bearing children) and its centrality to the female experience. Maxine comments, “Menstrual days did not interrupt my training; I was as strong as on any other day” (Kingston 30). The inclusion of this female-specific occurrence must be understood in response to the story of the “No-Name Woman,” recounted in the first chapter of the memoir, a cautionary tale about the dangers of pregnancy told to Maxine when she begins to menstruate. Kingston thus restores the biological import of menstruation by recognizing the power of childbirth (rather than the social dangers of an outof-wedlock pregnancy) and the way menstruation directly connects women to the cycles of life. Maxine thinks, “I bled and thought about the people to be killed; I bled and thought about the people to be born” (33). The phrase acknowledges both birth and death as powerful occurrences, reinforcing the notion that both phases of life are part of a larger continuum. This recognition reinforces the earlier theories put forward by gender scholars, who assert that women have tended to be associated with nature and the concrete fact of daily existence, while men are most often associated with culture and abstract notions about why we exist. In Maxine’s case, however, the powerful and positive associations of the life cycle and women’s ability

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to generate life are recast in a manner intended to demonstrate the divine wisdom and power to which women are privy and that later help Maxine to attain victory on the battlefield. After Maxine’s first period, she is resexualized via marriage, although not regendered. By this I mean that although she forms one half of a marital union she does not assume the typical duties of “wife.” Instead, Maxine’s husband eventually joins her campaign, both fighting and sleeping by her side. Maxine’s gender is not a liability but rather an asset. Her instructors say, “Even when you fight against soldiers trained as you are, most of them will be men, heavy footed and rough. You will have the advantage” (32). Thus, Kingston is not simply dressing her character in men’s clothing and engaging in a mimetic act of imitation that reverses the balance of power. Instead, she erases the binary opposition between masculine and feminine by allowing her character to attain her own ends, discover her strengths, and achieve self-respect and fulfillment through the very act of war. As in other texts I have examined herein, the home and doorways leading to the home indicate Maxine’s more traditional domestic duties. Along these lines, Lan Dong has noted, Using the feminist paradigm of spatial division as a structuring device, the image, juxtaposed with the bilingual text, constructs the contrasting scenarios for Mulan’s double roles: the domestic space with a wooden-structured bungalow, lattice windows, doors, curtains, and feminine dresses denote her female life as a daughter at home in contrast to the outside space with mountains, rivers, soldiers, horses, and armor that connote her “masculine” role as a warrior in the battlefield. (Dong 221–2)

The armor Maxine wears encapsulates her to some degree, much as the four walls of her home might do, protecting her from the male gaze and other, more literal, “weapons” of a patriarchal culture. Her armor is symbolic of how fighting affords her protection from male invasion and yet simultaneously allows her to venture into new territory for women in the actual world. Thus, this story of a Chinese American woman battling with weapons can be understood in terms of its political ramifications. Ultimately, words, not the sword, are Kingston’s weapons, for in real life Kingston is empowered by writing, by words that “allow

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her to become a different kind of warrior” (Quinby 137). And with her words, Kingston can draw blood. At the conclusion of “White Tigers,” Maxine claims, The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar . . . what we have in common are the words at our back. The idioms for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reporting is the vengeance— not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. (Kingston 53)

In this conclusion, Maxine is asserting her power to define herself, both as a Chinese American and as a woman of the United States. She takes solace in the realization that she and the swordswoman share words and the ability to use such words to “report.” With her recognition that “reporting is the vengeance,” Kingston bears witness to her extensive knowledge of the English and Chinese languages. Her vocabulary does not define her, it does not carve its inscriptions upon her back (as it does Fa Mu Lan), rather it allows her to report, to sanction, and/or to critique the customs from which her own life is modeled. Thus Maxine invokes her own understanding of her identity and situates herself as a link in the historical and cultural chain— one who translates the customs of her Chinese roots into language that new generations of Chinese Americans, and those outside of the culture, can understand and absorb. It is through this self-fashioning that Maxine finds her peace.

R M B’ H IGH H E ARTS () Rita Mae Brown5 is a political writer and an activist turned mainstream novelist, best known for the novel Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), which was first published by a small feminist press6 and reissued by Bantam when it became an underground best seller (selling 80,000 copies in hardcover) (Chew 61). As a lesbian feminist, Brown had a political vision that did not cease when her genre of choice shifted from essays to fiction, but instead, as noted by Martha Chew, she was able to reach a much wider and more mainstream audience, while continuing to break new literary ground and while maintaining a strong and opinionated point of view (63). Similar to Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Brown’s High Hearts (1986) conveys a message of pacifism, despite the focus on a woman warrior who fights in a military capacity. The narrative is a historical

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fiction set in Albermarle, Virginia, during the Civil War. The text is described by critics as colorful, vivid, and entertaining. The writing itself is far from perfect; however, the importance of the text lies elsewhere. The novel is significant for its acknowledgment of the contribution of women (of all colors and classes) during the Civil War— the women in disguise who fought beside their men, the women who selflessly nursed and cared for the wounded, and those who contributed in a variety of ways to rebuilding the United States in the aftermath of the war. As noted by Katie Adie, there were numerous women who “cut their hair, lowered their voices, and took up arms on both sides of The Civil War” (17). Adie reports that during the Civil War, “instances of women’s participation as would-be combatants were so frequent that they merited scant attention.” She writes that “Several hundred women appear to have been discovered through injury or death, others were surprised by their male colleagues and discharged, and yet more seem to have made it through the war undetected” (17). Rita Mae Brown does a wonderful job of crafting a novel that uses this truth as its premise. In doing so, Brown not only questions the nature of the patriarchal system in place but also “contribute[s] to the development of a female ethics,” by crafting her heroine as a moral agent who sees herself as the center of her own life. In other words, Brown, like Kingston, refuses to situate her female protagonists as “secondary to men and their pursuits” (K. Martindale 106). She allows her female characters full textual lives, replete with moral and ethical decision making, physical action, and roles of leader and commander. As I will demonstrate, Brown ensures that her female characters reject self-sacrifice and embrace instead a fully embodied mode of personhood. The protagonist of High Hearts is Geneva Chatfield, a willful girl of nineteen years, described as “the tallest girl in Albemarle County, as well as . . . the best rider” (Rita Mae Brown High Hearts 3). As Patricia Yaeger aptly notes, “size does matter” (Dirt and Desire 114), and in this case, six-foot-tall, androgynous Geneva qualifies as a Southern Gargantuan, a figure who “lay[s] claim to a dense materiality,” who embodies “the role of un-domesticating southern fiction, claiming vast physical as well as literary-historical space” (Dirt and Desire 115). Geneva frees herself from ingrained cultural mandates and proceeds to “claim territory,” when she disguises herself as a young man and enlists in the Confederate Army to be with her new husband. As a

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cavalry soldier she finds greater purpose, “a goal outside her own life” that allows her to feel “magnified, important, useful” (Rita Mae Brown High Hearts 95). A feeling of personal satisfaction is an interesting consequence of going to war. Kate Adie stresses that rebellion was often not the reason women donned male attire and determined to fight. Rather, she asserts that “there are many well-documented cases where the search for a husband, or the desire to follow a fiancé or lover, was clearly the overriding motive” (7). Alternatively, she claims that women were motivated by “the same love of country and desire for fame” that inspired men (19). But there is a subtle difference between the feelings of personal achievement that Geneva discovers after going to war and the notion that women were motivated by love of country and desire for fame. Neither love of country nor desire for fame motivates Geneva to join the Confederate Army. Like Maxine, Geneva fights, at least initially, for love. Maxine fights for love of her father, Geneva for love of her husband, Nash Hart, whom she believes she cannot live without. When asked late in the war whether she really loves Nash “that much,” meaning, enough to risk her life for him by disguising herself and going to war, Geneva’s response is an unambiguous “Yes” (Rita Mae Brown High Hearts 377). Thus the theory put forth by Aisenberg and Allen is borne out: Immortality and/or honor are not initially a factor in Geneva’s decision to go to war. She does not conceive of herself as heroic. She sees war not as an end, but as a beginning, to her marriage and her future. It is only after Geneva rides into battle that she recognizes the freedoms that men enjoy and takes satisfaction from a job well done. In many true-life accounts of women soldiers in the Civil War, the desire to remain with a loved one is cited as the initial reason that women enlist. Loreta Velazquez, in her 1876 memoir, The Woman in Battle, explains that she first became a Civil War soldier to be with her husband, a military officer who fought on the side of the Confederate Army. As soon as he left home, Loretta disguised herself as a man, raised a cavalry company in Arkansas, and then traveled with her troop to Florida, where her husband was stationed (Blanton 177–8).7 Velazquez’s story is similar to Geneva’s in that her first husband died while in service to the Confederacy (179), and she met her second husband while still serving as a soldier (a woman in disguise). Geneva’s first husband is also killed in battle, and Geneva meets her second husband, Mars Vickers, the major of her battalion, while she is still enlisted as an officer. Unlike her first husband (discussed later),

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Mars is not threatened when he discovers Geneva’s gender, but tellingly says to her, Some events, some principles are so great that we are willing to violate the commandment and kill for them, and we’re willing to lay down our own life. We’re no different than a woman in childbed. She risks death to bring forth life; we risk death to bring forth a nation . . . You’ll have it both ways. (Rita Mae Brown High Hearts 376)

On the surface, Vickers statement that men fight for principles while women fight to bring forth life says a great deal about how the patriarchy constructs the feminine. In effect, Vickers locates women in a place that he can “understand” and thus control. However he additionally grants that Geneva is the exception: she has moved beyond his typical perception of womanhood by infiltrating male “territory” and has gained his respect in the process. Geneva is ultimately able to have a family, bring to fruition her hopes and dreams, and balance her passion for action with her desire for motherhood and marriage. Thus, like Maxine, Geneva is able to achieve a satisfying domicile without sacrificing her life outside the home. Her ability to balance the literal aspects of her life with her more figurative goals allows her to achieve personal fulfillment and equal opportunity and paves the way for women in the real world to expand their own possibilities. Yet the path chosen by Geneva is not an easy one. Although her family initially accepts her cross dressing with little opposition, Geneva’s first husband, Nash, finds the changes in his young wife to be awkward and uncomfortable. He is unable to come to terms with the idea that his wife is his equal, and that she even excels in areas (such as horsemanship and engaging in battle) in which his performance is mediocre. Flanagan argues that the subversion of dominant gender paradigms works both ways, so that “the female characters who disguise themselves as males are able to perform masculinity not only as capably as their biological male peers, but even more so— receiving accolades from all whom they encounter” (21–2). In other words, “the masculinity she originally sets out to emulate, as embodied in the other male characters of the text, is surpassed and outdone” (104), demonstrating that “the versions of masculinity with which the cross-dressing heroine is confronted are inadequate and unconventional in themselves” (104). Brown demonstrates this point by

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crafting Geneva as an outstanding horsewoman and a courageous soldier, while Nash prefers “books, good conversation, [and] intellectual respect” (High Hearts 220). Brown’s ability to imagine a romance that is free of traditionally gendered characterizations destabilizes the gender roles of both the male and female characters. The destabilization of traditional gender roles leaves Nash confused. His authority as the dominant partner is undermined by Geneva’s assertive challenge to the binaries of gender, and Nash is not confident enough to come to terms with the new arrangement. Instead, he begins to find Geneva “less attractive,” focusing on her physical appearance and inability to meet his needs rather than on her strength of character and natural ability as a mounted soldier. He tells Geneva’s brother, “It’s not that I don’t cherish her desire to be on my side. I do, I truly do . . . But I don’t think of her as my wife quite like I used to” (175). As the story continues he finds himself certain that he “love[s] her more like a brother than a wife” (221). Because Nash is sexually threatened by the change in Geneva’s appearance and demeanor, he grows impotent, both physically and emotionally. He ceases to share a sexual relationship with Geneva, who comments sadly, “You never want to make love anymore” (High Hearts 221). Moreover, his exploits as a soldier become increasingly ineffective, especially in comparison to hers. He finally decides, She wasn’t the wife of his dreams. He knew she was a good person, but she irritated him by her ignorance. She cared nothing for the things he loved . . . and he cared nothing for the things she loved— horses, adventure, and war. (220)

In this passage Nash blames Geneva for not meeting his expectations of a good wife. In this way he avoids the symbolic castration that his impotence implies by shifting the blame for his lack of desire to his wife. Brown overturns the roles of a traditional married couple by inventing a female who appreciates action and outdoor activities, while her male partner prefers intellectual and sedentary activities that take place indoors. As a result, Brown shows that the socially prescribed gender roles—women as domestic and maternal, and men as public figures responsible for warfare— are variable. Brown takes pains to demonstrate the variety (as opposed to the essential) in human nature, lest we begin to suspect that she is

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advocating a simple inversion of gender roles. Instead her characters show readers the possibility of honest interaction that is not based on gender. As Judith Butler notes, The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual original. Thus gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. The parodic repetition of “the original,” . . . reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and the original. (Butler 31)

In this passage although Butler refers to the emulation of gendered constructs in homosexuals, transsexuals, and the like, the same can be said of Geneva and her cross dressing. She does not “emulate an original” in the sense that she is not copying the behavior of a man, because a true “original” does not exist. Rather, the “original” is a constructed idea of what is supposedly the norm. Mars Vickers stands in stark contrast to Nash. He exemplifies a secure and confidant man who is charmed by Geneva, even when she is disguised as “Jimmy.” Flanagan asserts that attraction of male characters to women disguised as men “functions to remind the reader of the cross-dresser’s biological sex” (21) and thus negates the challenge that Genava poses to patriarchal norms. Yet Mars seems attracted to Geneva because of her strength, not because of any feminine traits that might penetrate her disguise, suggesting that Mars is attracted to people based on character, not gender. This attraction is thus certainly a challenge to normative sexual scripts, which dictate that Mars might be attracted only to women, for that matter, feminine Southern women of the proper social class. As if to reinforce the point that sexual scripts are constructed, Geneva maintains the best of what is typically considered feminine, despite the hardships of war. Her character maintains a set of traits that have been identified as typical of both sexes, demonstrating an overlap of human experience that is free of gendered categorization. Geneva remains compassionate and open-minded, while occasionally shifting her vision to a world of abstraction to avoid the horrors of war. This portrayal is made explicit as she surveys the grotesque images of war. She “shudder[s] at the cries of the suffering” and thinks, “Battle she could take but it was torture to hear those screams” (288). Such

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observations ensure that Geneva does not become a masculine caricature or, as Aisenberg and Allen write, a “worshiper of abstraction” but instead maintains a believable balance between so-called masculine and feminine traits. Geneva’s half-sister, Di-Peachy, is a counterbalance for Geneva. Di-Peachy is the daughter of patriarch Henley Chatfield and a slave woman whom he once owned. Thus Brown introduces the issue of slavery and complicates the matter further by demonstrating the very close relationship between the two girls (despite the disturbing fact that Di-Peachy is officially Geneva’s “property”). Di-Peachy is the opposite of Geneva in many ways, not just in the most obvious arena of skin color. She is portrayed as a lady: “aristocratic,” dainty, intelligent, and “lustrous in her beauty” (Rita Mae Brown High Hearts 5). Di-Peachy has no violent tendencies, and absolutely no compulsion to go to war. This portrayal disrupts a stereotype concerning the aggressive black women. Kimberly Springer writes, for instance, that “African Americans are thought to be always already violent due to their ‘savage’ ancestry” (qtd. in Tung 110). In a similar fashion Tung asserts, “Black women’s bodies . . . are not read identically to white women’s bodies. So what appears transgressive for the white female heroine may not be so for the black female heroine” (110). In other words, if Di-Peachy were depicted as an aggressive or violent character it might add to the stereotype of the African “savage,” rather than challenge it. Brown alternately paints Di-Peachy as the model of Southern womanhood, a depiction that astutely counters the stereotype of the “savage” and additionally makes the ironic point that the Chatfield sister with African ancestry is the one who possesses the qualities deemed most admirable for a Southern lady (demonstrating that race and racial profiling are also constructions without merit). Further, at the war’s conclusion, a white man proposes to the beautiful Di-Peachy, who, against all of the mores of her upbringing, accepts his proposal. Throughout the war, Di-Peachy serves bravely as a nurse with Geneva’s mother, Lutie Chatfield. The two women— one black, one white—nurse sick and injured soldiers who come from both sides of the Mason Dixon line. In addition, when the number of injured soldiers becomes overwhelming, Lutie Chatfield calls on the “undesirable” women of Albemarle County, the prostitutes who are typically shunned by the women of polite society, to request their assistance (302–3). The need for solidarity forces the women of the aristocracy

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and the working classes to come together in a time of need, to overcome entrenched class binaries. When questioned about the difficult circumstances Lutie attests, “I’m a soldier in the shadow army of the Confederacy . . . I think of the women of Virginia as a shadow army. You have your duties, and we have ours” (300). Brown makes the reader aware of the daily battles in which women engage to make the world a better place. The Shadow Army is thus indicative of the warrior in the common woman, who struggles for recognition and for equal treatment in the world. Moreover, despite the petty rivalries that take place among the women (as in Lutie’s unwarranted aversion to Di-Peachy), the text depicts them as a collective force that comes together when needed, for the sake of the greater good (a “shadow army”). All of the women in the novel function as ethical agents responsible for their own choices, decisions, and lives. As much as they love the men in their lives they do not depend on them in difficult times but battle adversity and have faith and conviction in themselves. This is the creed of the woman warrior. Overall, the text is valuable for the way in which Brown challenges existing stereotypes: sexual, racial, and class-oriented. Although the novel is indeed utopian in vision, it depicts the possibilities for humanity when the patriarchal mores of our society are challenged. Fiction such as High Hearts extends the boundaries of accepted behavior for women by lauding characters who refuse to surrender to unfair socially mandated restrictions.

W F’ W W I T HE U N VANQUISHED () If women authors have a tendency to depict female warriors as moral agents who battle for love of family or for personal preservation as well as for the moral ideals attributed to men, how have male authors depicted female warriors in contemporary literature? One example is William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1934), which contains two boldly drawn vigilante female characters, a female warrior and a female bandit, both of whom provide an interesting counterpoint to the vigilante women we have encountered thus far. In this section I discuss Drusilla Hawk, the woman warrior of The Unvanquished, and will turn to an analysis of Granny Millard, the woman bandit, in a later chapter (“Female Bandits”). What my analysis of Drusilla

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will demonstrate is that unlike female authors (such as Kingston and Brown) who write about woman warriors, Faulkner does not allow his woman warrior to achieve full agency, because his female character finally devalues the feminine, a move that reinforces patriarchal systems (and perhaps the antebellum philosophies of the Old South), by suggesting that tradition will prevail. Drusilla Hawk is a proud young woman who loses her fiancé and father early in the American Civil War and subsequently decides to flout convention—to cut her hair, dress like a man, and join the Confederate Army. As far as extending the boundaries of acceptable behavior for women, Faulkner is off to a good start. Yet careful analysis reveals the way that Drusilla denies and devalues her feminine attributes and thus is complicit in sustaining the patriarchal worldview. To begin, Drusilla’s motives for going to war ally much more closely with those of male characters than the heroines we have discussed. Unlike Maxine, Drusilla does not go to war to take the place of another, and unlike Geneva, she does not enlist to be with her husband. Instead, she simply desires the freedom and independence accorded to men. In the chapter entitled “Raid,” Drusilla explains: Living used to be dull, you see. Stupid. You lived in the same house as your father was born in . . . and then you grew up and you fell in love with your acceptable man and in time you would marry him . . . and then you settled down forever more while your husband got children on your body for you to feed and bathe and dress until they grew up too; and then you and your husband died quietly and you were buried together . . . Stupid, you see. (101)

In this passage Drusilla acknowledges the “dullness” of life for a woman in the nineteenth century, who was expected to grow up, marry, rear children, and die. Her female agency is incommensurable with the actual facts of being a woman. Noel Polk writes, “War rescue[s] Drusilla from the bourgeois life of endless, stultifying repetition of routine from generation to generation” (91). Thus, on the one hand, Faulkner envisions the world through the eyes of a spunky young woman who has lost her fiancé and, to his mind, has nothing “substantial” to keep her occupied at home. On the other hand, Drusilla longs for adventure and change— abstract factors that are certainly valid in and of themselves but, when examined within the scope of vigilante literature, are quite different to the motives that typically

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inspire female warriors created by women. In a nutshell, Drusilla goes to war for herself; Kingston and Brown’s women warriors have the added motive of going to war for the sake of another. Although Drusilla’s motives are not “wrong,” they demonstrate the way that Faulkner sustains the imbalances of a patriarchal consciousness that denies feminist thought. In other words, “the archetype underscores the tension between masculine and feminine ways of knowing and being—the former characterized by single-mindedness and rigid control, and the latter expansiveness and acceptance” (Absher 6). As suggested in the previous quotation, Drusilla lacks the ability to successfully meld “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics into a full embodiment of personhood. Said another way, she is unable to merge that which is erroneously labeled “masculine” with what is erroneously labeled “feminine,” thereby reinforcing a gendered division rather than rectifying it. For example, after the war, Drusilla returns with John Sartoris to his Yoknapatawpha home. She continues to keep her hair shorn and to dress like a man. Polk writes, “She cannot live with the monotony of peace, a condition a lot of Faulkner’s male warriors also have” (Polk 91). Unlike the female warriors created by Kingston and Brown who manage to meld what makes them uniquely female with their newfound independence, Drusilla shuns everything that might be considered even remotely feminine. Here then is an example of a character who is not working to change the status quo but instead seems to be working unsuccessfully to become a man. Despite his best efforts, Faulkner is unable to completely set Drusilla free of her social obligations as a Southern female. He alternatively establishes just how “out-of-place” she is in the realm of the masculine. Whereas Kingston and Brown demonstrate the advantages of balancing gender assignments typically labeled masculine or feminine (the compassion and openness of Geneva; the quick, lithe movements of Maxine; and the ability of both heroines to meld the maternal with their ferocity), Drusilla sees her feminine attributes as detriments and tries to rid herself of them completely. Sadly, she cannot embrace the salient characteristics that make her unique from both men and other women. Her young cousin Bayard explains, Drusilla worked with Joby and Ringo and Father and me like another man, with her hair shorter than it had been in Hawkhurst and her face sunburned from riding in the weather and her body thin from living like soldier lived. (192)

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Although John Sartoris and the boys have no trouble accepting the boyish Drusilla, Aunt Louisa is appalled by the situation; fearing the ruin of her family’s “good name” (193), she evokes the Southern code of honor to force the men to comply with her wishes. In a letter to John Sartoris, Louisa implies that the relationship between John and Drusilla is improper, and that it is casting a pall on the family’s reputation. She writes, It is not myself I am thinking of since I am a woman, a mother, a Southern woman . . . But when I think of my husband who laid down his life to protect the heritage of courageous men and spotless women looking down from heaven on a daughter who [has] deliberately cast away that for which he died. (190)

By shifting her identity from “woman” and “mother” to “Southern woman,” it becomes clear how Louisa usurps the masculine ideal in an attempt to preserve the status quo. Drusilla is horrified by the implication that she and John Sartoris are anything other than equals but is eventually “beaten” into submission (200) via social conventions adhered to by her aunt and the larger community of women. She is socialized to identify herself as a sexual being that exists for men, “specifically for male sexual use” (MacKinnon 110), and she eventually internalizes the lesson, thus making it a reality, something she is unable to withstand. Drusilla’s submission to her aunt’s sexual politics is completely uncharacteristic for a woman who has flouted all convention to fight in a war. She has disguised herself as a man, suffered physical and mental duress, conducted herself with unfailing valor and honor, yet she cannot “win” against the women of her community who demand her compliance with social norms. This irony is the essence of the third main distinction between Drusilla and the she-warriors previously discussed. Drusilla eventually returns to the destructive feminine creed of self-sacrifice and refuses to stand up for what will help her realize her full subjectivity. Faulkner shows Drusilla crumbling to the women’s force and losing something vital about herself in the process. He thus constructs a narrowly proscriptive “either/or” scenario in which Drusilla is imbued with either masculine or feminine characteristics, but not both. The irony is that in either scenario Drusilla’s body is a tool to ensure the maintenance of one-sided, onedimensional existence.

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Drusilla is forced by Aunt Louisa and the upright Mrs. Habersham to wear dresses once again, clothes in which “she could neither fight back nor run away” (201), and she is forced to marry John Sartoris, who— like Mars Vickers from Brown’s High Hearts—is secure enough in his own masculinity not to care about Drusilla’s appearance. Drusilla’s sacrificial act fulfills the expectations of her aunt and the community, although it crushes her spirit in the process. Bayard sums up the situation by sadly proclaiming that Drusilla is unable to defend herself in “a game she couldn’t beat” (202). In calling her gender shifting a game, Faulkner reveals a bias against strong women. Coincidentally, the day of the wedding is also the day when a new town marshal is to be elected in Jefferson. The women planning the wedding take no notice of this fact. Bayard explains their lack of concern, stating, “Like Father said, women cannot believe that anything can be right or wrong or even very important that can be decided by a lot of little scraps of scribbled paper dropped into a box” (204). Here we can see traces of the abstract-concrete divide that we have seen attributed to men and women throughout this project; in essence, women are linked with the flesh and men are linked with the abstract and the symbolic. Kingston and Brown overcome this divide, at least to some degree, in their fiction, but in this example women are deemed entirely unable to see the value in the abstract electoral process (despite the fact that they turn out to be exactly right because the election is a farce). This election is unusual because a black man has dared to put forth his candidacy, with the support of two “carpetbaggers” from the North. When Drusilla and John Sartoris ride to town to marry, they encounter a posse of townspeople who are up in arms about the possibility of a black man taking office. John Sartoris shoots the two Northerners and proclaims Drusilla the new “voting commissioner,” ironically attesting, “Don’t you see we are working for peace through law and order?” (208). As noted by Polk, this is “peace and law and order as people of his own class define them” (92). In her wedding dress and veil, the ceremonial bride of the South, Drusilla takes the ballot box back to the Sartoris’ home, and the election proceeds. The voting process is conducted in the presence of white townsmen who write out the ballots ahead of time, so that “men would take them and drop them into the box and Drusilla would call their names out” (Faulkner 210). Thus, it is not surprising that there is not a single vote in favor of electing the black candidate. Polk writes, “Jefferson culture can no more tolerate

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a Negro as marshal than it can tolerate a woman who dresses like a man, behaves like a man, and hangs out with men” (Polk 92). This scene reinforces the proliferating ironies of the racist, sexist antebellum South. In the final two chapters of The Unvanquished Drusilla relinquishes her femininity for the second time and resumes an aggressive, masculine persona. The catastrophic ending to Drusilla’s rebellion forces readers to question the extent of Faulkner’s vision for women. Although his creation of a woman warrior was innovative and exceptional for the time period, he was unable to allow for the “third space” noted by Garber, which would situate Drusilla’s gender as neither an “either” nor an “or,” but as something altogether different. Many critics have argued that it is the loss of Drusilla’s feminine characteristics that lead to her ultimate demise. Cleanth Brooks asserts, for example, that “Drusilla Hawk’s aristocratic virtues become perverted: she is dauntless, but in her worship of honor and courage, she has forgotten pity, compassion, and even her womanhood” (335). Faulkner is aware that attributes typically considered to be “feminine,” such as the ability to experience “pity and compassion” and the ability to see beyond abstract notions of honor and legacy, have the ability to disrupt and change the Southern code that mires Bayard and Drusilla (in addition to the main characters of many of his other novels8) in its stead. My reading of this scene follows that of Sherrill Harbison and Deborah Clarke, who argue that Bayard and Drusilla reverse roles in the final chapter, and that “Bayard’s appropriation of the feminine works to his advantage, while Drusilla’s masculinity fails” (292). Clarke notes, While these reversals may implicitly privilege the feminine mode by Bayard’s triumph . . . gender has been reconfigured as men now colonize the feminine and incorporate it into a new masculinity, one from which women are as fully excluded as they were from the old one. (247)

Whereas the female authors I have discussed are able to envision a revolutionary reimagining of gender in which women are not confined to one stereotype or another but instead are free to formulate an identity based on the strengths of both, Faulkner does not give this opportunity to Drusilla because she is a female. As I will demonstrate, he gives it to Bayard instead.

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In the final chapter of the text, “An Odor of Verbena,” eight years have passed since the wedding of John and Drusilla. Bayard, at college, is abruptly notified of the death of his father, which leaves him as “The Sartoris” (214), the man of the family who will continue the Sartoris family legacy. Bayard— as recipient of this abstract honor, passed down to him through generations of Sartoris men—ultimately rejects the ethic of retributive violence that this role implies. Instead, Drusilla defends the legacy of the Sartorises, as the family patriarch typically would. When Bayard arrives home for his father’s funeral, Drusilla’s personality has become “completely bifurcated” (Yaeger “Amphora Princess” 213). She is dressed in a flowing yellow ball gown and perfumed with verbena,9 yet she wears her hair closely cropped and grips dueling pistols tightly in her hands. This portrayal of Drusilla is interesting, because it is the first time she has seemed confused about her identity. Instead of the positive connotations this might suggest—for example, that she is finding a new equilibrium that includes aspects of both genders— the Drusilla of this chapter is decidedly unsound, relegated to a state of madness that disarms and disables her. Although Drusilla greatly desires the opportunity to kill John Sartoris’s murderer, she recognizes that her station does not allow her to pursue this bloodthirsty Southern tradition. Instead, she passes the pistols to Bayard, imploring, “Take them, Bayard . . . I have kept them for you. I give them to you” (237). The sexual overtones of the scene become explicit as she entreats, “Do you feel them? The long true barrels true as justice, the triggers (you have fired them) quick as retribution, the two of them slender and invincible and fatal as the physical shape of love?” (237). The pistols she hands him indicate a phallic exchange; she confers the possibility of manhood upon him, even before she alludes to the “physical shape of love” (237). In addition, Drusilla gives Bayard a sprig of the verbena, saying, “There. One I give to you to wear tomorrow (it will not fade), the other I cast away, like this— . . . I abjure it. I abjure verbena forever more; I have smelled it above the odor of courage; that was all I wanted” (Faulkner 238). Maryanne M. Gobble interprets the verbena as a “talisman of war,” symbolic of the violent Southern code that Drusilla endorses. Although the historical implications of this flower suggest that this is accurate, I also believe that the verbena flower is representative of Drusilla’s femininity. When she passes the verbena to Bayard and then “abjures it forever” she is forever casting away the feminine

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aspects of herself, giving them to Bayard in a gesture of unrequited sacrifice, like a goddess casting herself upon an alter. This theory is supported by readings such as that by Clarke, who argues that the narrative demands more than Drusilla’s subordination as feminine, “it demands her subordination as female.” Clarke explains, Ultimately in this novel gender gives way to sex: if you are a woman, it doesn’t matter if your behavior is masculine or feminine; eventually your body will catch up to you and neither great Neptune’s ocean nor all the verbena in the world will wash it clean of female sexuality and thus subordination. (Clarke 249)

Bayard disappoints Drusilla by refusing to take part in the duel, thereby ending the chain of bloodshed. Drusilla realizes that Bayard has decided to abstain from fighting when she touches her lips to his hand. The kiss is a central symbol in the transference of feminine power. With the kiss, a momentary melding of masculine and feminine takes place, both literally and figuratively. In this instant, with the touch of her lips to his skin, Drusilla transfers all that remains of her feminine potency to Bayard, and afterward, it seems she has nothing of value left. Although Faulkner allows Bayard and Drusilla to experience a moment of connection enabled by the tactile kiss (perhaps the only true melding of masculine and feminine that occurs), it is a moment that Drusilla profoundly regrets. She cries, “I kissed his hand” in an “aghast whisper” (239), seconds before she dissolves into the hysterical laughter of a lunatic. The kiss leads to her final awareness of Bayard’s decision to forego revenge, and it is knowledge she is unable to tolerate. Faulkner is conscious that feminine attributes have the power to contradict and disrupt the outdated Southern traditions of violence and retribution. But instead of allowing Drusilla to assume the role of liberator, to attain full agency through the combination of masculine and feminine, Faulkner shifts the onus of change to the male protagonist. Bayard rejects the “traditionally masculine role of avenger” (48) with his heroic decision to face his father’s killer unarmed. He thus demonstrates a profound ability to forgo outdated codes of honor and to recognize the importance of attaining an equilibrium that is literally lost to Drusilla. The implications of Bayard’s decision to forgo violent action have been widely debated. Motomura and other critics argue that Bayard’s

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choice “implies emasculation, or becoming a ‘woman’ toward violence” (94). This is supported by my own reading, which illustrates how Bayard adopts the feminine aspects of Drusilla. Bayard’s decision to face Redmond unarmed can be understood as an act that essentially endorses his own symbolic castration, an impotence that carries over to the idea of the doomed legacy of the antebellum South. He assumes a role of feminine passivity, willing to sacrifice himself (literally, because he could be shot) for a moral ideal. Why does Faulkner choose such an ending? It seems likely that the conveyance of feminine power onto Bayard has to do with Faulkner’s own fear of symbolic castration occurring through the written word. He would rather castrate Bayard within the story by linking him to the feminine, than castrate himself and the masculine Southern culture in which he is immersed, by allowing conventions of gender to be completely overturned. Bayard “transcends the painful conditions of the past and finds a path into the future” (Baker 110) by relying on his moral strength rather than his physical prowess. Meanwhile, Drusilla devolves into madness. Faulkner, therefore, ultimately retains the hierarchy of male-female by esteeming Bayard and defanging Drusilla (male strong, woman weak), just as he retains the hierarchy of whiteblack by refusing to envision a black man as an elected official. This reading seems even more likely when we consider Faulkner’s own family history. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., writes that as a young man, Faulkner feared “for his courage and masculinity” and that he felt “a certain amount of shame over his emotional complexity” (61). His adulation for his great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner, is well documented, as is his wish to model himself after the older man, who had been not only a poet, novelist, and playwright, but also “a man of action”— a decorated Confederate soldier, railroad builder, and entrepreneur10 (61). Faulkner “spent much of his life lying about his war experiences . . . [because] he felt that his lack of combat duty unmanned him” (Clarke 230). He feared that the bravery and valor of his great-grandfather had been bred out of him, and that he was but a weak imitation of the man who had come before (Rubin Jr. 61). Many scholars believe that this novel was, in part, an attempt by Faulkner to come to terms with his guilt concerning his lack of civil service and to fully accept his vocation as a writer. Upon recognizing that Bayard will not engage in the duel, Drusilla is overcome with a hysterical screaming laughter that spills from her mouth “like vomit.” So begins her grotesque descent into lunacy: “there

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was no blood in her face at all, her mouth open a little and pale as one of those rubber rings women seal fruit jars with. Then her eyes filled with an expression of bitter and passionate betrayal” (239). In this passage Drusilla’s body is “a somatic battlefield for the race and class struggles that mark Faulkner’s understanding of the postbellum South.” (Yaeger “Amphora Princess” 207). All remnants of the strength she once possessed are eradicated as she tries to hold back her laughter “with her hand like a small child who has filled its mouth too full” (239). Here the very subjectlessness of her sex becomes clear. She is no better than an infant, a child throwing a tantrum for not getting its way. Instead, it is Bayard’s transformation that is prominent. He has mastered “a new set of moral norms” (Yaeger 224) by assuming the feminine attributes of mercy, leniency, and compassion. Drusilla’s hysterical laughter evokes the image of Abigail from Grau’s The Keepers of the House, who laughs hysterically at what she imagines will be the consequences of her vindictive actions (see Chapter One). However, although Abigail laughs at the expense of a compromised masculine authority, nothing about Drusilla’s laughter is threatening to masculine or feminine identity; instead, her laughter confirms her instability and shows her defeat. While Abigail’s laughter is subversive, Drusilla’s laughter suggests her failure to effectively question or change a representational and legal system requiring women to define themselves through marriage and self-sacrifice. Finally, while Abigail’s laughter is a precursor to her personal evolution, Drusilla’s laughter is the precursor to her retreat—like an army facing defeat she flees to Montgomery, never to be heard from (literally, she does not speak) again. Faulkner paints Drusilla as a person who has fallen prey to the gendered expectations of an entrenched social system. Drusilla is unable to see the futility in the Southern code of honor to which she ascribes. She is not permitted to combine the masculine and feminine tendencies within herself that might lead her to a fullness of being and experience. Instead, her wish to appease and please, to be loved and approved of in the costume of a woman, causes her to lose herself, driving her to madness. Although Faulkner bestows characteristics of the opposite gender upon Bayard, allowing him in the process to reconfigure the future of the South, his narrative refuses to grant the subordinated female the same privilege. In this way Faulkner reproduces the phallogocentric system of stable, ordered, meaning that already exists (and that

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excludes women entirely). The odor of verbena is perhaps the closest Drusilla comes to resisting the male-centered dialectic, because the scent itself is a nonrepresentational form (in fact, verbena is scentless) (Gobble 569). In the final lines of the novel Bayard discovers a single sprig of verbena on his pillow. The verbena pervades the air, “filling the room, the dusk, the evening with that odor which she said you could smell alone above the smell of the horses” (Faulkner 254), evoking feminine sexuality and a free and plural system—limitless, fluid, and ever-changing. Drusilla has relinquished her feminine essence, but a suggestion of what she might have been remains (like a scent). Faulkner offers this fragrance as a moment of redemption, a final allusion to all that was attractive and true about Drusilla, and a reminder of the new mixture of qualities in Bayard that convince him to forgo the violent actions of his ancestors. Within this gesture, Drusilla’s femininity can finally be understood not as a liability, but as a strength.

C Faulkner’s work originated amid the literary refashioning of the 1920s and 30s, a noteworthy time for the development of new styles and forms in literature, as well as for remarkable new ways of understanding and questioning our society’s ideological norms. Faulkner’s modern vision paves the way for successors such as Kingston and Brown, who 50 years later, write freely of a world of greater justice and equality. Kingston and Brown create heroines who reverse the stigma of physical and mental weakness in women and battle to overcome false notions that equate femininity with passivity and frailty. In these texts, violence is a beginning, a casting off of what “is not” to achieve the “what might be.” Feminist Jeffner Allen argues that equating nonviolence with women springs from the sexist belief that in our society men are entitled to engage in aggressive, dominant behavior, while women are not. She writes, Women, constrained to nonviolence, are precluded from claiming a self, a world. The moral imperative established by heterosexual virtue that women are to be nonviolent, establish[es] a male- defined goof that is beneficial to men and harmful to women. (qtd. in K. Martindale 109)

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The Woman Warrior and High Hearts challenge this notion. Maxine and Geneva defy convention by becoming female warriors who are skilled in combat as well as in matters of the heart. Their decisions to thwart convention and to reject destructive self-sacrifice ultimately prove to be beneficial as they discover and develop latent qualities in themselves and come to a better understanding of the larger world. Cross dressing serves as a particularly relevant weapon in the battle to establish women as strong and capable in the wider political realm of men. The fact that women characters can flawlessly and with ease assume the dress and behavior of men demonstrates the constructedness of what is typically considered “masculine” and throws wide the doors of possibility concerning the establishment of new identities, not just for women, but for all individuals in American society. The importance of the feminine elements of language is also brought to the fore in this chapter. Aspects of communication that threaten masculine social status and bring representation itself into question are identified, from Maxine’s powerful pen to Faulkner’s refusal to overturn traditional representations of gender. In this chapter it becomes clear that the differing motives of women and men for engaging in battle can be largely attributed to the power of language, the power that men have given themselves to harness the abstract, while relegating women to the earth-bound. This chapter demonstrates both how female authors defy such conventions and how they turn such restrictions into positive and humane motivation, crafting women who are concerned not just with legacy and honor, but also with sacred human bonds of love and connection. In sum, contemporary stories of women warriors traverse racial boundaries, class boundaries, and boundaries that prescribe gender and sexuality for women. The images created by these visionary women aid in the real-world construction, recuperation, and reinscription of ideas concerning femininity. Although the battle for equality is far from over, social construction of sexual difference remains a key factor in attaining gender equality. The next chapter, “The Woman Who Snaps, the Woman Who Kills,” will engage in a discussion of how and why social constructions of gender have been so thoroughly absorbed by women and will speculate about whether murder is ever a justifiable response to violence and oppression.

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C H A P T ER

T H R E E

The Woman Who Snaps, The Woman Who Kills

Everyone knows that a place exists . . . That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds. Hélène Cixous

In the United States, women are statistically more likely to be targets of domestic violence than of any other type of violence. The Family Violence Prevention Fund reports that “In the year 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490 women) were victims of nonfatal violence committed by an intimate partner” (1). Although the extent to which domestic violence occurs within Western society has long been underestimated, public scrutiny and condemnation of this troubling phenomenon has recently increased and, correspondingly, the more general theme of violence toward women is becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary arts such as literature, film, and television. Violence occurs in various forms; it is not strictly physical, as one might initially think. My discussion of violence in literature by women will, therefore, involve instances of physical, verbal, and emotional violence; sexual assault or harassment; discrimination; and vilification— all of which affect the mental, emotional, and physical health of heroines and their real-life counterparts. Although often not illegal, such treatment can restrict a woman’s participation in life outside the home, lessen her personal fulfillment, isolate her from friends and family, and lead her to financial dependency, all of which can lead to homelessness, financial ruin, and in extreme cases, even death.

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It is not always easy to define what qualifies as a crime against women; therefore, it is not always easy to determine when women’s resistance is lawful. In theory, in a best-case scenario, violence for purposes of self-defense is always justifiable in a court of law. Unfortunately, as the fiction in this chapter demonstrates, what counts as self-defense is often up for debate, particularly in situations where the violence toward women is dispersed over time, is not physical but mental, or is rationalized by male aggressors. Judy Costello believes that women’s “resistance to the pattern of dominance and submission is a radical step in ending the cycle of violence in this society” (178), and she advocates violent action to defend against physical attack or abuse, even when it means crossing the lines of “acceptable” behavior for women. Such self-assertion, argues Costello, is the only way to create lasting change in a system that has fallen into complacency. Fictional vigilante women combat the physical and mental violence that they have experienced at the hands of others with illegal action intended to right injustice. This is an unusual plot, even in the fiction of today. Traditionally, in all literary genres, women have been cast as the victims of violent acts. They are the damsels in distress. So why has the “woman-as-victim” role in realist fiction been so slow to change? To answer this question, we must first understand why women continue to occupy this position in our larger society. In Reweaving the Web of Life, Costello argues that, from childhood, women are indoctrinated with advice about what is appropriate and expected behavior, and that this advice is distorted to the point that self-sacrifice becomes the norm (77). This is compounded by the fact that women living with violence often fear for their lives and the lives of their children and so are reluctant to take action. It is likely that the theme of the victimized heroine has permeated contemporary literature to such a degree because domestic violence has become a concern of mainstream society. And although literature featuring the woman as victim might indeed be an important avenue for understanding the experiences of women living with violence, the fact that so few contemporary authors imagine women taking back their power is troubling in its own right. As noted by Ann Jones, in late nineteenth-century fiction featuring women who kill, the primary motives of the murderesses were often “greed, lust, and gratuitous cruelty.” Moreover, the murderesses

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almost always “suffer[ed] agonies of remorse before dying, usually by suicide” (118–9). Such stories were usually intended as “cautionary tales” for female readers; the implication being that the protagonists might have enjoyed the joy and contentment of domestic bliss (119), but because they were discontent with their “lot in life” they became monsters capable of murder. Both models of womanhood, the passive victim and the monster, are still commonly reflected in contemporary American fiction. In comparison, there are relatively few instances in fiction of women committing extralegal acts in the name of justice. Rarely, especially in realist fiction by men, are women cast as agents capable of self-defense or as the initiators of violent action for a just cause. This positioning (as submissive victim) reinforces ingrained patterns of dominance and submission. Even today only a handful of female authors are depicting women differently in realist literature, in roles that contribute to the reversal of subtle abuse, veiled violence, and stereotypes of weakness and submissiveness. I have selected the texts featured in this chapter for closer analysis because these particular stories challenge the reigning status quo that casts women as passive victims who are acted upon or, alternatively, as victims who kill because of the monstrous (masculine) impulses that drive them. Instead, the protagonists of these stories “snap” because of the unjust circumstances of their lives. Questions of motive are thus brought to the foreground, compelling readers to ask whether it might be necessary to expand the legal definition of self-defense so that it can justify responses to forms of violence other than the physical. In any case, the authors of these stories disrupt readers’ preconceived expectations of appropriate feminine behavior by choosing illegal murderous action as an option for their heroines. Similar to female avengers and women who battle with weapons, women who kill are not acting to simply make the world a better place for themselves. Instead, the empowerment that they achieve has a ripple effect that allows readers to witness a controversial, but undeniable, method of promoting equity. In all of the stories, women ultimately reject the self-sacrifice that has kept them subservient to men, and they do so without resorting to madness or to suicide, acts that would reinscribe them in the current system of male dominance because this kind of violence is directed against themselves. Instead, their decisions erupt in conflict, leading them to murder—the only deed

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that is life-changing and system-shattering enough to make a difference in the reigning ideology. The texts are controversial because women assert themselves at the expense of the life of another, and this behavior is viewed as aberrant, not just as a crime of violence, because violent women are seen as especially deviant within predetermined standards of gendered justice. Although there is no good argument to endorse violence, we must keep in mind that our strong reaction to women who kill might have much to do with the seeming abnormality of women violating their gendered role, especially in cases where women’s violence occurs as an act of self-defense or protection. In the stories examined in this chapter women disrupt hierarchies of power by demonstrating their “destructive potential.” As Rita Mae Brown has claimed, “Once destructive potential is established the establishment will reason with you because it is in their self-interest to reason with you” (Violence 25). In other words, violent action, or the threat of violent action, gets the attention of the government and society, forcing people to take seriously requests that they may have otherwise overlooked, ignored, or denied. This chapter begins with a discussion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a text that offers a way to explain and explore why protests such as suicide, infanticide, and euthanasia are not vigilante acts according to my definition of vigilante women who kill (see “Introduction”). Though initially Sethe’s violent response to the appearance of the slave owner and his men might appear vengeful, I argue that she is acting out of desperation and the desire to protect her children from harm. Because the act is not one of vengeance, she does not constitute a true vigilante female. The novel Wife (1975), by Bharati Mukherjee, depicts a woman who has accepted personal sacrifice to such a degree that it has damaged her ability to act as a moral agent in the public world (as well as in the private world of the family). When she eventually does rebel, by engaging in a sexual affair, she is left feeling guilty and even more immured in the patriarchal system that shackles her. Mukherjee configures the text firmly in the tradition of the female adultery plot (found in so many nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels) and yet modifies the typical outcome drastically by having her heroine commit murder instead of turning to self-harm. The text is controversial because Dimple Dasgupta stabs her husband to death although he has committed no discernible crime and poses no direct harm to her physical person. The text thus forces a question: Is there a productive

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way for women to tackle long-term insidious oppression? If the only means for escape that Dimple envisions are madness, suicide, or the murder of her husband, does the act become justifiable, at least to some degree? Short stories by Susan Glaspell and Alice Walker complete this chapter’s examination, by providing two explicit examples of women in fiction who refuse martyrdom and passive resistance, using violence to establish their right to a life free of oppression. Glaspell’s text, from 1917, is the earliest example of female vigilantism discussed herein. The story highlights the lack of opportunity for women in the early twentieth century and focuses on the limitations of the male-dominated justice system, which in 1917 did not allow women to serve as jurors. Similar to the previous texts explored in this chapter, Alice Walker’s short story highlights the connection between motive and action in female vigilantism. Walker chooses as her heroine a young black female who is unequipped to deal with the sexual exploitation she experiences at the hands of a prestigious white lawyer. The young girl commits murder to rid herself of the toxic influence of the violator in her life, but it is murder just the same. Thus the story compels readers to consider what constitutes adequate motive for a violent crime when being judged in a court of law. The inequity of our laws is made visible by the authors featured in this chapter, all of whom highlight the danger of a system that does not consider the indeterminable and ambiguous properties that exists within the so-called clarity of justice. For example, Renée Heberle provides evidence showing that “some women convicted of capital murder are more likely to land on death row than others not because their crimes are worse, as defined by statutory law, but because they do not enact a properly feminine gender identity” (1106). Thus we can see how the social anxieties concerning women’s potential power become actualized. The U.S. justice system is founded on the premise that one is innocent until proven guilty; however, as these texts show, the declaration of a verdict of either “guilt” or “innocence” oftentimes emerges from strong, yet transparent, preexisting prejudices. As a result, taking into account the conditions that lead to the trespass of murder becomes doubly important, especially when applied to women who willfully violate our most basic understanding of human rights in their efforts to be free.

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T M’ B ELOV ED () My reading of Beloved clears the way to a true understanding of what constitutes female vigilantism in fiction and helps to pinpoint the definition of the female vigilante: a woman who exacts revenge, independent of the law, for injustice committed against herself or her loved ones. The novel centers on Sethe’s decision to kill her children (and herself) rather than allowing them to return to slavery. In the 20-year aftermath of the crime, Sethe claims repeatedly that she killed her daughter, Beloved, to protect her from the horrors of slavery, in an act born of love and mercy. Her belief that Beloved was an extension of herself, “her best thing,” drives her to drag a saw across her baby daughter’s throat, draining her life like water from a faucet. Although critics have interpreted the murder of Beloved as an act of vigilante justice, I will demonstrate why this interpretation is not entirely accurate. Morrison’s story is based on true events, found in a newspaper article from 1856, “detailing the basic facts of the murder” (Peterson 552). In January 1856, Margaret Garner “escaped from a Boone County, Kentucky, plantation with her husband, four children, and mother- and father-in-law” (Wall 97). The family crossed the Ohio River and pushed on to reunite with relatives in Cincinnati. Sadly, the reunion was short-lived. Slave catchers tracked the family and surrounded their home. Minutes before being taken back into custody, Margaret Garner killed her three-year-old daughter by slashing her throat; she was later jailed for murder (97). The case received much recognition, both positive and negative. Abolitionists, who “took up her cause . . . helped the case to gain widespread publicity which eventually led to Garner’s acquittal, but also led to the division of her family as each was returned to slavery” (97–8). In Morrison’s novel, when the fully armed slave owner (called “Schoolteacher”) and his accomplices appear in Baby Suggs’s front yard, Sethe has no prior warning, no opportunity to run, no one to call on for help, and no way of fighting off four armed men. The men, representing the law in 1863, are prepared to recapture Sethe and her four children at any cost, to profit from their slave labor. The fact that the laws of the time supported the slave owner in his endeavor to recapture Sethe demonstrates exactly how laws that are believed to be essential, inclusive, and true can, in fact, be fabricated, exclusive, and false. As MacKinnon has observed,

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The law . . . was not written by women, white or black, rich or poor. It has not been based on women’s experiences of life, everyday or otherwise. No one represented women’s interests as women in creating it, and few have considered women’s interests as women in applying it . . . it was not written for our benefit, and it shows. (33)

In this passage MacKinnon calls into question not only laws concerning slavery, which have, of course, been repealed, but also those concerning women’s rights, which even today are heavily biased. For Sethe, returning to a world in which she has no legal right to her own children is literally a fate worse than death. Based on her own experiences and the experiences of her mother, her husband, and the friends she made while laboring at Sweet Home Plantation, Sethe realizes the consequences of surrendering her children to the slave owner and has no qualms about her decision to end their lives. When, years later, her closest confidant, Paul D, questions her decision to commit murder, Sethe responds simply: “I stopped him . . . I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (Morrison 193). This is a clear act of agency, especially for a woman who has no legal rights. In the few remaining moments before she and her children are separated, Sethe takes action. It is her decision to act that is important in the scope of vigilantism. She makes a desperate choice, but a choice nonetheless. “My plan,” Sethe later reflects, “was to take us all to the other side where my own ma’am is” (240). This thought establishes Sethe’s intent not only to kill her daughter, but also to kill herself and her boys as well, in the belief that the family will be reunited in a better afterlife. The horrific, yet courageous, acts of murder— cutting the throats of her boys and oldest girl and attempting to bash out the brains of her youngest baby— ironically demonstrate that Sethe is a human being capable of decision making, rather than the dehumanized animal she is considered by the slave owner (and later accused of being by Paul D). Sethe firmly believes that “what she had done was right because it came from true love” (296), and she dwells at length on this belief, trying to convince the re-manifested Beloved that this is so. If my analysis were to end here, then Beloved would indeed represent the ultimate in vigilante fiction. Sethe makes a conscious choice to kill her children to prevent them from becoming slaves. Yet, Sethe’s violent act is not understood by the slave owner and his posse of slave catchers for what it is intended. As noted by French, “an important

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point . . . that is evident in the literary roots of vengeance, is that the avenger must somehow communicate to the target the reasons for the infliction of the punishment” (69). Does Sethe act to “punish” her target, the Schoolteacher? Is her act one of revenge for the pain he has inflicted upon her? If we are to believe this, then we believe that Sethe acts to injure Schoolteacher by depriving him of something he desires— a source of income. My point is that although preventing Schoolteacher from making money from the labor or sale of herself or her children is certainly a consequence of Sethe’s action, it is not the desired goal. Sethe’s goal is relatively straightforward: she plans to “take all of us to the other side where my own Ma’am is” (Morrison 240), rather than allow “Schoolteacher to haul us away” (239). Sethe’s action is not an act of revenge (done in response to “an injury or a harm or a slight” [qtd. in French 67]) or an act of retribution “to redress a wrong” (qtd. in French 67), although it is an act of resistance and an act of protection, and it is illegal. Sethe acts from desperation, to defend her children and prevent them from what she considers an outcome worse than death— slavery. Sethe’s decision is complicated by the fact that the claim she asserts to her own body extends to her children. This is evident in the following quote: When she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat . . . she just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out away, over there, where no one could hurt them. (192)

Sethe believes that the children are an extension of herself and that she, therefore, has the right to decide whether they live or die. Although Sethe is not morally conflicted about her decision to commit murder, Morrison, I believe, sees the murder from a dual perspective and situates it so that readers confront Sethe’s deed from both angles—that of a devoted mother committing an act of mercy and that of a mother who, despite her best intentions, has no right to take her children’s lives. There are many critics in support of this second position. Christopher Peterson, for example, argues that in the novel “killing [is] equated with claiming” (554) and asserts “that the claim of possession is always violent” (554). Ashraf H. A. Rushdy argues similarly that Morrison intends for the reader to see both sides of this

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dilemma—that Sethe kills her children out of love and yet killing them is fundamentally immoral. He writes, “Morrison has on more than one occasion asserted that she writes from a double perspective of accusation and hope, of criticizing the past and caring for the future” (575). Finally, Megan Sweeny comments, “Morrison’s recent novels continually question the kinds of measurements that have regulated norms of justice; indeed, they interrogate how discourses and institutions of justice that privilege the logic of commensurability risk replicating slavery’s logic of commodification” (440–1). Morrison’s “dual vision” is effective. As the novel progresses and the flesh and blood embodiment of Beloved returns to demand restitution from Sethe, the danger of “claiming possession” of other human beings becomes increasingly clear. In Part II, the perils of claiming another as part of oneself are made more explicit. Sethe and her daughters menacingly lay claim, in turn, to each other. “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine,” asserts Sethe, during her stream-of-consciousness narrative (236), and soon repeats, “She come back to me, my daughter, and she is mine” (241). Next, it is Denver who declares, “Beloved is my sister” (243), and then again, “She’s mine” (247). Finally, Beloved lays claim to Sethe when she repeatedly states, “I am Beloved and she is mine” (248), and “I will not lose her again. She is mine” (254). The women declare ownership of each other as if they were laying claim to property or some other object. Because the entire text is a condemnation of the condition of being owned, these declarations of “ownership” must be read as intrusions upon each woman’s personal freedom. This reading is borne out by Beloved’s destructive consumption of Sethe: as the story progresses, Sethe wastes away while Beloved grows fat (285). If ownership of another human being is to be universally condemned, then logically Sethe’s belief that she can decide for her children whether they live or die is also a fallacy. Therefore, the murder of her daughter many years earlier is not portrayed as an act of vigilantism meant to rectify injustice but instead is intended to protect her daughter from the horrors that she has witnessed and endured as a consequence of slavery.1 This reasoning is supported further at the conclusion of the text, when Sethe has an opportunity to “relive” the past. While standing beside Beloved on the front porch of her home, Sethe mistakes Denver’s new white employer for the slave owner of 20 years ago, returning to capture her children. She grabs an icepick and, instead

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of attacking Beloved (as she had done in the past), flies toward the white man, once again determined to protect her children. The crucial difference in the scene is that Sethe turns her fear and anger on the perceived threat, the man whom she believes wants to make her children slaves, rather than upon her child, who stands vulnerable beside her. If she had originally attacked the slave owner for trying to enslave her children, her attack would have indeed been considered an act of vigilantism or even an act of self-defense by today’s standards.2 Sethe, in this final scene, amends her original response, and in doing so, her guilty memories are expunged. Beloved is driven from the home once and for all. It is important to understand both the standard textual reading of Morrison’s work and the opposing one, because one falls into the realm of vigilante literature and the other just slightly misses the mark. A female vigilante acts to rectify injustice, which would mean that if Sethe killed her daughter to punish Schoolteacher, or if she killed Schoolteacher himself, then the act would qualify as female vigilantism. On the contrary, because Sethe acts not out of vengeance or the desire to punish, but instead out of desperation, then her act must be understood as her final frantic attempt to prevent her child from experiencing a fate worse than death. This motive is certainly noble, but not female vigilantism as defined herein. Pinpointing this distinction is important in the larger context of this study because it demonstrates why acts such as suicide,3 infanticide, and euthanasia do not fall under the realm of vigilantism. None of these acts are intended to “punish” another but instead tend to be understood as a last resort in the struggle to relieve personal suffering. As noted in the first chapter, this distinction is important because for acts of vengeance to have a larger political impact, to be more than simply personal restitution, the avenger must “intend or expect some further or future consequence from performing the act” (French 84). In other words, the act must send a larger message that the behavior engaged in by the person being “punished” is unacceptable in the eyes of the general populace.

B M’ W IFE (): R T M/A P In Wife (1975), Bharati Mukherjee focuses on cultural stigmas that challenge her protagonist, Dimple Dasgupta, a young woman from

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Calcutta who immigrates to the United States after she is wed to a 29-year-old Indian engineer. In the tradition of other novels that deal with female adultery, the story demonstrates the subordination that Dimple experiences, both in India and beyond, as a result of cultural constructs that disempower and control women. Wife condemns traditions that restrict women’s freedom and which place women in positions designed to serve and empower men. In addition, the text is a condemnation of modern cultural constructs that promise meaning and fulfillment, while actually damaging women by convincing them to objectify themselves, act in certain ways, and relinquish their power. As I will show, Dimple’s tale is the story of countless women who lose the battle with a transparent, unnamable assailant: the cultural constructs that limit and depersonalize their lives. Yet, this story is exceptional for the way that it incorporates female vigilantism, extending possibilities for all women who find themselves trapped by circumstance. Wife depicts the devastation that can result from women’s selfsacrifice, when the sacrifice is taken to a point of self-abnegation. As Martindale and others have noted, self-sacrifice for women (in the name of social convention) can be morally repulsive, driving them to a state of confusion and self-hatred. Mukherjee depicts exactly such victimization in Wife via the character of Dimple Dasgupta. Unlike Mukherjee’s Jasmine, her most famous protagonist, from the text of the same name (1989), Dimple is unexceptional (which may explain why Mukherjee uses the possessive and universal word “wife” as the book’s title). Dimple is not particularly intelligent, nor the best judge of character, nor is she especially adept at dealing with new circumstances. In this sense, and at first glance, Dimple is a perfect image of a dependent docile “wife” in need of an assigned husband to care for her. But even the simple Dimple comes to sense the problem of being identified as derivative of the male “ideal” rather than as an independent entity. The text ultimately suggests that women must question both traditional practices (which can be used as scripted, reliable, and unchanging crutches) and modern pop culture (which can serve as a dangerous model of excess and so must be consumed critically and responsibly) if we are to prevent tragedy. This is an important point, for Mukherjee refuses to venerate one culture more than she does another, as might be assumed if the text were to suggest that either India or the United States were “healthier” in regard to Dimple’s adjustment. Instead she

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makes it clear that both cultures situate women within a hierarchical structure that places them at a disadvantage, although the way this is done varies according to custom and tradition. Mukherjee’s Wife, as part of a long tradition of novels including Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, exposes the right to an autonomous identity as unobtainable for women and forces readers to confront the challenges faced by characters trying to achieve it. In “Kate Chopin’s The Awakening as Part of the NineteenthCentury American Literary Tradition,” Maria Mikolchak draws parallels between Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1876), Theodore Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Mikolchak demonstrates how the theme of female adultery links the four works: adultery inevitably leads to “guilt and atonement by death” on the part of the female heroines (30). She additionally notes other similarities that link the novels: such as the fact that the marital relationships of all of the heroines prove to be unsatisfying and sexually frustrating; that all of the heroines are somewhat inarticulate (that is, they are unable to put into words what it is they feel they lack) 4; and finally, that the heroines seek self-fulfillment by going outside of the marriage. To this list of four novels I would add Mukherjee’s Wife, which, I will show, extends the trope of the female adultery novel by not only positioning the heroine as part of the novel of female sexual transgression but also simultaneously placing her in the emerging genre of women who literally refuse to lay down and die to atone for their behavior. Although Mukherjee’s Dimple Dasgupta is firmly configured as part of the formulaic wifely adultery plot frequently found in nineteenthand early twentieth-century fiction, the author modifies the outcome drastically by having her heroine commit murder instead of turning to self-harm. By creating a character who rejects the mental and physical self-annihilation that is typically found at the conclusion of stories with wifely adultery plots, Mukherjee rewrites and extends such plots to position women instead as part of the emerging genre of female vigilantism in American fiction. The main challenges facing heroines of the nineteenth-century literary genre of female adultery (as identified by Mikolchak) are to discover an autonomous identity, articulate their desires, and assert their sexual rights, “reclaiming their bodies and through their bodies the right to freedom” (Mikolchak 36). Dimple undergoes a similar struggle for self-definition. At first, she depends on images from

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popular culture to characterize her identity, even before she moves abroad. R. S. Krishnan finds, for example, that Dimple’s “notions of marriage are rather vague, derived as they are from the exaggerated art of Indian films, movie magazines, and the advice columns in ‘ladies’ periodicals’ ” (Mukherjee 3). Influenced largely by such images, Dimple dreams of “young men with mustaches . . . freedom, cocktail parties on carpeted lawns, fund-raising dinners for noble charities” (3). She searches magazine advertisements for products she believes will help her find a husband. She purchases skin whiteners and exercise equipment designed to enhance her appearance and believes, without irony, that “the girls in the ads were her friends” (4). In one specific advertisement, the differences are stressed between an “Old-Fashioned Girl with Long Hair” and a “Cute Modern Girl with Short Hair.” During this exchange the “modern girl” reveals that her large breasts are not real but are enhanced by “the Concrete Bra” (5). The old-fashioned girl looks upon the modern girl’s large breasts with envy, as does Dimple. Dimple wishes to purchase the bra, but her mother denies her request, relying instead on traditional herbs, massages, and homeopathic remedies to alter Dimple’s “imperfections” (her small breasts). Here the difference between modern commodities and traditional home remedies is apparent, but what emerges from this comparison is more important—that is, the way both traditional and modern remedies function to objectify women, to force them to believe in male-constructed notions of what is beautiful and sexually appealing. Both Dimple and her mother (old and young, traditional and more modern) have absorbed the message that big breasts will attract a husband, and that something is “wrong” with Dimple because she lacks them. Roland Marchand argues that in advertisements, “distortions of women’s shapes and gestures often convey messages of social subordination . . . a willingness to make oneself into an interesting ‘object’ ” (378). Certainly Dimple wishes to attain a standard of beauty that objectifies her body and she thinks rather less of developing her mind or strength of character. Such conditioning sets the stage for Dimple’s future violence, because she is unable to adequately process and filter the cultural messages she receives. At stake here is the difference between self-consciousness derived from one’s own corporal essence and one that is “applied,” and thus alien to one’s self. This is one reason that Dimple absorbs the media’s messages— one must look a certain way to attract the “right” sort of husband— yet her undeveloped cognitive, emotional, and social

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skills allow her neither to manage the information nor to put it in proper context (as advertisements attempting to sell products). The contradictory images that Dimple receives confuse her. For example, she wants a love match, a prince charming, yet she is instead told to marry a man selected by her parents. She wrongly believes that advertisements depict reality and that the products represent an avenue to a new life. Mukherjee astutely demonstrates how both Dimple’s traditional role (dutiful daughter) and the role she hopes to realize (dutiful wife) are similar in their superficiality. Cixous, among others, has linked violence toward women with political colonization, writing, “women haven’t had eyes for themselves . . . Their bodies, which they haven’t dared enjoy, have been colonized” (Newly Born, 68). Like many other critics, she asserts that male privilege has kept women in a state of subservience and passivity (64). Women who fail to pursue standards of beauty and behavior established by men are castigated, shunned, deemed immoral, dangerous, and even crazy. Nevertheless, a difference always exists between the established norm and the reality, a difference that leaves men slightly anxious, slightly off-kilter, about the woman who menaces them. On the day of Dimple’s wedding, two “minor mishaps” occur that foreshadow the state of the union to come— first, the fish that is to be served at the wedding is rotten and must be thrown away and, second, Dimple badly slices her thumb while opening a bottle of hair oil. Both images depict the destruction of flesh and thus portend the bodily damage that the union will inflict upon Dimple, and her husband, Amit. Dimple’s bleeding flesh (and the corresponding image of the rotting fish) signifies the sacrifice Dimple will make of herself; her virginal blood will be shed as she represses her autonomous self and submissively enters the contract of marriage. This bodily “colonization” is not dissimilar to territorial colonization— in both instances a region is taken over and dominated by a more powerful force that extends dazzling promises of new and improved circumstances, provided for the colonized peoples’ “best interest.” Perhaps the difference is that Dimple has bought into the propaganda and is convinced that marriage will lead her to happiness and fulfillment. During Dimple’s first evening at her husband’s home she “trie[s] to giggle like a newlywed” (Mukherjee 17) in imitation of new brides she has seen in popular culture. Clearly she is acting a part,

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portraying an image of femininity that is conventional, but one that is ultimately inauthentic. As noted by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, at a young age “girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects” (qtd. in Pipher). Dimple repeatedly behaves in ways she thinks are appropriate for a newlywed woman, behaviors that prevent her from asking what it is that she herself desires, behaviors that thus impinge upon her authentic self. Such behavior reinforces her inferior position to her husband, for whom she is playing a role. Role playing, however, does not at first come easily for Dimple, and early in the marriage she rebels. When Dimple finds herself pregnant, she jumps rope until “her legs [grow] numb and her stomach burn[s]” (Mukherjee 42) to force an abortion. Motherhood is clearly not part of the popular image of women to which she aspires. Although Dimple’s motives for abortion might seem misguided, and her impressions of the self-reliant and glamorous women in the media are fantasy, she is at least (in this instance) able to fight for what she believes. Only after she and Amit migrate to the United States does Dimple begin to focus more on how to please others and “fit in,” rather than on what she personally wants to achieve, thus completely forgoing her personhood. Dimple finds herself isolated in her life in the United States and stifled in her marriage, circumstances that are compounded by her struggle to become a “modern” American. She watches hours of television to learn American customs and to assuage her boredom. As a result, the pop-culture images that in India were a mere part of her larger existence become a full-fledged guide that Dimple uses to determine how to behave. The omniscient narrator observes, The women on television led complicated lives, became pregnant frequently and under suspicious circumstances . . . murdered or were murdered, were brought to trial and released . . . everything she saw on TV was about love; even murder and death were love gone awry. But all she read in the newspapers was about death, the scary, ugly kind of death, random and poorly timed. Dimple much preferred to watch TV than read. (73)

Much like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary is caught up in the false romanticism of storybooks, Dimple is carried away by the false, glamorous

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images of love and marriage portrayed on soap operas and sitcoms. These fantasies intrude into Dimple’s life so that she is terrified of being herself, of making mistakes, of having a life that is not perfect. Obviously, Dimple’s marriage fails to meet her unrealistic expectations, as does Amit, who struggles to find a job. She believes that love should be easy, that the honeymoon should last into daily life. Amit worsens the situation by destroying Dimple’s sense of normalcy even further. He compares her to the well-adjusted Indian housewives in their new community of acquaintances and defines her daily life by refusing to allow her to accept a job outside the home. Dimple scorns the Indian community for their lack of glamor and looks instead to the American women on television as role models. Yet her efforts to mimic the constructed role of “happy housewife” inevitably leave her miserable. Like Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, Dimple cannot ignore the disparity between the role that she is playing and the reality of her emotions. She acts the part of a good and obedient wife but is confounded by the divergence between what she perceives and what she portrays: “She was bitter that her marriage had betrayed her, had not provided all the glittery things she had imagined, had not brought her cocktails under canopied skies and three A.M. drives to dingy restaurants where they sold divine kababs rolled in roti” (102). Dimple’s sense of autonomy is slowly undermined, and she begins to resent herself—much the way she detests the gaudy plastic flowers in the Sens’ home. She notes, Life had held out such promises but was so slow to deliver! . . . When she helped Mina dust and sweep, when she lifted the plastic f lowers out of place and dragged the rag over the cabinet and or television, she felt like a hypocrite . . . Once while pretending to dust each petal of the plastic f lowers, she managed to twist and break off three petals. (105)

The plastic flowers are an apt symbol for Dimple’s existence. She is being plastic, insincere, in her encounters with everyone, her husband included. Just as she resents the perfect plastic flowers and finds them abhorrent, so does she begin to detest herself, as demonstrated in the following quote: “It was a relief that no one knew how much she hated plastic flowers. When she was about to throw out the torn petals, she felt guilty, as if she had intended to throw out parts of her own body” (105). Dimple’s sense of well-being is destroyed like the

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petals of the plastic flower. Moreover, the Sens’ “normal” relationship just makes her more depressed, because it forces her to realize that her own feelings of alienation are atypical. She confesses to feeling “like a hypocrite” (105). Such emotions again call to mind Edna Pontellier from The Awakening, who, after spending time with the Ratignoles, feels “depressed rather than soothed” and sees in their life “an appalling and hopeless ennui” (Chopin 107). Like Edna, Dimple is not a “mother-woman.” Dimple’s unhappiness grows worse because she is unable to explain why she is dissatisfied, beset with inertia and “endless indecisiveness.” Her inability to find words to express her angst links this novel to its predecessors, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1876), Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895), and Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), all of which feature inarticulate heroines who cannot explain their despondency (Mikolchak 30). Thus, what Cynthia Wolff writes about The Awakening can also be applied to Wife, as well as to the other novels focusing on women’s adultery: This is a tale about not speaking, about disjunction— about denial, oversights, prohibitions, exclusions, and absences. Not merely about things that are never named, but most significantly about stories that cannot be told and things that can neither be thought nor spoken because they do not have a name. (Wolff 1)

Wolff stresses that women’s feelings are, at times, unnamable, because they are not represented in our patriarchal system of language. Slowly, however, by observing her friend Ina Mullick, a “liberated” Indian housewife who has assimilated into American culture, Dimple starts to sense that the alternative “script” offered by the West is no more valid a model for attaining happiness than the model she has carried with her from India. After spending time with Ina and her Western friends, Dimple thinks to herself, “Happy people gravitate; she was not a happy person. But she could imitate them . . . no one would know” (189). Jody Mason correctly observes that “Ina’s engagement with Western feminisms is a form of resistance to the confines of traditional Bengali wifehood” and concludes that such liberations “fail to provide Ina with a satisfying sense of self” (2). Mason believes that this failure is because of the “misfit between Western and Third World feminisms.” She argues that “Ina and Dimple cannot find expression through a feminism that forces them to abandon

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their Indianness” (2). Although I agree that Ina serves as a foil for Dimple to demonstrate that assimilation alone will not result in selffulfillment, I do not think that either women’s missing sense of self has to do with “mismatched feminisms.” Instead, both women relinquish control of their lives to others, give up accountability for their actions, and depend on false images for information and affirmation. As the novels by Flaubert and Chopin confirm, Dimple’s insecurity, like that of the heroines before her, is the result of living a life of imitation, and thus an imitation life. Her attempts to “correctly” fulfill the role of dutiful wife eventually lead her to abandon her authentic self. Her insecure sense of self leaves her pliant and prone to being easily controlled by others, rendering her dependent on her husband and afraid of being victimized, all of which further ties Dimple to the heroines of Flaubert and Chopin. Dimple eventually begins to understand that it is her need to meet others’ expectations that prevents her from figuring out who she is and what she really wants from life. She does not state this dawning recognition outright but instead expresses the sentiment in many of her passing thoughts. She comes to the bitter realization that “Amit would always be there beside her in his shiny, ill-fitting suits, acting as her conscience and common sense. It was sad, she thought, how marriage cut off glittering alternatives” (Mukherjee 126). Her sentiment is similar to one expressed by Edna Pontellier, who thinks, “As the devoted wife of a man who worshipped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams” (Chopin 63). Both women, then, acknowledge that the possibilities for their own lives have been limited by the institution of marriage, while simultaneously linking their dreams of independence to the delusion of romance and glitter. As the cracks and fissures in the lives of those around her begin to show more fully, Dimple intuits that many of the rules she follows are dictated by men, by Amit in particular, who, despite the fact that he seems quite harmless, represents control and limits Dimple’s full actualization. Mikolchak observes that Flaubert, Tolstoy, Fontane, and Chopin “create the image of a husband who, far from being a villain, is a very decent person, nondemanding, permissive, and very amiable to his wife” (31). Amit, too, fits this description. Yet although Amit does nothing extremely out of the ordinary to harm or humiliate Dimple, she nonetheless feels the heavy hand of oppression in the

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minor details of her life. She cannot even go out to eat in the company of another man for fear of Amit’s censure (194). Although she has followed “the rules” and has done as she was told all her life, she has not been rewarded with the happy carefree life she envisioned. In response, she feels angry, betrayed, and taken for granted and begins overreacting to the smallest directives from Amit. For example, after he offhandedly comments that she should avoid wearing synthetic fibers while cooking for fear of fire, Dimple is “filled with hate and malice, [and] an insane desire to hurt.” She later says viciously to Amit’s sleeping form, “I’ll wear synthetic saris if I want to! I’ll wear any goddamn thing I want to, so there!”(117). Dimple’s overreaction is a result of the long-term deprivation of speaking her mind. The exaggerated response emphasizes how Amit stands for everything against which Dimple feels she must rebel. As Mikolchak notes, the point to take away from these novels is that “mediocrity . . . accompanied by lack of satisfying sexual relations are detrimental to any marriage” (32). At this stage in the novel, Dimple begins to rebel in earnest. She rises from bed later and later in the day, refuses to do housework, and barely speaks to Amit. She shirks her duties as a traditional housewife in an attempt to reclaim her independent self and to assert control over her own body, but Amit seems to barely notice and Dimple remains desperately unhappy. Dimple begins to lose weight, refusing to eat, and when she does eat, she often vomits. Dimple damages her body physically to reflect her emotional unrest. As noted in the previous chapter, grotesque imagery (such as vomiting) permits the reader to perceive and empathize with problematic circumstances in which fictional characters find themselves, via the reactions of the body. In other words, grotesque imagery shocks the reader into recognition and realization. Thus the grotesque “becomes a somatic tool or wedge that points to the dangers of everyday domesticity” (Yaeger 225). Dimple vomits, fixates on the oddities around her, and becomes obsessed with thoughts of dying— changes that shock the reader into seeing just how deeply Dimple is disturbed. Unfortunately, what is clear to the reader is not taken seriously by those closest to Dimple. She frantically seeks a way to reclaim her body by refusing to eat or by vomiting. Yet these nonverbal cues are not recognized by her husband; thus, Dimple is spurred on to even more extreme behavior in her efforts to assert herself and bring about a change of circumstances.

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Dimple’s rebellion escalates until she breeches the ultimate imperative of married life—faithfulness. Like famous heroines before her, she strays from her marriage to have sex with another man. Dimple begins an affair with Milt Glasser, a white American man who makes the “inhuman maze of New York [seem] as safe and simple as Ballygunje” (196). Milt Glasser is quite different from Amit— he is muscular while Amit is not, he is hairy, while Amit takes pains to be clean shaven (197). But predictably, just as Edna discovers in The Awakening, although sex with another man is a huge indiscretion and an extreme attempt to control her own body and to shatter the dictates of her life, the act makes no difference to her happiness. In fact, after intercourse with Milt she is even more confused. As MacKinnon puts it, So many distinctive features of women’s status as second class—the restriction and constraint and contortion, the servility and the display, the self-mutilation, and the requisite presentation of the self as a beautiful thing, the enforced passivity, the humiliation— are made into the context of sex for women. Being a thing for sex is fundamental to it. This approach identifies not just a sexuality that is shaped under conditions of gender inequality but reveals this sexuality itself to the dynamic of the inequality of the sexes. (130)

If sexuality itself is the cause of inequality, then Dimple’s affair does not allow her to rupture the constraining system of “right” and “wrong,” via the affair, but rather keeps her entrenched within the patriarchal structure, simply replacing one man, whom she lives to serve, with another. Dimple thinks, “She was so much worse off than ever, more lonely, more cut off from Amit, from the Indians, left only with borrowed disguises. She felt like a shadow with no feelings” (200). Dimple remains caught in a web of rules, relying on a man to complete her and to make her world “safe.” Dimple’s feminist awakening comes not as a result of her sexual indiscretion, but rather with her dawning awareness that the position of “wife” that she enacts (whether in India or the United States) is humiliating and unjust. In the novel’s final chapter, just minutes before Dimple stabs her husband to death with a kitchen knife, she fully recognizes her entrapment, visualizing herself as a strange creature caught within a birdcage, desperate to “get out of there . . . to save herself” (210). The metaphor of the caged bird occurs in many texts by women,5 symbolizing life devoid of freedom. The metaphor

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is appropriate for women who may preen and chirp as decorative objects to be gazed upon but are ultimately trapped in social roles that prevent them from free expression. Society may be suspicious of women who refuse to submit to the patriarchal standard but, as Ann Jones adroitly comments, in most cases, “free people are not dangerous” (Jones 14). As Dimple begins to experience her own “awakening” she thinks, “Individual initiative, that’s what it came down to . . . her life had been devoted only to pleasing others, not herself” (211). Here then is the crux of Dimple’s unhappiness; she has allowed herself to be bullied and constrained, seeking to play a role for which she is not suited, for which no woman is suited. Dimple recognizes that personal freedom necessitates initiative, a willingness to publicly defy authority and risk castigation, something that Dimple has learned to fear and dread (and something that is not always easy to achieve). But thoughts of spending a lifetime with Amit, “watching him spill sugar on counters,” prove to be more frightening for Dimple than the act of taking initiative, and her resolve to implement change grows. She thinks of “how hard it was for her to keep quiet and smile though she was falling apart like a very old toy that had been played with, sometimes quite roughly, by children who claimed to love her” (212). The rough children are equivalent to the men in Dimple’s life who claim to know what is best for her, who play with her roughly as they would with a doll, and claim to do so out of love. Dimple’s “fall,” that is, the brutal murder of her husband, is a radical action, an act that, although clearly horrendous and illegal, is the only life-changing, system-shattering deed that Dimple has ever achieved. Every other rebellion she has attempted—from a selfinduced abortion, to secret vomiting and a refusal to eat, to dressing in the risqué clothing of Western women, even to sex with a man other than her husband—has changed nothing fundamental about Dimple’s state of being. Moreover, all of her prior acts have been attempts to control her own body, while the murder has placed the fate of another in her hands. We thus face a critical question: If murdering Amit is the only way that Dimple can find to change her circumstances and attain a life where she will no longer have to contend with Amit’s domination, is the murder criminal? That is, if this is the only way she is able to cast off the shroud of self-sacrifice, a shroud that consists of distorted ideals that do not permit Dimple to attain

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moral agency, is the sacrifice wrong? This question, of course, is left unanswered. Wife is the story of a woman who is unable to successfully negotiate the social elements of her life. Her eventual attempt to overthrow what contains and keeps her “always outside” the comfort of selfacceptance leads her to commit murder, a somewhat misplaced rebellion that nonetheless effects real change within her life. Consider the alternative taken by the heroines of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Fontane, and Chopin. All of the adulterous heroines of these stories commit suicide6 — the literal act of self-sacrifice taken to its most extreme. Thus the transgressive act of adultery is undermined, whether the heroine kills herself from contrition or in an attempt to remain free of social restrictions. In either case, “the repressive forces acting on the adulterous heroines through both societal norms and their own embeddedness in patriarchal culture” are revealed (30). Such is not the case with Mukherjee’s Dimple. Dimple changes the paradigm with her flat refusal to die, with her insistence on exacting vengeance on a system that tries to constrain her— a system that Amit represents. Wife thus depicts an alternative to suicide that can occur when the oppressed female rebels against patriarchal control. Amit’s murder, with the irreversible changes that it causes, is the single act that refuses imitation, for no person can die twice. Thus, by committing murder, Dimple disrupts the authority of male privilege. Amit’s death shatters the system that has failed Dimple time and again. As Cixous forecasts, the exchange (between woman and society) becomes different, no longer do the players end up “right back in a dialectical destiny” (78). Although the outcome of Dimple’s actions is ambiguous, the fact remains that Dimple’s life has been unequivocally and forever changed.

S G’ “A J O H P” ()  What distinguishes the protagonist of Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) from Dimple Dasgupta Basu in Wife is most obviously the character’s cultural background. Minnie Foster Wright is the wife of a farmer who lives deep in the country, while Dimple immigrates to New York City from India. Despite major ethnic, religious, and class differences, both Minnie Foster Wright and Dimple Dasgupta resist self-sacrifice by taking steps to liberate themselves from oppression,

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actions that ultimately establish them as moral agents capable of individualized decision making. Initially a one-act play titled Trifles, “A Jury of Her Peers” tells the story of Minnie Foster Wright, a woman who knots a rope around her husband’s neck and strangles him to death while he sleeps. The troubling scenario is based on the real-life murder trial of Margaret Hossack (1901), a case that Glaspell covered while working as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily. Midnight Assassin (2005), by Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf, supplies background information concerning the real-life murder of John Hossack and the subsequent trial of his wife, Margaret, in 1905. Contrary to the adaptation penned by Glaspell, Midnight Assassin provides interviews, newspaper stories, and court transcripts, all of which suggest that Margaret Hossack may not have been to blame for the murder of John Hossack. As stated by Marcia Noe, the “book is valuable for the social context it establishes, a social context that illumines why Margaret Hossack was so easily convicted in a case based on compromised, questionable, incomplete, and circumstantial evidence” (156). The legal and judicial practices of the early twentieth century, along with attitudes toward gender common at the time, are brought to light in this historical overview. In “A Jury of Her Peers,” Glaspell presents a female character who, demoralized as she is, refuses to be fully contained or immobilized. In response to her husband’s attempts to keep her under his control, in his possession, isolated and confined in his house, Minnie responds, at least seemingly, with action, with the pushing aside of social norms, in the act of committing murder, all the while engaging the sympathy of the reader. Glaspell’s motives for writing such a work point to her refusal to accept gender as defined by masculine discourses and suggest that there are aspects of the female psyche that refuse to be suppressed. The story begins after Mr. Wright’s dead body is discovered by a neighbor, Mr. Hale, who, along with his wife (Martha), accompanies the sheriff and his wife (Mr. and Mrs. Peters) back to the scene of the crime. The men are determined to collect evidence that will decide the guilt or innocence of Minnie Foster Wright. The women are assigned the task of collecting Mrs. Wright’s personal belongings and bringing them to the county jail. The Wrights’ home is located in a remote area that is described by Mrs. Hale as “lonesome-looking” (Glaspell 77). It is immediately apparent both to readers and to Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters that

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Minnie has been isolated from other members of the community. Her isolation is only partly due to the location of the home; the gloomy feeling about the house too has kept visitors away (77, 88). Catherine MacKinnon writes, “Sanctified by the absolution of law, the private [home] is the everyday domain of women in captivity, abandoned to their isolation and told it is what freedom really means” (39). The link between Minnie’s body and the isolated house has been pointed out by critics such as Linda Ben-Zvi, who writes, “the mise-en-scene suggests the harshness of Minnie’s life . . . dark, foreboding, a kind of rural Gothic scene” (40). She continues, “The interior of the kitchen replicates this barrenness . . . Things are broken, cold, imprisoning; they are also violent” (41). Thus we can again see how the author establishes a metaphoric link between the home and the female body that forecasts the emptiness of Minnie’s life. The violence of the relationship is first apparent in the broken jars of preserves that have shattered from the cold, much like Minnie’s life has “shattered” as a result of a lack of metaphoric warmth, either from her husband or from outside human contact. This evidence of violence also establishes Minnie as a very different heroine from Dimple Dasgupta, who was not subject to physical violence. Although both of the heroines occupy isolated households, they are isolated for different reasons and in different ways. As noted in the literature, violent households tend to be cut off from human contact both geographically and via restriction of social engagements. Sheryl J. Grana explains, Batterers maintain their power and control by defining whom family members can and cannot see, talk to, spend time with, work with, and so forth. This isolation also depends on the silence of family members— batterers thus tell their victims/survivors not to talk about what goes on behind closed doors. (138)

John Wright establishes Minnie’s isolation by refusing to chip in to purchase a community telephone. He thus controls who Minnie speaks with, ensuring her isolation as well as determining her literal lack of a voice. John Wright exemplifies how abusive men attempt to define/confine their wives using the metaphor of a closed container— that is, as something they can possess and control. Women were— and, in some cases, continue to be—immured in a constructed ideological system of gender that dictates their place in the world. Althusser, in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State

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Apparatuses,” defines ideology as “a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (241). In other words, organizational systems such as religion, laws, and politics do not represent the real conditions of our existence but rather are constructed social systems aimed at linking individuals to society, specifically to their class positions. He stresses that no governing system of organization is innate, including gendered categorization and heirarchization. This argument supports the notion that women are oppressed by a patriarchal system that establishes customs and models for women that they dare not thwart, for fear of castigation, abuse, and punishment. A home and family were all that women were expected to aspire to in rural turn-of-the-century United States. When home life did not prove to be enough for some women, conflict was the inevitable result. Minnie’s apparent decision to kill Mr. Wright occurs when she finally has nothing left to lose. As Ann Jones notes in “Women Who Kill,” and as Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters seem to conclude in Glaspell’s story, “Murder is often situational. Given the same set of circumstances, any one of us might kill” (14). The empathy that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters feel for Minnie is apparent from the minute they arrive in her home. They find humanity in the minor details of Minnie’s life. For example, they notice her shabby clothes and furniture and note that “the old Minnie,” that is, Minnie before her marriage, would have taken pride in her appearance and in the appearance of her household (here again the two are linked). The men, who are more concerned with adhering to the correct legal procedure, notice none of these “trifles.” Further, the men clearly believe their own concerns to be superior to those of the women. As the women commiserate about broken preserve jars, Mr. Peter comments, “Well you can’t beat a women! Held for murder, and worrying about her preserves!” (Glaspell 81). A short time later, when the men find the women discussing the stitching on Minnie’s quilt, they condescendingly “laugh [at] the ways of women” (86). Two things are revealed in these comments: first, they demonstrate how much women value a sense of connectedness to others and the concrete concerns of daily life that make such connections possible. Second, they show how the concerns of men are clearly considered more important than those of women. This perhaps is the main point Glaspell is making—that generalized law without an assessment of the details surrounding each circumstance can never be adequate. As Bendel-Simso argues, “While law may be

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based on an assessment of the facts, empathy is a necessary component of the pursuit of Justice” (291). In other words, the objectivity of the law must be balanced with the particulars of a case to reach a fair verdict. The details noticed by Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters would likely persuade a modern jury that Minnie was maltreated by her husband and thus acted out of anguish rather than spite. Bendel-Simso accurately notes, “Without empathy, one has only vengeful law” (292). Indeed, the empathy that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters feel for Minnie allows them to acquit her, without personal guilt, of the act of murder. They recognize “that the crime Minnie Wright is accused of is not the only crime involved” (297). As the title of this story makes clear, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters’ understanding of Minnie and her situation is a direct result of the fact that they are women. Yet, as Susan Sage Heinzelman attests, Even as late as 1961, in Hoyt v. Florida, the Supreme Court concurred with a lower court ruling that an all-male jury did not violate a female defendant’s 14th Amendment right to a jury of her peers. It was not until 1968 that Congress passed a law ensuring that women would serve on juries in all states. (127)

This quote serves as a reminder of the biases of a legal system that did not allow women to participate. The most powerful evidence for exonerating Minnie is the small carcass of a canary with a broken neck that Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters find hidden carefully in Minnie’s sewing box. The dead bird is an apt symbol for Minnie, a metaphor that is made unmistakable when Mrs. Hale thinks, “She was like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery” (Glaspell 89). The comparison extends further when we consider the implications of the caged bird, a bird that, like Minnie, is taken from its independent existence, confined and isolated in a small barren home, and ultimately destroyed by Mr. Wright (thereby silenced permanently). As Bendel- Simso attests, “Just as the bird is dead, so— symbolically— is Mrs. Wright” (292). Canaries were historically used in coal mines as a warning system for miners, alerting them to the presence of dangerous gases. The fact that the dead bird is a canary is important, because it serves as a warning for Minnie about what might happen to her in the “poison” environment of her home. Moreover, the canary with the broken

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neck affirms the violent tendencies of Mr. Wright. This “evidence” of Mr. Wright’s nature allows the reader to understand what kept Minnie subdued year after year within her marriage— the “fear and terror . . . of what might happen if [she] doesn’t follow the rules, if she talks to people she isn’t supposed to, if she makes the bed a different way, if she tells someone what is going on” (Grana 138). The silenced bird correlates with Minnie’s own silenced voice. Minnie used to sing, Mrs. Hale says aloud, and Mr. Wright “killed that too” (Glaspell 90). The word “too” is telling, for it reveals Mrs. Hale’s belief that the bird was killed by Mr. Wright, providing a motive for Minnie’s revenge. Despite this confirmation of their worst fears, the women do not put their misgivings into words. Instead, Mrs. Peters comments, “It’s a good thing the men couldn’t hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a— dead canary . . . As if that could have anything to do with— My, wouldn’t they laugh?” (Glaspell 92). Mrs. Peters thus takes advantage of the men’s condescending attitude toward the “trifles” of women’s lives to outwardly justify her decision to conceal her suspicions from the men, allowing room for Minnie’s exoneration. The nonverbal communication taking place between the women is indicative of a realm of language not readily evident to men, and that furthers women’s attempts to liberate themselves from a language system that excludes or diminishes them. The form of communication that they use is a form of discourse that has been “forged out of a position of disadvantage” (MacDonald 68). Such nonverbal communication has been discussed by Cixous, who posits that women must identify their feminine voice to reach full agency in a world where men are otherwise privileged. Although Cixous is not specific about what that voice may consist of, she does note that such a language involves letting go, exposing oneself, expressing meaning with the body (92), much as Minnie chooses to do, and Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters also do in their recognition of Minnie’s innocence. Moreover, Cixous argues, the feminine voice emanates “from a time before law” (93), so that the onus of privilege of the patriarchal justice system would be removed. “A Jury of Her Peers,” with its focus on the way women communicate, demonstrates how women have found alternative means of expression based on the shared aspects of their lives— modes of communication that are often underestimated and overlooked within the larger culture. In particular, the story points out how such expression

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is not given expediency in the justice system of the early twentieth century, a fact that has dire implications for women seeking impartiality and protection from the law. In the final story examined within this chapter, we will further explore the consequences of social inequity and how this motivates women to take the law into their own hands.

A W’ “H D I G A W K O O T B L I T S I W E” () Alice Walker’s “How Did I Get Away with Killing . . .” was published the same year that Alice Walker spoke the following words at a San Francisco antinuclear rally: I have considered the enormity of the white man’s crimes against humanity. Against women. Against every living person of color. Against the poor. Against my mother and father. Against me . . . When I consider that at this very moment he wishes to take away what little freedom I have died to achieve, through denial of my right to vote . . . Has already taken away education, medicine, housing, and food . . . When I consider that he is, they are, a real and present threat to my life and the life of my daughter, my people, I think “Let the earth marinate in poisons. Let the bombs cover the ground like rain. For nothing short of total destruction will ever teach them anything.” (“Only Justice” 264)

Walker’s desire to see the disadvantaged avenged for their suffering is evident in this passage. The short story “How Did I Get Away with Killing . . .” forecasts Walker’s rage and her heartfelt desire to seek restitution for those who have faced ongoing inequity and discrimination. My reading of this short story focuses on the relationship between the disempowered black, female, underage protagonist and the white, married, educated lawyer who rapes her and then bribes her to continue a sexual relationship with him. The man, a lawyer, is clearly representative of the legal system, a system that perpetuates the patriarchal power structure. As in Wife and “A Jury of Her Peers,” only the violent culminative act of murder reveals that the organizational systems of

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race and gender are constructs that do not represent the real conditions of women but rather are intended to link them permanently to a class position that is inferior to that of men and the privileged white race. The narrator of the short piece is nameless—just one in a long line of nameless narrators within the tradition of women’s fiction, from the mad heroine in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” to the nameless ghost-obsessed narrator in Daphne Du Maurier’s psychological thriller Rebecca. The namelessness of female narrators is a literary device often used to demonstrate the universality of the condition of the woman narrating the story; in other words, the experiences recorded by this person could be happening to you, or to the women next door, or to any woman, given the appropriate circumstances. As in the previous works of literature examined in this chapter, the body of the young narrator is literally and physically entrapped, confined, and debased. Yet, the oppression of the young black female narrator is not entirely the fault of the lawyer, despite his undeniable culpability. Her oppression began much earlier, as a result of a system designed to disenfranchise women and minorities and to perpetuate prejudice against them. The narrator’s childhood is all too familiar: she has been raised without a father, and her mother has struggled to make ends meet (“How Did I” 21). She lives in a poor area of town, exceptional only for its dilapidation (22–3). The first paragraph of the story concludes with the image of a beautiful magnolia blossom that withers when the narrator plucks it and takes it into the “blighted” air of her childhood home (22). An overt symbol of withering beauty, the almost instantaneous decay of what was once pure and beautiful is a metaphor for the loss of the narrator’s own innocence and childhood virtue and stands in stark contrast to the plastic flowers referenced in Wife that portend the sanitized life of Dimple Dasgupta. The narrator first meets the lawyer when she is just 14, when her mother, who works as his housekeeper, brings her to his home. “Bubba” lives with his wife and two children in a large house that seems like nothing less than “fairyland” to the young girl, who notes, “everything was spotless and new, even before Mama started cleaning” (23). The following day, Bubba offers her a ride home from school. When she gets into his car he takes her to his office where he rapes her, gives her money, and sends her on her way. The narrator comments that she “wanted to kill him” (23), a phrase that effectively conveys her powerlessness and rage, as well as her desire to regain a modicum of control.

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The lawyer dismisses her objections, claiming “he hadn’t forced [her]” because she “felt something for him” (23), in essence, the lawyer’s argument is based on the mistaken belief that a natural and expected “relationship” is always established between a man and a woman that precludes rape, even when the woman protests. The lawyer’s ability to “reason” the narrator’s protests away after the rape makes the extreme power discrepancy between the narrator and the lawyer evident, as does the way he then dismisses her without another thought. Catherine MacKinnon has written extensively on the inability of the law to protect women from the reality of the sexual power differential that exists between the sexes, a differential that is even more extreme between white men and women of color. She writes, Rape is supposedly illegal. Yet the rape that the law actually recognizes as illegal is a far cry from the sex forced on women in everyday life. The law’s rape is by a stranger, in a strange location, with a weapon, which the woman resisted within an inch of her life. Preferably the woman is white, the rapist is black. Most rapes that actually happen are by someone the woman knows, of the same race, often to a woman of color. Rape happens . . . without weapons other than hands and a penis, and the woman is too surprised or too terrified or too learned in passivity . . . to fight back. Or she does fight back and loses and is not believed, either by the rapist or in court, because sex is what a woman is for. (35)

Many of the conditions that MacKinnon refers to are evident in Walker’s fictional piece— the young and inexperienced narrator accepts a ride from the rich white lawyer who employs her mother. He forces her to have sex with him, an act she neither consents to nor fully understands. What’s worse, the lawyer, by carrying on with the relationship over the next few years, continues to take advantage of her desperate need for money and her inability to discern the full implication of how she is being used and manipulated. After two years, the narrator’s mother discovers the affair and violently beats her daughter “almost to death” for what she considers a vast betrayal of their race and womanhood (24). Although this response is extreme, the act highlights the distinction between the two types of violence being experienced by the narrator. The narrator’s mother responds with an open display of violence, hoping that it will be cathartic for her daughter and will lead her to recognize

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the exploitation inherent in her relationship with the lawyer. She explains that the lawyer’s father “goes on t.v. every night and says folks like us ain’t even human” (24). At the same time, the lawyer engages in a hidden, more pervasive sexual violence toward the narrator, by taking away her ability to control intimate contact and using her body as a source of pleasure without any concern for the consequences for her. Ironically, the mother’s “abuse” of her daughter would be considered illegal in a court of law, while the lawyer’s exploitation of the young girl would most likely be rationalized. As in Hurston’s “Sweat,” Walker constructs a clear distinction in the intensity of vice based on motive, not on law, by distinguishing between those who act from “good” intentions versus those who act from “bad” ones. In like fashion Martindale stresses that nonviolence needs to be redefined so that self-defense, righteous anger, and rage are acceptable reactions for women exposed to abuse or physical injury. Martindale posits, in an interesting reexamination of our current justice system, “The problem for women who have tried to use passive resistance against rapists is that it does not work” (K. Martindale 109). Although this is certainly an overgeneralization, it does convey the need for a reassessment of our current jurisprudence. Despite her mother’s continued threats and counsel, the narrator is convinced that Bubba loves her, and so it is to him that she is loyal. This decision interrupts the mother-daughter relationship, which, despite its seeming difficulties, is the narrator’s only secure support system. Black feminists have argued that black women see their families as “a base for protection from, and resistance to, racism” and often as the source of “their most supportive relationships, not in the least between female kin” (Jackson 179). Walker’s disruption of the matriarchal relationship thus foregrounds the destructive nature of the narrator’s involvement with the white lawyer, who replaces care giving with violent sexual domination. Mary Maynard writes, men “often use sex as a means of exercising power and domination, and their effect is to intrude upon and curtail women’s activities. . . . mechanisms through which women are socially controlled” (106–7). An extreme example of this occurs when the narrator has her mother committed to an insane asylum, simply because her mother’s concern intrudes upon her fantasy that oppression can be equated with love. The narrator is unable to recognize that it is pressure exerted by the lawyer that causes her to turn

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against her own mother, subverting her own ability to reason and make independent choices. While incarcerated in the insane asylum, the narrator’s mother receives shock treatments that eventually leave her “as vacant as an empty eye socket” (25). This image indicates the mother’s powerless gaze. She is aware of what is happening to her daughter but can only observe, not act to change or have an impact on what is to come. Yet it is this irrevocable turn in her mother’s health that finally seems to penetrate the narrator’s reverie. She explains this reversal in a very matter-of-fact tone, exclaiming, “I just suddenly— in a way I don’t even pretend to understand—woke up” (25). Not surprisingly, Bubba refuses to come to her mother’s aid when the narrator requests his help, refusing to petition for her release from the asylum. He is aware of the threat posed by the narrator’s mother, who recognizes the power dynamic within this “relationship.” Moreover, he is “really pissed off that a black person despises him” (25), a feeling that clearly demonstrates his belief in his own superiority and advantage. When her mother dies as a result of treatment in the asylum, the narrator kills Bubba. She shoots him with his own gun, which she removes from a desk drawer in his office. The shift in phallic authority is clear. The narrator, with the aid of the phallic object, assumes control and kills her violator. Richard Slotkin has noted two main principles in fictional characters who use guns with intent to kill: (1) a personal element that drives the killer’s decision (typically motivated to maintain “pride and honor” and ensure “the defense of ‘civilization’ ”) ; and (2) The need for preemptive violence to prevent atrocities that he believes will otherwise follow (392–3). The personal element involved in this character’s decision is clear— she had been conditioned by Bubba to such a degree that she allows and even participates in her own mother’s demise. Once the narrator finally “wakes up” to realize she has been exploited, she kills Bubba out of a need for revenge, and to rid herself of his presence in her life. The implication is that the narrator believes civilization will be better off without a person like Bubba, a person clearly disposed to the brutal exploitation of those who are not of the privileged race, class, and/or gender. The narrator’s sudden awareness of the lawyer’s destructive power reflects Slotkin’s second element, which states that the killer believes that the act is in some way preemptive, a way to ensure that

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further atrocities are not committed by this person in the future. Thus it is the ongoing abuse of the narrator and the “murder” of her mother that warrant female justice. Although the narrator forgets to wipe her fingerprints from the gun, the murder is never investigated and the narrator remains free of suspicion. The police conclude that the crime was committed by burglars. This ending suggests that the police are intentionally overlooking evidence, perhaps to protect the lawyer’s reputation from scandal. This again supports Walker’s contention that the law shows bias and favoritism to insiders, a point of view with which Catherine MacKinnon agrees when she writes, Women of color are severely, pervasively sexually abused, including in racist ways worldwide. They are violated by it, resent it, resist it, want justice for it, and they want it to stop. Sexually abused women tend to know with real clarity that sexual abuse has everything to do with being a woman. (89)

MacKinnon notes that millions of women, especially women of color, suffer from gendered violence. Walker’s story provides an example of one woman of color who is harmed as a result of the hierarchical system, but who refuses to concede defeat. Moreover, the factors that originally work to disempower the narrator (her gender, her age, her social status, her color) ultimately prevent her from being named as a suspect in the lawyer’s murder. In this way Walker reveals the underlying paradoxes of Western society: first, that which works against women can also be used in their favor (much as Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters use gendered communication to their advantage in “A Jury of Her Peers”) and, second, that women (who are allegedly nonviolent and passive) are feared by men for the power of which they are truly capable. In this story, Walker forces readers to confront internalized falsehoods concerning gender and suggests that change can result from extralegal acts of courage.

C This chapter initially sets out to address why the “woman-as-victim” role in realist fiction has been so slow to change. In addition, the chapter seeks to determine how and why authors of contemporary fiction

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have started to resituate their heroines as agential subjects capable of murder. Because self-sacrifice was a reigning ideology for women in the nineteenth century, women were “trained to inflict their disappointments upon themselves, to become not angry and aggressive but depressed and self-destructive” (Jones 352). Often, when dealing with long-term oppression, women in fiction turned their anger and frustration inward, because of their hesitancy to cause trouble. The authors of stories of women who kill destroy readers’ preconceived expectations of appropriate feminine behavior by writing of women who set out to overcome the source of their oppression, rather than turning their disillusionment upon themselves. In the stories discussed herein, women ultimately reject the self-sacrifice that has kept them subservient to men, without placing blame on themselves or explaining their actions away using excuses typically conferred upon women behaving badly: “menstrual tension, hysterical (i.e. womb centered) disease, insanity, or a male accomplice” (Jones 99). The recognition of wrongdoing and/or injustice and the desire to set things right become, in these novels, an impetus for individual action. Such action, even in fiction, influences the way that women are perceived and, correspondingly, the way that they are treated by both individuals and institutions within our larger culture. In addition, these authors make apparent the biases of the U.S. justice system, which at times requires women to take extralegal action to attain a life of free will. The inequity of legal justice is foregrounded by the authors to highlight the danger of a system that does not consider the indeterminable and ambiguous properties that define fairness. Thus, it is unreasonable to decide on a verdict of “guilt” or “innocence” without considering the extenuating circumstances of each case. If such extenuating circumstances establish a context that the legal system can consider independent of ideological and patriarchal constructs, the next generation of women might not need to go outside of the law to attain justice but will find protection within the law itself. Hélène Cixous postulates that the place “which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise” is writing. For this reason, vigilante fiction by women must be studied. These works effect social change by providing a social-symbolic space for women to act. Feminist attitudes in writing filter into the public awareness of everyday life; thus, whether explicitly or by implication, reading fiction that depicts women who reject oppression and tyranny

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undermines the position of the dominant male and offers an antidote to the undue restrictions that lead to women’s victimization. In the chapter to follow, we will look more closely at women who employ individual acts of banditry to achieve change in a much more public, and thus political, forum.

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CH A P T ER

F OU R

The Female Bandit/Outlaw

This chapter investigates the archetype of the female bandit, a powerful vigilante figure who does not seek vengeance for crimes left unpunished by the criminal justice system but instead struggles for a more even distribution of wealth and/or power among the general populace. In this sense, her altruistic motives surpass the boundaries of self. Such vigilantism frequently overturns the existing androcentric power structure, to victimize those individuals who typically do the victimizing. Unlike their male counterparts, the female bandits showcased in this chapter have the additional motive of vanquishing their own demons via their radical acts—they rid themselves of social mandates that are so ingrained in their psyches that it prevents them from living to their full potential. The destruction of these demons is often replete with violent wrenchings of the soul as well as the social order, steps that are necessary to correct outdated ideologies. An important characteristic of bandit women is their desire to replace their own sacrificial behaviors with behaviors that instead lead them to fulfill their potential and motivate other women to do the same. By proving themselves central to the transformation of other women, female bandits act in a political capacity to inspire change. Female bandits commit criminal acts but privately rationalize their lawbreaking, seeing their criminal behavior as a type of social defense or as part of a natural law that supersedes the fallible laws of man. My analysis of the female bandit exposes the extent to which the themes of Sister Gin (1975) by June Arnold and Fried Green Tomatoes (1988) by Fannie Flagg overlap, demonstrating that despite the radical differences in style, the underlying messages of the two texts correspond. June Arnold’s earlier novel informs Fried Green Tomatoes in multiple ways. For example, both texts are written by lesbian authors from the South who write about lesbian relationships despite a patriarchal culture that values and normalizes heterosexuality; both texts

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counter ageism by denoting the elderly in a positive way; both texts draw attention to the pervasiveness of racism; both texts include main characters experiencing menopause and use the condition of menopause to provide their heroines with an opportunity for personal renewal; and both texts include vigilante characters whose anger at the biased justice system of the United States spurs them to take the law into their own hands. The texts thus present in narrative form what both authors seek to achieve in storytelling—that is, a new kind of female solidarity based on the sharing and influence of political belief rather than on some sort of primary group identification. The themes shared by these texts thus exceed the norms of representation in fiction by constructing and contributing to a mode of expression that translates beyond the text itself, in a continuum that I have termed “mothering morality.” The term encapsulates how female-constructed femininity is articulated both within and beyond the fictional text by these authors and authors like them, and how such articulations influence new generations of writers. Moreover, the passing along of newfound gynocentric strength and potency in a “lesbian continuum” (Rich) mirrors the way that the characters of their stories promote empowerment both in their own generation of women and in future generations. Finally, I revisit (see Chapter Two) a discussion of William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1938), which includes a female bandit, Granny Rosa Millard, because this character provides an interesting counterpoint to the two female-authored bandits in her very lack of altruism and desire for personal development. A brief history of the bandit in American fiction will establish some guidelines for this discussion. In the United States, the bandit became notorious in the late nineteenth century when a new era of violent crime began. Banditry experienced an upsurge after the Civil War, when train robberies by the Reno brothers of Indiana and bank robberies by the James-Younger gang of Missouri became frequent occurrences (Richard Maxwell Brown 16). Brown cites the James Brothers, Henry Berry Lowry, Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger as premier examples of American bandits and explains that from the period following the Civil War to about the mid-1930s (with the demise of Dillinger), Americans were largely ambiguous about whether banditry should be condemned or admired (16). Crimes of banditry and the men committing such crimes were mythologized in fiction, transforming the men into heroic incarnations that glorified

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their offenses and minimized the cruel and brutal consequences that often accompanied such crimes. The outlaws featured in dime-store novels are thus often portrayed as “social bandits whose outlawry [is] a response to injustices perpetrated by corrupt officials acting at the behest of powerful moneyed interests” (Slotkin 127–8). Richard Slotkin additionally credits fiction for transforming the image of the bandit from sociopolitical reformer to moral champion, a figure struggling to uphold increasingly generic mythologies such as truth, justice, and the American way (128). Like Slotkin, Eric Hobsbawm generally considers the bandit a noble figure and refers frequently to the “noble robber” in his study Bandits. He defines the bandit as “an outsider and a rebel, a poor man who refuses to accept the normal roles of poverty, and establishes his freedom by means of the only resources within reach of the poor— strength, bravery, cunning, and determination” (95). “Robin Hood,” writes Hobsbawm, “is the most famous and universally popular type of bandit, the most common hero of ballad and song in theory” (46). The bandit of lore generally meets a list of nine behavioral criteria: 1. He begins his career of outlawry not by crime, but as a victim of injustice, or through being persecuted by authorities for some act which they, but not the custom of the people, consider as criminal. 2. He “rights wrongs.” 3. He “takes from the rich to give to the poor.” 4. He “never kills but in self-defense or just revenge.” 5. If he survives, he returns to his people an honorable citizen and member of the community. Indeed, he never actually leaves the community. 6. He is admired, helped and supported by his people. 7. No decent member of the community would help the authorities against him. 8. He is invisible and invulnerable (most often because of magic). 9. He is not the enemy of the king or emperor, who is the fount of justice, but only of the local gentry, clergy or other oppressors. (47–8) The list provides an excellent overview of the characteristics of the bandit and clearly delineates his relationship to honor, tradition, and order. Unfortunately, Hobsbawm’s consistent use of the pronoun

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“he” warrants that the female bandit is a nonfactor or is nonexistent. As I will show, this is a faulty assumption. The female bandits discussed in this chapter are both alike and different from their male counterparts. Perhaps even more than the male bandits they resemble, they rely on their “strength, cunning, and determination” to counter unequal distributions of power. Yet unlike their male counterparts, female bandits more often find it necessary to assess and reassess their own behavior and the ingrained ideologies of those near and dear to them. This close scrutiny allows them to reject, much like the previous vigilante women examined herein, the destructive selfsacrifice that has limited their potential and replace it with positive behaviors that help them to realize their right to a fulfilling life. Most importantly, female bandits motivate other women to make important positive changes in their own lives. Female bandits thus act in a political capacity to inspire change via the networks of people whom they influence. When female bandits choose to disobey oppressive laws, they do so with the intention that their acts will effect longterm widespread change. The final goal of this chapter is to discuss the impact of female banditry on larger networks of people, and how these networks have changed both literature and society.

J A’ S ISTER G IN ()1 Sister Gin is the story of Su McCulvey, a successful journalist from the southern United States who, at the age of fifty, experiences a difficult menopause, a condition that becomes metaphoric for a much larger crisis of self-identity. Su struggles with her writing and her self-worth, both of which have been affected by compromises she has made while working as a book reviewer, and by concealing her lesbianism from her family. To make matters worse, Su and her long-term partner, Bettina, find themselves growing apart. Su is secretly in love with seventy-seven year old Mamie Carter, in whom she perceives strength of character, self-assurance, and beauty. The catalyst for Su’s metamorphosis is Sister Gin, a mysterious persona whose acerbic presence forces Su to reevaluate her life, her work, and her sense of herself and leads her to rebellious acts of banditry that revolutionize her outlook on life. Jane Marcus describes the character Sister Gin as “a metaphor for female subjectivity, for lesbianism, for coming-into-writing, for political action, and for coming to terms with white racism” (Marcus

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217). She explains that although birth has long been used by women writers as a metaphor for creativity, June Arnold is the first feminist fiction writer to use menopause as a metaphor for the “rebirth of the female self” (218). Su’s rebirth occurs after Sister Gin spurs her to recognize that she is deeply unhappy, and that much of this unhappiness is the result of always doing what is expected of her, rather than allowing herself the freedom to make mistakes, to learn from those mistakes, and ultimately to grow. In reaching these conclusions Su turns to banditry as a way to express her dissatisfaction with a system that has prevented her from attaining the indelible rights to free will and reason. Throughout her life, Su has modified herself to fit the socially acceptable template of a “good” woman. She has “corrected” herself to fit the standard of polite society, despite the fact that she finds such social constraints alien to her own personhood. Eventually she thinks, She had long ago surrendered to the loneliness of being right. She was right in her health, her weight, her hairstyle. Her writing was right. Everything in her life had been corrected and she had felt . . . that if something didn’t change soon she would hand in her days and quit. (7)

As we will see, her dawning awareness is similar to that of fortyeight-year-old Evelyn Couch from Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes, who flourishes only after recognizing that the compromises she has made for the sake of propriety have hindered her ability to live a full life. Both texts focus on the process of self-discovery and demonstrate that in certain instances it is necessary to take extralegal action to attain full personhood in a normatively androcentric culture. Su has allowed her fear of disapproval, criticism, and condemnation to prevent her from a healthy personal fulfillment, a condition that impinges on her free will. Although she has at least been able to acknowledge her sexuality through her lesbianism and establish a career, both of these areas of her life are in turmoil. Su has censored her writing to the point that it no longer makes a political statement; it no longer expresses her true feelings on matters of feminism, power relations, and the patriarchal world at large. Her fear of upsetting the hierarchy and of losing her job and the respect of her mainstream

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audience prevents her from reviewing openly feminist texts. Su declines all such invitations, stating, “I’m just not a political person” (38). Yet, she simultaneously recognizes that her decision is a disservice to her true sense of self. She comments, I’m neat! . . . I’m as trim and tidy as a Whitman’s Sampler, in mind and body. Not a bulge bulges its unspeakable stuffing into the circle of politeness. I explain but not too much. I object quietly. I laud in Latin symmetry. I am a poet of critics because he thinks poets are rhythmic little box-makers. I am too young to be garrulous, too old to shout. I am shouting now! (56)

Su castigates herself for her refusal to take risks and defy the norm. Although as a book critic Su is in a position to influence the larger culture with her words, she fears exposing the parts of herself that the larger culture sees as aberrant. Not until she reaches the “change of life” that is menopause, the transition from fertility to post-fertility,2 is Su finally able to confront her unhappiness by engaging in political and social banditry to address the uneven distribution of power that she witnesses each day. Su’s repressed emotions emerge in the guise of Sister Gin, who appears when Su drinks to excess (allowing her well-honed, wellpositioned barricades to recede and her true musings to emerge on paper). Sister Gin leaves book reviews and personal notes for Su, all of which express the innermost thoughts that Su fears to acknowledge. Similar to this, In Fried Green Tomatoes, menopausal Evelyn Couch deals with her own unhappiness by imagining the existence of a powerful alter ego, Towanda, who has the courage to fight those who harm others. Towanda’s power manifests in various physical and verbal confrontations and paves the way for Evelyn to become more assertive. Unlike Evelyn who welcomes Towanda and treats her with reverence right from the beginning, Su at first resists the power of Sister Gin, responding with shame to the knowledge that Sister is a part of her, and fearing the consequences of allowing the repressed side of herself to emerge. This response is not unusual; many women assume guilt or shame for desiring self-realization, because any notion of transgression is viewed by the larger society as violating a true and endemic law (patriarchy). Thus for a long time Su considers Sister Gin a saboteur, against whom she must remain constantly vigilant (101).

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Yet shame ultimately functions as a constructive motivating force for Su, spurring her to pursue valuable ideals. Martha C. Nussbaum argues that shame is an emotion that “often tells us the truth” (206). She continues, “Certain goals are valuable and we have failed to live up to them. And it [shame] often expresses a desire to be a type of being that one can be: a good human being doing fine things” (206–7). Such seems to be the case for Sister Gin, who is active where Su is passive. She is emotional and daring where Su is rational and reserved. Oddly, this side of Su reveals to what extent gender is a concept that requires women to adhere to boundaries established by social constructivism. It is not until Su is confronted with symptoms of menopause that she allows the two sides of her person to merge. This merging represents a rebalancing of the gendered aspects of Su’s personality: “active” mixing with “passive,” and “dominance” with “reticence.” The text suggests that it is the onset of menopause that allows Su to renegotiate her understanding of what it means to be female. As noted by Delaney, Lupton, and Toth, “Post-menopausal women are freed from any of the social and biological restrictions that patriarchy imposes on their lives” (223). Menopause frees women from the responsibilities of childbearing and childrearing, allows women to enjoy sex anew, and provides them the ability to refocus on work and career (222). The physical changes taking place within her thus prove to be a catalyst for personal growth and self-acceptance. Moreover, menopause brings Su to the realization that throughout her life she has sacrificed full personhood for the sake of propriety. Ultimately, she realizes it is not Sister Gin that she must resist, but the society that inadvertently makes Sister Gin necessary. This is the point in her life when Su turns to banditry as a tool for social redress. Su first gives expression (and thus representation) to her true thoughts when she writes a scathing review of a novel by Joyce Carol Oates (Arnold 142). Although not illegal, the review can be seen as a precursor to the more extreme acts of banditry to come, because it takes to task Oates’s lack of belief in the power of women. The review accuses the publisher of attempting “to cash in on feminism,” and Oates of being “unable to take her womanself seriously” (Arnold 143–4). After the review is written, Su notes the conspicuous absence of a note from Sister Gin. Sister Gin does not appear because she is not needed. Su has finally bravely expressed herself completely without

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the help of her “sister.” Writes Marcus, “Su . . . is ‘born again’ at fifty, saved by the blood of menopause” (220). Menopause has freed her from the ingrained need of public acceptance, and in her newfound freedom Su is able to start anew. The satisfaction that Su experiences as a result of her politically incorrect review prompts her to more extreme acts of self-expression, including banditry. She extricates herself from her destructive relationship with Bettina to begin a sexual relationship with “octogenarian” Mamie Carter Wilkerson. While this relationship is not necessarily prohibited by law, it does push the boundaries of heteronormativity. Unbeknownst to Su at the time, Mamie is also involved in female banditry and encourages this aspect of Su’s transformation. Mamie encourages Su’s anger and rebellion, for at age seventy-seven she understands the rage that Su is experiencing and is well past the age of caring about the opinions of those who are not dear to her. The central status of the elderly in both Sister Gin and Fried Green Tomatoes links the texts in yet another way. The matriarchs of both novels influence the development of the younger women with whom they interact. Their guidance allows their younger friends to become more fully actualized, more fully whole. The mirroring, or doubling, of older and younger versions of womanhood is intended to demonstrate the complexity of the specific relationship between Mamie and Su. Moreover, it invokes the important theme of “mothering morality,” that is, the passing along of a new, female-centered morality, a theme around which the latter half of the text revolves. Freud’s concept of “doubling” is interesting to consider when exploring the link between Mamie and Su. Essentially, doubling involves “the recognition of the self in another, as a stranger, the arrival of the person from . . . the world outside himself” (qtd. in Yaeger 43). In this case, the elder Mamie sees a younger, less confident, less experienced version of herself in Su, while Su sees in Mamie that which she has the potential to become. The love between Mamie and Su is literalized when Su’s reverence for Mamie and what she stands for becomes a physical relationship. In other words, Su literally loves the person she hopes to become. Thus, lesbianism in this novel is depicted as a continuum, a limitless and indefinable experience that aspires to discover and maintain a mature love between “total-self” and “other-self,” as opposed to self and other. In other words, women in healthy lesbian relationships resist the urge to define themselves in opposition to one another but instead are able to define themselves

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through one another, in relationships that include sexual pleasure but also include “the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, [and] the giving and receiving of practical and political support” (Rich 11). As we can see, the idea is similar to that expressed by Adrienne Rich, who argues that lesbian existence and the lesbian continuum incorporate all support systems and interactions among women, not only the sexual. However, the term “mothering morality” differs in the sense that it specifically refers to the transmission of such values and networks, from person to person, both within and beyond fiction. The revolutionary narrative strategy chosen by Arnold thus reflects the goals of female banditry itself: committing “transgressive” deeds intended to level the unequal, or to share the bounty of the wealthy with those in need. The relationship between Mamie and Su demonstrates how such interaction between “total-self” and “other-self” might occur, by showcasing how female-inspired morality (a “mothering morality” that rejects self-harm while encouraging self-care) is transferred from one generation to the next. The point is made explicit in the mirroring of the two characters, in the way that one character is signified and improved by the other. For example, because both women aspire to achieve strength of character, Mamie refuses to indulge Su’s quiet, deferential tone of voice. The narrator explains, Mamie Carter, actress and nearly deaf, hated that quality [lowered voice] in Su so much that she never bothered to look beyond it to see how much she and Su might really be the same person; Su, ignorant of Mamie Carter’s antipathy, adored her and often wished she were she. (Arnold 14)

The intergenerational communication between the two women is evident here—they are in dialogue even as they incorporate and reject aspects of one another’s personalities, in turn. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that Mamie’s refusal to indulge weakness is not so much about Su, but about loathing traits that she has worked hard to eradicate in herself. Su though clearly aspires to learn from Mamie, to become like her. The twinning of the two women is made deliberately apparent when Su declares to Mamie, “I wish I were you” (57). There are many striking similarities between the two women, including their similar clothing: “navy blue sundress[es] with white collar and cuffs, [and] white (not pearl) earrings” (14). Another similarity

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between the two women is their ability to write. Mamie writes book reviews, just as Su does; however, Mamie does not write to please or placate her audience. She reviews precisely two books a year, no more, no less. The narrator explains, “Her quota of service to the community had been agreed upon jointly by her total self and her part which handled human obligations” (17), in other words, her “total self” takes priority and must be indulged. To complicate matters further, the similarity of sound and meaning between the name “Mamie” and the term “Mother” cannot be ignored. Mamie and Su’s mother, Shirley, are both seventy-seven, “exactly the same age” (73). Yet while Su reveres Mamie, she is deathly afraid of becoming like the sheltered “class-conscious” Shirley, who has for years suppressed her own sexual desire for a female friend because it is too nonconforming, too frightening. Su’s fear of emulating her mother is based on her resistance to assuming the false “normalcy” that her mother models. Su’s need to define herself in opposition to her mother demonstrates that a woman can enter the world of the symbolic (created by men) without suffering the ramifications of psychosis, and her lesbian relationships establish the defiant rule of female vigilantism, by showing Su’s refusal to participate in the androcentric model. In “The Space Between: Daughters and Lovers in Anne Trister,” Lizzie Thynne analyses the connections between a young girl’s unconscious desire for her mother and a lesbian affair that takes place in her adulthood. Thynne concludes that many lesbians resist the idea that “desire between women has anything to do with mother-love, apparently because the association has commonly been used to dismiss lesbianism as an immature and/or pathological sexuality” (105). In other words, psychoanalytic theories that stress the Oedipal bond between mother and daughter also risk casting lesbianism as a pathological attachment to the mother that has never been resolved. Remaining in the nether zone of unmediated desire (lesbianism), a position that results from her unwillingness to acquiesce to the laws of the father, prevents Su from becoming too much like her mother. Indeed, much of her anger comes from watching her own face “become” like her mother’s. She says, “I made my own face into hers so I could watch it to my grave and behave. I have her frown and disapproval shake and pursed cautious lips. It keeps me from talking to myself” (Arnold 60). For Su, Shirley signifies what she

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herself could become if she allows her fears of public disapproval to keep her from self-awareness and personal happiness, whereas Mamie embodies everything that Su secretly wishes to become. In this way, Mamie becomes the nurturer of Su’s morality. She models radical nonconformity and demonstrates that the consequences of resistance are tolerable. Once Su allows her anger with her circumstances to become visible, there is no going back, and her actions become more and more subversive. She takes pains to nurture her emotion, personifying it as a small female child: “She’s going to get all the advantages my expanse of years can provide, every opportunity to become whatever she wants to become, even if she just wants to get married and have lots of little angers” (200). Su treats her long-repressed anger as she would a daughter whom she wishes to help achieve self-actualization. This is the swinging back of the scale, the re-balancing of power.3 As with Evelyn Couch from Fried Green Tomatoes and Abigail Howland Mason Tolliver from The Keepers of the House, Su’s anger and desire for vengeance escalate at first, as the balance of power rights itself, moving her from a state of utmost self-control to a state of wanton abandon that results in the loss of her job, the loss of her relationship with Bettina, and bout after bout of heavy drinking. Su explains in no uncertain terms, I’m an old warmare on the warpath . . . With a dirty mouth from all that licking. A foul tongue from always being behind, a forked tongue from trying to do two asses at once, a pointed tongue from serving those real tight ones. (165)

Su has long existed in a place of subservience, sacrificing her dignity and self-respect for the sake of propriety, an example of self-sacrifice gone awry. When she is eventually called to task for her behavior, Su does her best to explain that her fury comes from “a life time of deception” (197–8). She tells Mamie, I have to make up for so many years of letting things go by . . . Every time I speak up I hear a pair of tiny hands clapping inside my head. They belong to a woman who doesn’t dare say anything, who can’t yet. But she claps like the devil . . . And each time, if I think, no, I won’t say anything, she pokes me. (199–200)

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As with Abigail and Evelyn, Su’s previously model behavior swings sharply in the opposite direction before the scales of justice right themselves. It is within this period of extreme agitation that Su first involves herself in illegal acts of banditry. To begin, Su and her former assistant, Daisy, steal pornography magazines from newsstands all over town (170), ridding the community of what they consider a menace and detriment to women’s dignity. The women use patriarchal preconceptions about female bodily functions to their advantage, approximating hot flashes and menstrual leaks to disarm the (male) vendors, quell their suspicions, and thus create opportunity for theft. These tactics are so successful that they plan to steal more magazines the following month. Su and Daisy thus exact a measure of social control by seeking to protect women from what they view as sexual exploitation through pornographic magazines. Although removing pornographic magazines from the city of Wilmington is a minor dent in the grand scheme of patriarchal oppression, the women have faith that their actions will improve the quality of life for women everywhere, and thus they resolve to protect the sanctity of women in this small way. Like Idgie from Fried Green Tomatoes, Su and Daisy do what they can, when they can, to change the system, enacting a radical new narrative that creates an alternate history for themselves and others. As a result of their banditry, Su and Daisy are adopted as the youngest members of the Shirley Temple Emeritae4 Gang, an assemblage of five elderly women, including Mamie, who meet under the ruse of a harmless bridge club. The addition of the two younger members highlights the ongoing intergenerational dialogue that is so important to the transmission of a changing value system for women. Instead of card games, these avenging women make it their mission to correct injustice by punishing violent and abusive men. Their chosen victims are men who have harmed women, who would otherwise get off with relatively light sentences because of the injustice of the political system in dealing with crimes against women. In this way, the women act in the tradition of female avengers, to right wrongs that are overlooked by local law enforcement. Although illegal, such actions are often lauded by the wider community. As Peter French comments, the very concept of a wrong or evil action entails that it should be met with a hostile response. In many cases— including torture and

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rape— rebuke, condemnation, and ostracism are far from adequate hostile responses. The moral order itself is affronted if such responses are all that occur. (x)

By the time Su and Daisy become members of the Temple Gang, the five founding members have already “punished” two rapists by tying them to plywood boards and leaving them on display in public areas of the community (Arnold 125). The intention is to shame and humiliate the men, who have shamed and humiliated women through the violent act of rape. The criminals are aware of why they have been selected for punishment, which, as noted in the chapter on “Female Avengers,” is a criterion necessary for any act of vigilante justice. Summarizing Locke, French writes, “For vengeance to be successful, the target must understand that he or she is suffering injury or being killed as a penalty for his or her actions that triggered the revenge behavior of the avenger” (34). Although punishing rapists is an act of female vengeance, aspects of banditry are also at work. The women of the Temple Gang cannot be identified because of masks that conceal their faces. As a result, one of the rapists claims that “five old women spirits” came for him, and the townspeople wonder whether there are witches afoot (Arnold 126). Recall that a belief in the invocation of magic is often present when bandits are at work, for the community tends to accept as true the “invisibility and invulnerability” of those committing extralegal acts. On the one hand, deities are thought to aid the bandit in their quest for positive change. But on the other hand, as noted by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger, fear often leads people to blame demons or deities for the disruption of an otherwise seemingly stable order. In other words, when people become fearful, they are known to adopt beliefs not commonly operating within the communion of the Christian church. The male target believes that the gray-haired women who confronted him must be witches or spirits; otherwise, he insinuates, they could not possibly be powerful enough to subdue him. It is disturbing that although male bandits are often believed to employ helpful and mystical magic to protect them from capture, the women of the Temple Gang are compared to malevolent witches. As noted by Aisenberg, The profound fear of witches may be traced to the fact that they are transpositions of the Fates, of the Furies, all held to be women

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capable . . . first of controlling destiny, and, later in time, to forecasting events. Thus the human fear of the future and the fear of women who control or foresee that future coalesce in one monstrous or weird female shape. (92)

Although the women of the Temple Gang must endure such stereotypes, they ultimately refuse to be stunted and instead use the negative portrayal to instill fear into the next criminal that they attempt to punish. The Temple Gang’s next target is Mamie’s ex-son-in-law, Clayton Everett Eagle III. After a brief three-year marriage to Mamie’s daughter, Imogene, Clayton has been legally awarded one-half of the house and property that Imogene “built with her own separate money” (Arnold 120). Both Imogene and her mother realize that Clayton married her only for the money, but it is the fact that he has been awarded half of the property that upsets them. Clayton’s unjust acquisition of Imogene’s home symbolizes a claim to, and invasion of, the container that represents who and what she is. Imogene’s desire to defend the home is a sign of her need to protect her own symbolic space, which is directly linked to her sense of self and autonomy. Imogene asserts, “I’d like to kill him,” and speaks of an acquaintance who can “get it done with no risk for twentyfive hundred,” a possibility that leaves Imogene feeling “murderously joyful” (121). None of the women react with horror at this assertion. Meanwhile, the women of the Gang are organizing to punish Clayton Everett. Dressed in matching black gowns and blond curly wigs (combining the image of the witch with that of a femme fatal), the women surprise Clayton and then tie his “partially nude body” to a board, with plans to leave him exposed in public. The Gang believes that “rape can be extended to cover [Clayton’s] behavior too . . . [because] the laws covering rape all extend from the property code” (136). The reasoning behind this assertion is surprisingly sound. Mamie describes the erroneous thinking of the court system, which she interprets as follows: At sixty-five a woman is not considered of much value as property so her rapist wasn’t even indicted. And if she’s black too she’s not even believed . . . The fourteen-year-old girl was property not really damaged since her hymen was left intact, so her rapist was allowed to plead

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to a lesser sentence. If you even bothered to think abstractedly . . . you’d see that rape and theft are both classified as property cases; therefore I see nothing amiss in treating Clayton’s theft as the only form of rape open to him. (136)

Mamie explains that it is only because the older black woman and the fourteen-year-old girl are thought of as property that they are considered of value in our patriarchal society. There are mitigating factors in each of the cases (the fact that one woman is black and past childbearing age, the fact that the young girl’s hymen was left intact) that result in the male perpetrators receiving lesser sentences, factors that essentially define each women’s worth according to their value as objects “possessed” by men. The inequity of this ideology is evident and makes the rage of the Temple Gang, and their attempts to correct the inequity by bringing it to the attention of the larger community, more comprehensible. After Su and Daisy join the Temple Gang, the women set out to punish “three young men responsible for gang-raping [a] woman in a downtown shop” (177). When the seven women are caught and jailed, their vigilante antics come to an abrupt end. They decide instead to channel their anger into an officially authorized outlet— politics. Su campaigns for Cad and Mamie Carter, who run for office, and does not hesitate to express to the press her “boisterous fury” concerning social inequity (197). She also writes an article explaining the entire story of the Temple Gang. Of this she says to Bettina, “I’m going to start fighting and assume I have nothing to lose. Soon I won’t. That’s the only strength an old woman fighter has” (182). Su is commenting on the way that the elderly, especially elderly women, are disenfranchised in many communities of the United States—they have lost their sexual provocativeness according to standards of male-defined beauty, so they no longer have clout in a male-dominated world. Su resolves to make herself heard nonetheless, shattering the silence that has contained her throughout her life, and continue her revolutionary campaign tactics. Marcus writes, “One of the reasons Sister Gin is so important is that the plot of self-decolonization enacts the heroine’s move from couple to family, to community, to political action, to recognition of her own complicity in the colonization of others” (222). In this progression we can again see how the feminine continuum toward achieving the full embodiment of free will is enacted. Marcus’s point

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is significant, for with the shift from personal dissatisfaction, to anger, to banditry, to political action, Su and the other members of the Temple Gang ultimately form an active community that fights for the rights of the traditionally oppressed in a way that is sanctioned by the state. The emergence of a more progressive women’s fictional plot is also evident in this schema: in women’s fiction dating from the early nineteenth century women resisted oppression, then rebelled against oppression within legal confines of the law, and are currently creating fictions in which women proudly flout the law to correct injustice and then victoriously take this battle to the legal, political arena. In much the same way, Su builds a political force of women who, like her, have long remained apolitical for fear of community censure. At this point in her life she is finally able to work openly for change and to enable other women to see the necessity of united public resistance to discrimination and injustice. She thinks, “She wanted to . . . shout so that all the women could hear, even those who didn’t listen any more: All out come in free!” (205). In other words, don’t worry about past mistakes, don’t succumb to your fear; instead, help affect change in yourself and others now. At the conclusion of Sister Gin, Su is a “changed” woman, both physically, with the onset of menopause, and emotionally. She overcomes her fear of condemnation and censure and allows herself the freedom to advocate for her rights and for the rights of other women. As the text concludes, Su is busy writing a play that recounts the important moments of this process, giving voice to her thoughts and feelings in a genre of her choosing. Su thus sets an example for other women, just as Mamie was an example for Su. Banditry in this context has provided the impetus for widespread social change and has resulted in an alternate narrative that allows Su to freely explore her history and create her own future.

F F’ F R IED G R EEN T OM ATOES W HISTLE STOP C AFÉ ()

AT THE

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1987) by Fannie Flagg features strong female protagonists who demonstrate the importance of family, home, and close relationships while simultaneously contributing to women’s empowerment through their influence and maternal authority. They additionally model the heroism inherent in taking

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care of those in need, regardless of the unjust biases of the wider community. The women are thus able to inhabit the traditional sphere of the domestic, while simultaneously posing a challenge to maleconstructed identity and sexuality and overturning male-constructed notions of what constitutes strength. Fried Green Tomatoes is a work of female vigilantism because it features women who engage in extralegal acts designed to correct unjust laws that privilege white middle- and upper-class men. The text, published in 1987, was written more than ten years after Sister Gin and in many ways is less radical than its “sister.” However, as demonstrated in this chapter, many of the primary themes of Sister Gin recur and garner further attention in Fried Green Tomatoes, including a central lesbian relationship that flouts the rules of heteronormativity, a close friendship between an elderly woman and her younger friend that enacts the message of “mothering morality,” and a character who experiences menopause as an opportunity for personal renewal. Finally, both texts include vigilante characters whose anger at the biased justice system of the United States spurs them to take the law into their own hands. With so much overlap, Arnold’s novel is almost certainly a model for Flagg’s offspring text, much as the character Mamie is a model for Su, and as Mrs. Threadgood of Fried Green Tomatoes is for the younger Evelyn. The influence of one author upon the other allows both texts to become more fully realized in the literary canon as their liberatory messages gain prominence. Moreover, the connections between the two novels literally reflect the way gynocentric ideas are passed from one generation to the next, in an effort to oppose women’s complicity in their own subjugation. The most obvious acts of banditry in Fried Green Tomatoes are accomplished by Idgie Threadgoode. For several years during the Great Depression, Idgie masquerades as the notorious Railroad Bill, a bandit who sneaks aboard government supply trains to throw food and coal to poor blacks living along the railroad tracks. In carrying out these acts of banditry, Idgie demonstrates her allegiance to a moral code that promotes action on behalf of the powerless, even though such action does not adhere to the sanctioned rules of law. This behavior is typical of the way she lives— she helps her partner, Ruth, to leave her abusive husband and subsequently builds a life with Ruth in Whistle Stop, sharing the responsibilities of raising Ruth’s newborn son and running a small café.

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Yet although Idgie’s train heists are clearly intended to be altruistic, her generosity to the “poor blacks” inadvertently dichotomizes the white and black communities within this novel and places Idgie in the dominant role of white benefactor. Although it is unlikely that Flagg intended for such a reading, Idgie’s awareness and understanding of the immediate need for supplies is countered by the question of the ultimate productivity of her actions. By throwing food items from the train she is contributing to a real need; yet, despite her sympathetic outlook she does not ultimately address the underlying problems faced by any of the people she helps, for example, their lack of employment opportunities and the racial divide that keeps them powerless. Dressed in the clothes of a man, Idgie robs from the rich to give to the poor without ever raising the suspicions of Detective Grady Kilgore and his men. Her gender works to her advantage, because few people suspect that a woman, even the fiercely independent Idgie Threadgoode, is capable of such shrewd initiative. In fact, as with the Temple Gang from Arnold’s Sister Gin, many people in the community attribute the bandit’s activities to supernatural forces. Buddy Jr. explains, Pretty soon the colored started telling stories about him. They claimed that someone saw him turn into a fox and run twenty miles on top of a barbed-wire fence. People that did see him said he wore a long black coat, with a black stocking cap on his head. They even made up a song about him . . . Sipsey said, every Sunday in church, they’d pray for Railroad Bill, to keep him safe. (Flagg 332)

The image of a fox implies a sly cunning that most people find both commendable and repugnant— reactions that capture the essence of common attitudes toward bandits, whom people often admire and deplore, simultaneously. Idgie takes advantage of the supernatural comparison to agitate the rational detective further, commenting, “The reason you boys cain’t catch him is because he can turn himself into a fox or rabbit whenever he wants to” (327–8). The ironic subtext is that although everyone thinks Bill is a man, a person possessing the attributes of the male bandit, the reality is that “he” is a “she,” a feminine “other” equipped with attributes such as stealth and cunning that are antithetical to reason and the law. Railroad Bill

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does not function via force, as would the typical male, but rather employs characteristics that are more often considered feminine, to outmaneuver the police force. Because of law enforcement’s inability to predict the bandit’s actions, Railroad Bill remains free to continue her acts of mercy. Detective Grady’s very lack of suspicion inadvertently causes him to aid Idgie, by revealing to her exactly when the trains are scheduled to pass through town. Grady’s defenses are lowered because he talks to Idgie while she waits tables at the café; as a “server” she is behaving in a way that is deemed appropriate for women, mitigating any threatening attributes that might arouse his suspicions. Years later Ninnie Threadgoode explains, Grady Kilgore . . . used to come in the café every day, and Idgie would laugh and say, “I hear ol’ Railroad Bill is still on the loose. What’s the matter with you boys?” He used to get so mad, they must have put twenty extra men on the trains, at one time or another, and they offered a lifetime pass on the L & N Railroad to whoever had information about him to come forth, but nobody did. Idgie just razzed him to death over that one! (124–5)

Despite the reward, no one comes forward with information that implicates the guilty party. This again suggests that the community supports Railroad Bill and harbors “the wish that the people’s champion cannot be defeated” (Hobsbawm 57). As Buddy Jr. states years later, “The railroad put a huge reward up, but there wasn’t a person in Whistle Stop that would have ever turned him in, even if they had known who he was. Everyone wondered and made guesses” (332). Nonetheless, the reluctance of the people of Whistle Stop to defeat their champion begs the question: would the outcome be different if the townspeople suspected that Railroad Bill was, in fact, female? Unfortunately, it seems much more likely that the notion of “people’s champion” would not apply to a female outlaw. This is supported by the fact that the members of the Temple Gang from Sister Gin are accused of being witches rather than noble saviors. As it stands, the bandit is venerated by the people of Whistle Stop, who appreciate that “he” is providing a service for those who might otherwise go hungry. Even Detective Grady eventually admits that the crimes are somewhat justifiable, despite being against the law.

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During a conversation that takes place in the café, Ruth comments, “Really Grady, I cain’t see what harm it can be. These poor people are almost starving to death, and if it hadn’t been for him throwing coal off, a lot of them would have frozen to death.” Even the detective admits, “I agree with you in a way . . . Nobody cares about a few cans of beans, now and then, and a little coal” (327). Thus Railroad Bill fulfills another of Hobsbawm’s criteria: the bandit is admired and supported for righting or correcting unjust laws. Idgie’s moral judgments compel her to implement change when things are unfair, and she inspires others to do the same. She, among other things, defends and feeds transients, refuses to credit the demands of the very active Ku Klux Klan, and maintains a close friendship with social outcast Eva Bates, who despite her reputation as a “loose woman” has a generous heart. Buddy Jr. and Evelyn Couch are the most obvious examples of others who learn from Idgie’s example, but the story allows us to see that over her lifetime multiple individuals are influenced by her good-natured sense of justice. As noted by Naomi Rockler, the story is about women who are empowered “through women-identified experience” (7). Idgie lives by a code of right and wrong that is in excess of the law and yet demonstrates decency and kindness, regardless of race, class, or creed. This doctrine exhibits one of the main goals of female banditry, which is to affect long-term change on the political level. In claiming this, however, it is important to stress the difference between the stand Idgie takes for the sake of what she believes is morally just, and the type of self-sacrifice that prevents women from developing into their total-selves. In the first case, Idgie puts herself at risk to improve the world around her, consequently improving herself in the process. She feels satisfaction and a sense of integrity from accomplishing her illegal deeds. In the second case, women put their bodies and spirit at risk for the sake of a patriarchal ideal, an ideal that diminishes or does harm to their true nature and often perpetuates social relations that are exploitative and destructive. The distinction between the two codes of ethics is important, for one works to implement equality between the genders while the other represents an outmoded hierarchy that diminishes the value of women. Thus, female banditry requires women to first unlearn what has been drilled into them since they were young children, and to learn the art of self-care while maintaining a sense of responsibility for the many other-selves whose lives intersect with their own.

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Evelyn Couch, the second female protagonist of the story, learns self-care the hard way. Evelyn’s story begins much later, in the 1980s, when at the age of forty-eight she begins visiting her mother-in-law at the Rose Terrace Nursing Home in Birmingham, Alabama. Evelyn is experiencing a rocky menopause and is depressed and unhappy about the direction her life has taken. She thinks, her life was becoming unbearable . . . the quiet hysteria and awful despair had started when she finally began to realize that nothing was ever going to change . . . She began to feel as if she were at the bottom of a well, screaming, no one to hear . . . it had been an endless procession of gray mornings, when her sense of failure swept over her like a five-hundred pound wave; and she was scared. (63)

Evelyn is a clear example of a woman who, all her life, has subscribed to a false ideal and is miserable as a result. At the nursing home Evelyn meets Ninny Threadgoode, Idgie’s now aged sister-in-law. Mrs. Threadgoode recounts stories of life growing up in Whistle Stop with Idgie and Ruth, eventually inspiring Evelyn to see the good in others and to make positive changes in her own life. Here, as in Sister Gin, an older woman passes along valuable gynocentric morality to a younger women, a philosophy that involves self-care and the casting aside of limiting ideological constraints. As the friendship between the two women blossoms, Evelyn comes to understand what Idgie, Ruth, and Mrs. Threadgoode model—that is, the importance of sticking up for herself and for what she believes is morally right, rather than what is always necessarily legally (or socially) warranted. This is the creed of the female bandit, as applied in a more realistic scenario. After hearing of Idgie’s continued refusal to bow to injustice, Evelyn realizes that throughout her own life she has given her power away by letting men define who she is and what she stands for. She thinks, She had stayed a virgin so she wouldn’t be called a tramp or a slut; had married so she wouldn’t be called an old maid; faked orgasms so she wouldn’t be called frigid; had children so she wouldn’t be called barren; had not been a feminist because she didn’t want to be called queer and a man hater; never nagged or raised her voice so she wouldn’t be called a bitch. (236–7)

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Evelyn’s fears of disapproval, criticism, and condemnation have prevented her from living a fulfilling life. Like Su, she has always done what is expected of her, including raising “the required two children—‘a boy for him and a girl for me’ ” (40). This has led her to feel as though life “has passed her by,” because her free will has been compromised (67). Recognizing her value is a crucial element in the development of her “total-self” and demonstrates how female banditry can have a much larger impact on the world. Upon reaching this understanding, Evelyn begins to make subtle but important changes. She begins selling cosmetics for Mary Kay and begins treating her symptoms of menopause. Most importantly, she starts to change the way she thinks about and interacts with the people around her. She adopts an alter ego by the name of “Towanda”— a powerful female avenger, unlike the old Evelyn in every way, whose purpose is to correct injustice and right the wrongs of the world (238). The alter ego, whom Evelyn imagines as invincible, reminds Evelyn that she can and should stand up against oppression, so that, although the actions of Towanda are imaginary, they spur Evelyn to become more assertive. Like the protagonist of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, who is a warrior fighting for the sake of her family, Towanda the Avenger is a manifestation of Evelyn’s desire for justice. Evelyn’s imaginary alter ego proves cathartic for her; she uses Towanda to bolster her own courage. Towanda the Avenger also allows Evelyn an outlet for her pent up anger. For example, when her husband Ed calls out from the living room to demand a beer, Evelyn shouts back, “SCREW YOU, ED!” (240), something that she would never have dared to do before the Towanda fantasies. The self-assertion brought about by Towanda is a necessary step for Evelyn’s development because it helps her to unlearn the servitude and complacency that she has been taught are expected of her. However, Evelyn’s true breakthrough occurs when she realizes that heroism is not about battling in extremis, like Wonder Woman or Superman. The people of Whistle Stop provide countless models of heroism on a small scale, as does her new friend, Mrs. Threadgoode. Like Idgie, they demonstrate that true power is found in the ability to resist unfair legalities for the sake of what is truly right, and that it is healing to avoid becoming embittered about all that remains unfair. From Idgie’s class- and color-blind embrasure of difference, to Big George’s willingness to endure cruel racial discrimination when he rushes the injured Buddy Jr. to the (white) hospital (106), to Ruth

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Jamison’s courageous decision to leave an abusive husband to be with Idgie in an unconventional lesbian relationship, the integrity and heroism of the Whistle Stop community is clear. It is this heroism, this love and care for self and others, that finally inspires Evelyn to relax her inner self-critic and regain control of her own consciousness. As Idgie demonstrates, individual acts of female banditry can have a widespread impact. This theme is ultimately reiterated when Ninnie Threadgoode recounts the story of when Idgie and her black employee, George, are accused of murdering Ruth’s ex-husband and must stand trial. During the trial, everyone whom Idgie has assisted in the past steps up to provide her with an alibi and proclaim her innocence. When the Reverend Scroggins testifies (falsely) that Idgie and George were attending a revival meeting at the time the murder took place, the legal accusations are dismissed and Idgie and George go free. Why has the law-abiding God-fearing Reverend Scrogins provided a false cover for Idgie and George? Because despite their differences, the Reverend knows deep within himself that Idgie is a moral person who would not commit such a crime unless absolutely necessary for the protection of Ruth and her son, Buddy Jr. He knows that protecting Idgie is the right thing to do. Different community factions unify for the sake of what they believe is “right,” not for what is necessarily lawful, just as Idgie and Ruth have always done. Thus the personal integrity that Idgie and Ruth model is reflected back to them in their time of need. As it turns out, it was not Idgie but her black employee, Sipsey, who killed Frank in an act of self-defense. Frank arrives late one night in Whistle Stop while Sipsey is babysitting Ruth’s infant son. The drunken man kicks the back door down, knocks Sipsey to the floor, and moves toward the crib with his gun drawn. Sipsey responds in kind. She grabs a five-pound iron skillet and cracks Frank over the head, stopping him in his tracks. Big George later helps her to dispose of the body. Sipsey then is a vigilante woman who kills, a woman who defends against the physical attack of a drunk and abusive man. Recall that in Chapter Three, “The Woman Who Snaps, the Woman Who Kills,” Judy Costello advocates self-defense as an important aspect of the doctrine of nonviolence, because violence is occasionally necessary to combat patterns of oppression. Sipsey’s action appropriately exemplifies Costello’s point. Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat,” analyzed in Chapter One, includes a discussion of the skillet as an object of self-defense for

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women. The skillet5 is typically associated with women and domesticity, yet it is used by Delia Jones to defend against her aggressive husband. Sipsey, like Delia, selects what is closest at hand, the skillet, to defend herself and the baby. In a discussion of the film adaptation [Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)] of the text, Rockler writes of this scene, “The least empowered individual in the film, an African-American, elderly servant woman living in the segregated south, destroys the white patriarch” (Rockler 8). Yet although the scene shows Sipsey’s strength of character, it is also troubling because it frames unequal racial and class implications as the norm. The fact that Sipsey is left to tend the baby while Idgie and Ruth visit a sick friend suggests that the relationship between employer and employee is informed by the unequal standards of the Depression-era south. Placing Sipsey in the kitchen with easy access to the skillet indicates a typical labor division between blacks and whites. Sipsey, no matter how much a part of the Threadgoode family, is still a paid employee, and thus not quite equal in status to her white employers. Not only is the trope of the loyal slave/servant troubling, but also having Sipsey (and not Idgie) murder Frank Bennett inadvertently suggests that black women are capable of murder while white women, however rebellious, are not. Although on the surface this scene intends to showcase the power and loyalty of a black woman who defends herself and her loved ones at all costs, Flagg’s penchant for highlighting the hierarchy between blacks and whites reinforces, rather than contest, racial inequalities. Despite the insensitive portrayal of race in Fried Green Tomatoes, Sipsey’s motive for killing Frank is clearly her love for “Miz Ruth” and her family, as evidenced by what she says immediately after killing Frank: “Ain’t nobody gonna git dis baby, no suh, not while I’s alive” (Flagg 364). This representation explains and “normalizes” Sipsey’s action by situating her as a nurturing mother figure acting in defense of a helpless child. However, when we learn that Big George has disposed of Bennett’s dead body in the barbeque pot, the disturbing link between the black characters and primitive savagery again becomes evident. The cannibalistic implications are made clear when the narrator explains, Later that afternoon, when Grady and the two detectives from Georgia were questioning his daddy [Big George] about the missing white man, Artis had nearly fainted when one of them came over and looked right in the pot. He was sure the man had seen Frank Bennett’s

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arm bobbing up and down among the boiling hogs. But evidently he hadn’t, because two days later, the fat Georgia man told Big George that it was the best barbeque he had ever eaten. (Flagg 367)

Critic Jeff Berglund argues that representations of this scene on film create a clear association between cannibalism and blackness, implicating the directors and film producers in racism by linking the black characters to such a taboo practice. However, Berglund also suggests that within the text itself Flagg may be attempting to demonstrate “the power of private and secret resistance and subversion against the racial regime of power/knowledge” by having the oppressed characters successfully defy the overwhelming force of the white patriarchy in the deep South during the era of the Great Depression (142). Although disparate power relations are evident within the text, Flagg has invented characters who seek to overcome the social dictates of gender, race, class, and social stigma, through the compassion they feel for one another. Idgie, maintaining the honorable persona of the social bandit (but also, unfortunately, the guise of white benefactress), refuses to place blame elsewhere and stands trial for murder. Big George, who is accused of aiding and abetting the crime, is thus protected by Idgie from a sure death sentence, because as noted, The odds of a white woman’s getting off were much higher than his, especially if his alibi depended on the words of another Negro. She [Idgie] was not going to let Big George go to jail if her life depended on it; and it very well might. (Flagg 341)

Indeed, the true heroism and bravery within this text are demonstrated in the context of the ordinary lives of ordinary people, who use their personal strengths to have a positive impact on the world. The bravery of Idgie, Ruth, and Sipsey intensifies in its retelling, inspiring Evelyn to take risks, renounce her “terror of being called names” (236), and find her own happiness. When she finally recognizes bravery as something of which she too is capable, Evelyn is able to free herself of the fear that has been keeping her from fulfilling her true potential. The narrator attests: Evelyn took a deep breath and the heavy burden of resentment and hate released itself into thin air, taking Towanda along with them. She

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was free! And in that moment she forgave the boy at the supermarket, her mother’s doctor, and the girls in the parking lot . . . and she forgave herself. (313)

Thus, Fried Green Tomatoes is ultimately about finding the courage to do what is right, rather than what is necessarily lawful or socially sanctioned. The strong female protagonists of this novel live by their own code, a form of justice that endorses kindness and fair-mindedness according to personal conviction. The female bandit acts of her own accord to ensure that these personal standards are met. Flagg has successfully created a work of vigilantism that allows its female characters to define themselves, and in doing so, they are able to attain satisfying outcomes for their lives.

W F’ F B  THE U N VANQUISHED () Granny Rosa Millard is the second of two vigilante females in The Unvanquished, a bandit who is even more unusual than Drusilla Hawk (see chapter two) because of her age (as well as her sex). During the Civil War, Granny commits crimes for monetary gain. Unlike the heroines from the other novels analyzed in this chapter, Granny does not try to contest oppression to end her own subjugation as a female participant in a hierarchy that privileges men, nor does she act to affect change in a political capacity. Instead, she takes advantage of the way that men misread her as a result of such heirarchization, and in doing so prioritizes her own interests and those of her family above what might be beneficial for the greater good of mankind. Such selfinterest models a form of banditry that is more akin to personally motivated vengeance rather than to objective justice and thus provides an interesting counterpoint to the other female bandits examined herein. Unfortunately, because of the selfish nature of her crimes, Granny soon becomes a stand-in for the absent Southern patriarch, instead of being an emblem for a new Southern womanhood, and is later killed off entirely by Faulkner when she becomes too threatening. We must conclude that although Faulkner’s inclusion of vigilante women in his fiction is innovative and paves the way for the more radical female-authored portrayals to come, he does not implement the image of this powerful icon to its full potential. The importance

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of the text despite this failing is that just as Su and Idgie and the women they influence exist on a developmental continuum whereby the older and more experienced women pass along their knowledge and counsel to the younger generation, Faulkner’s text serves as a predecessor to the more fully actualized image of the female bandit that will reveal itself in later texts by different authors. The character of Granny Millard is part of Faulkner’s larger literary theme of the Civil War narrative (see Chapter Two). As many critics note, and as texts such as The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom, and Flags in the Dust suggest, Faulkner is concerned with the legacy of the Civil War, and the impact it has on the region and the people of the southern United States. In almost all of Faulkner’s fiction, the legacy of the Civil War invokes questions of identity, most obviously concerning race, but also very much concerning gender. Without question, the aggression and physical violence that accompany war are associated with masculinity and masculine ritual (e.g., the male coming-of-age saga). Anne Goodwyn Jones writes, “if anything in our ‘adult’ culture has a history of establishing manhood in opposition to the feminine, it is war: war makes men” (qtd. in Clarke 229). In times of war, notes Deborah Clarke, men fight, while women wait. War then, by its very nature, allows men an authority of experience that is denied to women (Clarke 229). In The Unvanquished, questions about the nature of gender are made explicit through Faulkner’s portrayal of Granny Millard, a formidable bandit who is able to substantially undercut the progress and the profits of the Union Army with her illegal acts of horse thievery. Post-menopausal, widowed Granny is initially perceived by the Union soldiers as a non-threat. The soldiers assume that because she is an old woman, a Christian, and a lady of aristocratic origins, that she is incapable of substantial vice. At the first encounter between Granny and the Union soldiers, the Yankee colonel humors Granny, rather than taking her to task for hiding her young charges beneath her skirts. Despite the clear amusement of the colonel, Granny gives him “look for look while she lied” (Faulkner 31), indicating to readers that the circumstances of war are pushing her to “transgress the boundaries of being a lady” (Clarke 239). This initial sartorial display6 marks a shift in Granny’s persona, from care-giving matriarch to patriarchal agent of manly bravado, a posture that becomes increasingly apparent as the story continues. By enacting this shift, Faulkner

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is directly acknowledging the performative aspects of gender, and he reinforces this ironic position by allowing the Union soldiers to repeatedly misread Granny based solely on their faulty perception of her as a harmless little old lady. As with the other female bandits analyzed in this chapter, Granny’s characterization demonstrates that gender is something that one does rather than something that one is. However, her lack of feeling for her young charges, Bayard and Ringo, and her heartless treatment of the freed blacks who are migrating north toward freedom also demonstrate an absence of compassion. Her turn away from the role of caregiver and her increasing social power correlate directly with the development of a fully “masculine” persona. After the Union soldiers strip her of wealth and property, “the silver and the darkies and the mules” (Faulkner 109), Granny stubbornly and bravely follows them north to retrieve what she unfalteringly believes belongs to her. Granny’s blind insistence on the restoration of what was (not simply the material possessions that once belonged to her family) signifies her desire to reestablish the ideals of the Old South that were in place before the war began. Her desire to reclaim traditional Southern ideological practices is troubling, for in addition to supporting a racist system, she is defending a gendered hierarchy that places her in a subservient position. When Granny, Bayard, and Ringo finally locate the Northern troops, Granny “takes on the role of a general, negotiating with Colonel Dick to reclaim the family property” (448). Her behavior is permissible only because of the state of war, which gives Granny license to masculine conduct that would not be tolerated from a woman otherwise during this era. When the note from the colonel is misread, Granny reclaims not just the trunk, two servants, and two mules, but ten trunks, one hundred and ten mules, and “an army” of blacks. Deborah Clarke comments, “Granny’s appropriation of textual authority, for the sake of the Southern patriarchal system, places her in precisely the position which that system has denied her: in control of military men and military language” (234). Thus the war has provided Granny with the opportunity to forgo established gender roles. Granny sees things differently, however. She chalks the boon up to “the hand of God” (Faulkner 112), crediting an intangible (masculine) authority for her deceit. It is this illegal act and the illegal horse trade that follows that place Granny firmly within the bandit tradition.

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As the war continues to rage, Granny’s banditry flourishes, and perceptions of her begin to change. The notorious Ab Snopes, for example, suddenly notes, You got my respect. John Sartoris himself cant tech you. He hells all over the country day and night with a hundred armed men, and it’s all he can do to keep them in cowbait to ride on. And you sit here in this cabin with nothing but a handful of durn printed letterheads, and you got to build a bigger pen to hold the stock you ain’t got no market yet to sell. (122–3)

Snopes serves as Granny’s “middleman”; that is, he is the person who links her “not only to the rest of economy but [also] to the larger network of commerce” (Hobsbawn 93). He sells the stolen animals to the Yankee patrols in the area and keeps a hefty share of the profit for himself. His high regard for Granny establishes that her acts are morally bereft, for Snopes is known throughout Yoknapatawpha County for his corrupt and dishonest behavior. As a result of her continuing success, members of the Union army begin to see Granny in a different light as well. After stealing countless horses and selling them back to the Union Army for a profit, Granny is finally confronted by a lieutenant who says respectfully, “I want you to tell me, as enemy to enemy, or man to man, if you like . . . how many heads of stock you have taken from us” (Faulkner 144). Because of the triumph of Granny’s heists, the lieutenant finally sees her as an equal, a “man,” perhaps even the enemy she is, instead of an old lady to pity and pacify. Despite her gender, Granny fits the traditional definition of bandit put forward by Hobsbawm: “an outsider and a rebel, a poor man who refuses to accept the normal roles of poverty, and establishes his freedom by means of the only resources within reach of the poor— strength, bravery, cunning, and determination” (95). In many ways, Granny justifies stealing livestock by presuming that God is sanctifying and supporting her, a type of abstract self-aggrandizement that excuses the fact that she is stealing from the Northern troops exactly as they stole from her. Granny justifies her behavior by convincing herself that she is working for the reestablishment of the old Southern aristocracy and that her work is sanctioned by God. In an apparent effort to make up for her flagrantly illegal acts, Granny does her best to instill the Southern code of honor into

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Bayard and Ringo. Her determination to teach them the Southern moral code is yet another attempt to preserve the prewar social order, by passing it on to the next generation. In this case, however, the code Granny wishes to pass along is based on nostalgia for the superficial lifestyle of “well-bred” gentlemen and “well-mannered” ladies, an aristocratic vanity that often veiled the hierarchical, exploitative, and violent antebellum system. According to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor may be seen as a people’s theology, a set of prescriptions endowed with an almost sacred symbolism. . . . The chief aim of this notion of honor was to protect the individual, family, group, or race from the greatest dread that its adherents could imagine . . . the fear of public humiliation. (vii–viii)

Wyatt-Brown’s definition suggests that the type of honor Granny endorses is not determined by any sort of fundamental integrity but is rather “defective because it rely[s] on shame to enforce” (Wyatt-Brown 22). Whereas for Su in Sister Gin, shame is constructive because it motivates her to change, Granny’s behavior demonstrates “a type of aggression that lashes out at any obstacle” (Nussbaum 207). Although it is difficult to determine whether Granny’s code of honor is based upon a sense of right and wrong that she has inherited from her ancestors or an internalized fear of public condemnation, her behavior certainly presents a paradox within the story. While on the one hand she insists that the boys pray for forgiveness when they lie or curse, on the other hand she justifies to herself the swindling of horses and mules from the Yankee troops and the endorsement of slavery as a way of life. Such contradictions in values are the result of believing in honor instead of conscience (Wyatt-Brown 14). This type of thinking, Wyatt-Brown writes, is the same philosophy that allowed Southern whites to hold “a race in bondage,” for “to make one’s way . . . in the antebellum South, one had to adopt the principles held sacred by the community” (14). Further, Granny’s criminal behavior becomes integral to the community and the church, which dissuades her from ceasing her actions. Each Sunday, Granny and clergyman Brother Fortinbridge dole out the proceeds from her illegal earnings based on what the community members intend to do with the money (138). Granny judges the actions of the public, disguising her particular values as universal values that structure the community. As noted by Polk,

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Granny’s charity . . . is particularly patronizing and offensive because it requires the dispossessed working folks publicly to accept her bounty and publicly to endure her contumely if for some reason they do not fulfill their part of the contract implied in their acceptance of the bounty . . . Granny’s giving is at best an officious and moralistic form of charity. (Polk 84)

Thus in his portrayal of Granny, Faulkner acknowledges both the “heroic and inglorious aspects” (21) of the Southern code of honor, as well as lauding Granny’s determined refusal to accept the normal roles for women left to manage while their men go off to war. While, on the one hand, Granny might be understood as a feminist icon (by revealing the performative nature of gender and demonstrating that women are as skilled as men in business and finance), on the other hand, Faulkner implies that Granny is unable to transcend the shackles of antebellum brutality. Instead of standing as an emblem for a new type of stronger, more assertive Southern womanhood, Granny becomes a stand-in for the absent Southern patriarch. She does not wish to overturn the dominant power structure but rather inadvertently becomes a part of it, prioritizing her own self-interested values before the health and wellbeing of her family and the larger community. In essence, she works for the return of the impossible, the return of a Southern plentitude built on the backs of slaves. Because of her lack of sexuality, the abstract values that she endorses, and her insistence on restoring the pre-Civil War patriarchal order, Granny is a subject with whom male readers can identity, rather than an object that is gazed upon, acted upon, and feared. In some ways Faulkner is clearly attracted to the idea of the female bandit, but he ultimately destroys Granny when she is shot and killed by one of Grumby’s men. In fact, the scene in which Granny is killed provides further evidence that she has become something of a surrogate male, because the men kill her without a second thought for the “risk of ignominy” associated with violence against females (Wyatt-Brown 36). Finally Granny is no longer misread because of her appearance. She is instead killed, naively maintaining the belief that “Southern men would not harm a woman,” (Faulkner 171) because Grumby and his men do not see Granny as a woman at this instant. Instead, the men see Granny as a threat, just as they would see a man “going into a battle” (153), she appears to them as no different from themselves.

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Granny’s status as surrogate male is also the reason why young Bayard and Ringo do nothing to stop Granny from facing Grumby and his gang in the first place; they perceive her as powerful, as unassailable as Colonel Sartoris, despite her small stature. After Granny’s death, the description of her corpse comes as a shock. Her body is depicted as follows: “a lot of little dry light sticks notched together and braced with cord and now the cord had broken and all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor, and someone had spread a clean and faded calico dress over them” (154). The description of Granny’s marionette-like frame calls to mind the image of a thing that has been purposefully manipulated and controlled; in other words, Faulkner is pointing out the performative nature of this character, how she has been manipulated and controlled by the gendered roles he has constructed for her, as well as by the culture that has shaped and controlled every aspect of her adult life. The calico dress noted in the final line of the passage re-feminizes Granny, stripping her of the final vestiges of strength she exhibited while living. Death has neutralized her power so that all evidence of masculine vigor has disappeared. Thus, although Faulkner has made strides by including a female bandit as well as a woman warrior in this undeniably innovative work, both of his vigilante women are ultimately undermined so that the status quo can continue without challenge.

C Together, Sister Gin, Fried Green Tomatoes, and The Unvanquished demonstrate the progressive development of attitudes about women and justice in the United States as expressed through banditry. June Arnold’s Sister Gin, written in 1975 during the height of the Second Wave women’s movement, depicts one woman’s realization of her multifaceted feminine identity and demonstrates how this knowledge manifests, first through acts of social banditry, and later, through political action. Flagg’s text, published in 1988, shifts back and forth temporally between the Great Depression and the mid 1980s. The story revolves around a lesbian relationship taking place in the era of the Great Depression and features acts of banditry that emphasize personal morality as more important than juridical law. The bravery of Idgie and Ruth in the face of racism, sexism, and class bias inspires change years later in Evelyn Couch, a middle-aged housewife who learns from her predecessors’ example. Chronologically, Faulkner’s is the earliest

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portrayal of female banditry examined herein, although it is the last text examined in this chapter. The novel, published in 1938 and set during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras of the United States, portrays differences between men and women that point to men’s strength and women’s vulnerability. The text treats the banditry committed by Granny and her young charges as anomalous to a time of crisis; that is, Faulkner presents banditry as an outgrowth of war, something necessary for personal survival, rather than as altruistic deeds intended to remedy the status quo. Thus, the quest for justice in The Unvanquished is the most stunted of the quests in the three texts but nevertheless paves the way for texts featuring female banditry to follow. The themes common to texts of female banditry exceed the norms of scholarly representation by constructing and contributing to new modes of expression in fiction. Most important is the way that female banditry in literature, when conducted in the spirit of positive change, has a collective impetus and impact that affects large networks of people and is passed from one generation of women to the next. Such a continuum helps younger generations of women to break free—from outdated social restrictions and from damaging behaviors that promote destructive self-sacrifice—using positive behaviors that help women to fulfill their own potential. The passing on of this new gynocentric morality is a heroic effort that requires much spirit and courage. This process of “mothering morality” is a necessary step for women to allow themselves and those who follow in their footsteps to achieve full self-hood. Banditry is key to this process of selfdevelopment and recovery, because the conflict that is inherent in thwarting the law is often an inevitable step in correcting ideology that privileges men. Moreover, this theme is reflected in the narrative form of the three authors discussed herein, who draw from the work of their predecessors to achieve continued progress in the struggle for justice and equality.

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Conclusions

Throughout this book I have connected acts of female vigilantism to the idea of women’s rights and advancement, both in the world of fiction and in the actual world. Female vigilantism is emerging as a genre of fiction that responds to the central question posited by feminists since the beginning of the feminist movement; that is, how is it possible for women to recognize and respond to their own exploitation when they are immersed within a wholly masculine order? (Irigaray 128). Very often, as theorists such as Catherine MacKinnon have made clear, women are determined by their conditions, by their need for love, approval, and a steady income (138). If this is so, then how is it possible for women to take steps to break free from that oppression? It is my contention that the texts examined in this study each reveal the moment when women come to recognize the extent of their oppression and then refuse it, in radical, illegal, and often system-changing ways. This is a genre of literature that stirs the reader into self-awareness, resists stratifying hierarchies, and demands a feminist jurisprudence that is “accountable to women’s concrete conditions” (249). As discussed, the lone vigilante was a popular trope in America even before the Puritans reached the Atlantic coastline, and its popularity continues in modern culture (with characters such as those portrayed by Bruce Willis in Die Hard, or Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter). In our current society, however, as William Culberson has noted, vigilantism involves people acting for the sake of common interests, even if they are not working in close physical proximity to one another. Such is the case with the collection of texts examined herein. Culberson attests, In a specialized, individualized society there is individualized violence, specialized in its targets. And part of that individual violence is the individual taking matters into his own hands without a defined specialty— ecology, conservation, human rights, and so in— in a new era of vigilantism. (118)

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Although many of the acts of female vigilantism explored in this work are singular, performed in the setting of an isolated farmhouse or within an anonymous high-rise apartment, they are also collective, expressive of the growing conviction that women’s oppression must no longer be tolerated. As a result, female vigilantes in fiction are steadily chipping away at the patriarchy via acts of resistance, rebellion, and outright criminality, and they are doing so en masse. Such acts are “rooted in community needs” (112); that is, they are based on the necessity of meeting the changing face of justice, and so must be understood as collective and thus as a movement— a vigilante movement. Culbertson argues that vigilantism must be cooperative to “open up” society and be constructive; indeed, this study demonstrates that this is what is occurring in female vigilantism in fiction. Chapter One, “The Female Avenger,” takes as its focus fictional women who are driven to commit a single act of illegal violence, to retaliate for crimes committed against them or their loved ones. Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ “Gal Young ‘Un” (1932), and Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House (1965), all feature a female avenger who, after years of oppression in a patriarchal social system, experiences a sudden awareness, or epiphany, that all is not as it should be. In each of these cases the epiphany is brought about by a shocking occurrence that shakes each heroine from her reverie of normalcy. Delia Jones, the protagonist of Hurston’s short story “Sweat,” has a near-death encounter with a poisonous snake that is brought about by her husband. Mattie Syles, the protagonist of Rawlings’ “Gal Young ‘Un,” confronts the grim reality that her new husband has been taking advantage of her, when he brings a young mistress to live in her home. Finally, in Grau’s The Keepers of the House, protagonist Abigail Howland faces down a mob of racist and sexist townsmen, learning in the process that her husband cares more for his career than he does for his family, and that the townspeople she has lived among her entire life care more for one’s skin color and class position than for basic human dignity. The three protagonists seek vengeance for the crimes they have endured and also seek to shrug off the chains of patriarchy that have kept them from experiencing their right to free will. These texts raise the question of whether women’s violent response to violence is ever warranted. Many different points of view exist in response to this question. Perhaps most prominent in feminist studies

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are active proponents of passive resistance, who argue that “it is possible and necessary to work with and refine the practices of legal and welfare agencies and press for reform in procedures adopted by the police and the judiciary” (qtd. in Maynard 118). These reformers believe that violence should never be an option, and that to engage in violence is to adopt the erroneous behavior of the oppressor. Other feminists see women’s violent response to violence in an altogether different light. These feminists are convinced that in some instances passive resistance is not effective in warding off predators or predatory behavior. Martindale, for example, believes that using passive resistance to combat rape and rapists “does not work.” (109). Jeffner Allen takes this conjecture one step further, claiming that nonviolence is a patriarchal construct that has been assigned to women because it is ineffective and self-destructive (qtd. in Martindale 109). She argues that “nonviolence keeps women powerless” and that it forces women to “choose martyrdom and suicide” rather than to resist. Allen writes, Women, constrained to nonviolence, are precluded from claiming a self, a world. The moral imperative established by heterosexual virtue that women are to be nonviolent, established a male-defined goof that is beneficial to men and harmful to women. (qtd. in Martindale 109)

Allen argues that men have burdened women with nonviolence as a defining characteristic because it keeps women in a persistent state of subservience. Finally, there are feminists who believe that the laws in place to protect women are not adequate, and that the definition of self-defense needs to be expanded, so that it includes instances of violence used to protect oneself or ones loved ones. In each extralegal response explored in this study, rebellious and illegal action precipitates women’s freedom. In Chapter One, Delia Jones allows her husband to be killed by a poisonous snake; Mattie Syles burns her philandering husband’s still and car and drives him from her home with a shotgun; Abigail Howland rescues herself and her children from the mob by setting their vehicles alight and then shooting at them as they flee (She additionally causes many of the townspeople financial ruin when she withdraws her financial support from the local businesses that depend on her investments). In all cases, vigilance is the price of freedom. These women are portrayed as courageous enough to publicly expose or retaliate against their

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violators, thus saving themselves, their families, and their offspring from further physical and psychological damage. Traditionally, in literature and in the actual world, conditions for women have been slow to change. Acts that might initially be upheld as representations of justice within the scope of narrative were often re-symbolized to avoid lasting repercussions. In Victorian fiction, for example, heroines who resisted or rebelled against oppression were often driven to commit suicide, for they had no other way to maintain their freedom (e.g., Edna Pontellier from Chopin’s The Awakening). Alternately, such characters were deemed insane (such as the unnamed heroine of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), seen as victims of “hormonal/chemical imbalance,” or considered “sexually promiscuous” and demonic (such as Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, or Bertha Mason from Bronte’s Jane Eyre). Even today, many examples persist of women who when facing a jury are not depicted as active agents upholding justice but are instead disarmed by legalities that deny them their agency, because the resisting body (the woman) is infantilized, demonized, or otherwise not recognized as capable of seeking concrete change. Such bodily controls are legitimized by a court system that deems women’s actions “insane” and then treats the “perpetrators” accordingly. Thus, women are continually and conveniently reinscribed back into the system that drove them to commit crimes in the name of fairness and justice in the first place. This can likely be attributed to society’s fear of women who act outside of the boundaries of women’s ascribed place. For all of these reasons, women’s vigilante fiction deserves further attention. In Chapter Two, “Women Warriors and Women with Weapons,” the focus is on women who battle with weapons, both literally and metaphorically, to combat oppression. There is a special focus, however, on women who break the law by choosing to engage in battle in male disguise, or who otherwise flout the constraints of propriety by writing of such deeds, without actually engaging in vigilantism by breaking the law themselves. In this chapter, language becomes a primary focus, because language is used by women to affect change in both the fictional and actual worlds of American women. Following Paula Gunn Allen, I argue that the patriarchal language system has encouraged male soldiers to bury or sublimate their war experiences by focusing on the

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abstract, while women have been tied to the home front, left to take care of the quantitative without such an escape. These stereotypical and essentializing associations have been widely adopted in war literature. This chapter demonstrates how, as our society evolves, these associations are changing, and how in response, women writers are crafting female soldiers who formulate new relations between their bodies and language, casting women as active subjects and overturning false representations that depict women as being unable to inflict conscious violence. Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1989) and Rita Mae Brown’s High Hearts (1986) are texts in which such symbolic significations become evident; in addition, they are stories in which women’s bodies become metaphoric of larger cultural themes. In Kingston’s version of the legend of Fa Mu Lan, Maxine must literally learn the art of combat to survive. This struggle represents the actual battles in Maxine’s life, in which she struggles to forge a creative identity for herself within a culture that would otherwise require her to become “a wife and a slave” (Kingston 20). Moreover, her creative reinscription of myth and legend provides a behavioral model of empowerment for other American women of Chinese descent. Brown’s High Hearts depicts the bravery of a female soldier who disguises herself as a man and proves herself strong and capable on the battlefield. Within this fiction Brown boldly challenges sexual, racial, and class stereotypes by portraying women who defy social norms in all areas. Her unusual heroine, Geneva Chatfield, makes obvious how gender roles are socially prescribed. Moreover, like Kingston’s heroine, Geneva Chatfield disrupts the patriarchal constructions of womanhood in language, for Geneva fights both for the ideal of preserving a code of honor in which she believes, as well as to be with her husband, whom she dearly loves. Thus, she combines characteristics of both the masculine and the feminine, demonstrating again that gender is variable and performative. As Gilligan has noted, “differences in the body, in family relationships, and in societal and cultural positions . . . make a difference in psychology” (xi). This chapter ultimately reveals that the psychological differences between the sexes are the result of environment and conditioning. Chapter Three, “The Woman Who Snaps, the Woman Who Kills,” provides four examples of women in fiction who commit murder and speculates about whether murder is ever a justifiable response to violence and oppression. In each instance of murder, women are

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the initial victims of extensive violence— physical, emotional, and/ or psychological—that causes them to react in kind. Their violent responses to such treatment free them from the shackles of violent men and/or other violent and damaging patriarchal constraints. But in all cases, the stories end ambiguously, leaving the question of right or wrong unresolved. Building on what is established in previous chapters, these stories demonstrate that characteristics such as passivity, submissiveness, and compliance are not “natural” to women, any more so than attributes of strength and assertiveness are “natural” to men. However, the stories in this chapter also allow us to understand exactly how and why such teachings have been so thoroughly absorbed by women, and how three ordinary women from three very different circumstances manage to break free of such ingrained ideologies. Women are indoctrinated from the time they are very small children with advice about what is appropriate and expected behavior, and they are then rewarded or punished according to how well they adhere to that standard. Such advice is distorted to the point that self-sacrifice becomes the norm (Costello 77). Thus, in the case of the three female vigilante heroines of this chapter, to attain personal freedom, all must unlearn qualities they have been taught since childhood to believe are desirable. In each case, the violent act of murder is the only avenue they find to shatter the chains of propriety. Mukherjee’ s Wife (1975) renovates previous narrative structures concerned with women’s infidelity, by turning her heroine’s anger and frustration outward, instead of inward, toward herself. This act results in the death of her husband, detailing (if not a permissible action) at least an alternative to madness and/or suicide for achieving change. Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917) focuses on the guilt or innocence of Minnie Foster Wright, a woman who strangles her abusive husband in his sleep. As with Wife, this text reveals the case of a woman who, after recognizing the extent of the violence that has been done to her (both directly, as a result of physical violence, and indirectly, because of social mandates that have prevented her from achieving full personhood), responds in kind. In this case, two local women privately exonerate Minnie of her crime, because they recognize the extenuating circumstances that drove Minnie to commit murder. The story points to the biases of a patriarchal justice system and suggests the need for changes in our structure of law. Alice Walker’s short story “How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy” (1982) depicts a similar

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scenario. In this case, race, gender, and social status are the main factors contributing to the young protagonist’s disempowerment, rape, and ongoing sexual and mental abuse. When she ultimately murders the man who exploits her, it is the reader, rather than two neighbor women, who is inclined to feel that justice has been served. Finally, I end my summation of Chapter Three with a quote from Ann Jones, who makes a helpful distinction between “causes” and “motives” for committing murder. She writes, A motive is not the cause of the homicide, but the cause for the sake of which the homicide is committed . . . A wife does not poison her husband because he is drunk . . . she poisons her husband for the sake of a future life in which she will no longer have to contend with his habitual drunkenness and domination. (99)

This distinction can help us to more fully understand the violent impulses of the heroines discussed herein, whether we deem them “right” or “wrong.” Chapter Four, “The Female Bandit/Outlaw,” examines individual acts of resistance as part of a wider political movement. The chapter is a culmination of the themes that have been examined heretofore, especially the idea that works of female vigilantism function collectively to express the inadequacy of laws that exclude, subjugate, or tyrannize people on the basis of gender, class, creed, or color. Sister Gin (1975) by June Arnold, and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1988) by Fannie Flagg achieve in form what their authors advocate in plot—that is, the passing along of revolutionary value systems that are brought to the fore through banditry. In this chapter, female banditry sends the message that the uneven distribution of power in American society will not be tolerated and takes the message to the public arena. Sister Gin uses banditry as a way for women to achieve their totalselves. Su, with the help of other women from The Temple Gang, fights actively for the rights of the traditionally oppressed, first via illegal acts of banditry, and then, as her ideas and authority gain impetus, in a publicly sanctioned political forum. The progressive development of Su’s authority replicates the wider development of women’s fictional plots. Where at one time fiction that featured rebellious women often ended in the heroine’s suicide or madness, texts such as Sister Gin showcase heroines who denounce injustice through words and deeds and reach full personhood as a result. The similar

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thematics of Sister Gin and Fried Green Tomatoes demonstrate how the gynocentric wisdom of earlier works is transmitted and explored by new generations of authors and readers. Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes shows the positive impact that two brave women have on other women. Stories of their bravery lead Evelyn Couch, years later, to reject destructive self-sacrifice and make positive changes that lead to her self-fulfillment. This text, like Sister Gin, features banditry as a social corrective and demonstrates how true heroism and bravery are mandates of ordinary people who refuse to allow injustice to be overlooked, and who thus serve as a model of how our representational norms can be expanded. The Western world prides itself on a system of law that promises liberty and justice for all. Although nations, states, courts, or individuals may occasionally fall short of this ideal, those who are subject to the rule of law must strive to achieve their constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom and justice. Women’s vigilante fiction engages in this fight directly, to ensure that the world will be equitable and just for future generations. This work provides a window into this emerging genre of literature, a genre that extends the possibilities for women’s fictional plots and for women’s lived realities.

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N 

Introduction 1. This term appears to have originated in a poem by Coventry Patmore from 1854, titled The Angel in the House, which cast women as pious, pure, submissive, and devoted to domesticity above all else. The repercussions of this idea are discussed in more detail on page 13 of this chapter. 2. I use the term “she-warriors” throughout this text to refer to vigilante heroines created by women authors. 3. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Geena Davis as Thelma, and Susan Sarandon as Louise. 4. Directed by David Slade and starring Ellen Page. 5. Directed by Neil Jordan and starring Jodie Foster. Chapter One: Great Vengeance and Furious Anger: The Female Avenger 1. In the original French, “L’Incontournable volume.” 2. This reading is borne out by the ending of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, wherein Janie Crawford Woods is declared innocent of the shooting death of her husband, who attacks and attempts to murder her after he is stricken with Rabies. 3. Nevertheless, the members of the poor black Southern community where Sykes and Delia live understand the importance of Delia’s actions and do not bother to label them as crimes. Sykes, in fact, alienates himself from the community as a result of his laziness and fecklessness, while Delia remains within the good graces of her neighbors. 4. Helene Deutsch, author of The Psychology of Woman—A Psychoanalytical Interpretation (1944), attests, “While fully recognising that woman’s position is subjected to external influence, I venture to say that the fundamental identities ‘feminine-passive’ and ‘masculine-active’ assert themselves in all known cultures and races, in various forms and various quantitative proportions” (qtd. in Friedan, Feminine Mystique, Ch 5). Although I disagree with this statement, I include it as evidence that this belief once held widespread currency.

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5. Rawlings is perhaps best known today for her later work, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Yearling (1938) and the autobiographical Cross Creek (1942). 6. Such characters appear in other of Grau’s novels, for example, Roadwalkers (1994), her most recent novel, narrates the story of two homeless black children, who during the Great Depression travel like gypsies across the southern United States in search of food and shelter. 7. This paradox is a microcosm of the dilemma of vigilantism itself: when facing conflict, should a person rely on their personal morality of right and wrong, or should they abide by public law, which can be unjust and slow to change? Chapter Two: Women Warriors and Women with Weapons 1. The middle-class ideology for femininity “developed in post-industrial England and America, [and] prescribed a woman who would be a Perfect Lady, an Angel in the House, contentedly submissive to men, but strong in her inner purity and religiosity, queen in her own realm in the Home” (Showalter 14). 2. Ann Jones writes, “properly understood . . . a motive is not the cause of [a] homicide, but the cause for the sake of which the homicide is committed.” In this chapter, when I speak of the motive for women to engage in armed combat, I am referring to the cause for the sake of which combat is undertaken. Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1980) 99. 3. Flanagan notes that transvestism is “viewed as an adult behavioral fetish, a means of procuring sexual gratification,” while transsexualism is a psychological condition that involves individuals who “identify with the opposite sex and may seek to live as a member of that sex.” Victoria Flanagan, Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature and Film (New York: Rutledge, Taylor & Francis, 2008) 3. 4. One example of this is Spenser’s Britomart from the canonical poem The Faerie Queene (1590). Britomart, disguised as a man, dressed in armor from head to toe, and armed with a phallic sword, fights in the name of Chastity. Spencer got the idea for this character from the fourteenth-century Italian epic poem Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto, which features the female Christian warrior Bradamante. Spenser used the character of Britomart as a tribute to Queen Elizabeth, to justify the rule of an unmarried woman. The legendary Joan of Arc was also purported to be a virgin warrior. In 1429, at the age of 16, Joan donned male clothing and

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6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

173

a sword and mounted a horse to lead the Armagnac army to victory against the English army in Orleans. Joan was a mystic— she identified two female saints and an archangel as the source of the voice compelling her to go to war. Anne Llewellyn Barstow writes, “Joan’s lesson for women is . . . to take themselves seriously . . . but the further message . . . is that women must not assume that their truth is acceptable in the world of male values.” Anne Llewellyn Barstow, Joan of Arc: Heretic, Mystic, Shaman (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986) xvi. Rita Mae Brown was born on November 28, 1944, in Hanover, Pennsylvania, to an unwed mother. She was adopted by Ralph and Julia Brown, a working-class family who lived in Hanover until she was eleven years old, when the family moved to Florida. Brown attended the University of Florida on a full scholarship but was expelled from the school in 1964 for her political activity in the civil rights movement and for her outspoken lesbianism. She went on to receive a PhD in English and Political Science from the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington D.C. and has written more than fifteen novels to date. Harold Woodell, “Rita Mae Brown,” The History of Southern Women’s Literature, ed. Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002). The press was Daughters Inc., founded by June Arnold (see Chapter Four), Bertha Harris, and Charlotte Bunch. Velazquez’s incredible career continued after her husband’s untimely death, when she became a Confederate spy and then published her shocking memoir. DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2002) 178. Quentin Compson, Buck McCaslin, and Thomas Sutpen, for example. The verbena flower that Drusilla wears in her hair is representative of oppositions. Maryanne M. Gobble attests that it has historically been associated with “war and peace, love and death, and politics and domesticity,” and that according to legend, the early Romans declared war by “launching a spear decorated with verbena into the enemy’s territory” Maryanne M. Gobble, “The Significance of Verbena in William Faulkner’s ‘an Odor of Verbena’ ” Mississippi Quarterly 53.4 (2000). 572. The portrait of Colonel Sartoris in The Unvanquished is closely modeled upon that of Colonel William Clark Falkner. (Rubin, Louis D. “Discovery of a Man’s Vocation.” Faulkner: Fifty Years after the Marble Faun. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1976).

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C T : T W W S, T W W K 1. The fact that Beloved is unable to forgive Sethe for what she has done suggests, in a double entendre, that restitution can never adequately make up for the harms done to those forced to endure slavery. 2. Yet such an act would still be problematic, for it would, in the eyes of the slave owner and his men, affirm their opinion of blacks as “savage.” 3. I acknowledge that this might be argued otherwise in certain extreme cases, but I believe it is the exception rather than the rule. 4. Mikolchak argues that such desires “do not have a name,” because they are articulated within the patriarchal language structure that has no need to grant them expression. 5. Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers” are examples of texts that invoke the metaphor of the caged bird to represent the restricted lives of women. This metaphor was especially common in the nineteenth century. 6. Perhaps arguably, because the reader is not witness to the death of Edna Pontellier. Rather, she swims out to sea until her arms and legs grow tired, and we are left to intuit the ending. 7. Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) was born in Davenport, Iowa, and graduated from Drake University. She is the author of more than 50 short stories, nine novels, eleven plays, and a biography; she won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. C F: T F B/O 1. Lesbian feminist June Arnold was born in South Carolina but spent most of her life in Texas. She attended Vassar College and Rice University. After getting married and having four children, Arnold moved to New York City to become a writer. There she wrote and published her first novel, Applesauce (1966). Subsequently, Arnold moved to Vermont, where, with novelist Bertha Harris and political theorist Charlotte Bunch, she founded Daughters Inc. Press in 1973. In its five brief years of existence, Daughters Inc. published thirty titles, most notably Rita Mae Brown’s groundbreaking Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Harris’s innovative Lover (1976). The press also published Arnold’s next two novels, The Cook and the Carpenter, a Novel by the Carpenter (1973) and Baby Houston (1987) (published posthumously). Arnold died at age fifty-five in Houston in 1982. Carla Williams, “Arnold, June,” glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay,

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3.

4.

5. 6.

175

Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture (December 14, 2002), March 10, 2009 <www.glbtq.com/literature/arnold_j.html>. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary notes that the etymology of the word “fertile” is from the Latin “fertilis” meaning fruitful, which is akin to “ferre” meaning “to bear.” The negative connotations of being infertile are evident in this meaning— to be infertile is to be unproductive or unable to produce. To be unable to “bear” has multiple connotations that are also relevant. All of these meanings are countered in this text, which positions Su as creative and able to bear meaning only after the onset of menopause. “fertile.” MerriamWebster Online Dictionary. 2009. Merriam-Webster Online. March 15, 2009. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fertile. Justitia, or the figure of Lady Justice, is often depicted with a set of weighing scales typically suspended from her left hand, scales that measure the strengths of a case’s support and opposition. She is also often seen carrying a double-edged sword in her right hand, symbolizing the powers of reason and justice, a sword that may be wielded either for or against any party. Emeritae: A woman who is retired but retains an honorary title corresponding to that held immediately before retirement. The Free Dictionary. Accessed February 17, 2009. Last updated 2003. Thanks to Pallavi Rastogi for pointing out that “skillet” contains the word “kill.” The fact that the name of the patriarch of this story is Colonel John Sartoris is evidence of Faulkner’s play on the idea of sartorial dress codes and the theme of cross dressing that is prevalent within this text.

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I 

abortion 107, 113 Abrahams, Roger D. 26 Absher, Tom 82 abuse 28, 94–95, 117, 123, 125, 169 Adie, Kate 74–75 ageism 130 Aisenberg, Nadya 43, 59–60, 75, 79, 141 Allen, Jeffner 58, 90, 165 Allen, Paula Gunn 59–60, 75, 79 Althusser, Louis 116 American women 2–3, 10, 55, 93, 108, 166 angel 4, 10, 171–72 domestic 7, 56 Aristotle 38 armor 66, 70, 72, 172 army 70, 89 Confederate Army 74–75, 81 Arnold, June 9, 129, 133, 135, 137–38, 141–42, 145–46, 160, 169, 173–74 Sister Gin 9, 129, 132, 143–5, 147, 149, 160, 169–70 assault 26 sexual 14–15, 93 authority 26, 58, 66, 70, 77, 114, 131, 155–56 phallic 30–31, 124 autobiography 23, 64–66 avenger 17–18, 21, 31, 38, 40, 87, 100, 102, 141, 150 virtuous 8, 17–19 avenging female 7, 19, 28, 32, 51, 140

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Baker, Charles 88 Bakhtin, Mikhail 34 banditry 9–10, 130, 132–33, 135–36, 140–41, 144, 154, 160–61, 169 acts of 145 illegal acts of 140, 169 bandits 2, 9–10, 80, 129–32, 136–37, 141, 146–51, 154–57, 159–61, 169 American 130 women 9, 129 Barstow, Anne Llewellyn 173 batterers 21, 24, 116 Ben-Zvi, Linda 116 Bendel-Simso, Mary M. 117–18 Berglund, Jeff 153 bird 118–19 black community 24, 146 black men 11, 28, 84 black women 11, 22, 26, 28, 31, 40, 42, 79, 97, 120–21, 123, 143, 152, 177 black women’s bodies 79 blackness 153 Blanton, DeAnne and Lauren M. Cook 173 body, female 6, 20, 26–27, 32, 40, 45, 52–53, 58, 61, 116 bravery 46, 70, 88, 131, 153, 157, 167, 170 breasts 105 Britomart 8, 172 Brooks, Cleanth 85 Brown, Gillian 20 Brown, Richard Maxwell 29, 130

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186

INDEX

Brown, Rita Mae 61, 73–74, 76–77, 79–82, 84, 90, 130, 167, 173 High Hearts 8, 55, 60, 73–74, 77, 80, 84, 91, 167 Rubyfruit Jungle 73, 174 Bukoski, Anthony 45 Butler, Judith 78 care giving 10, 123 caregiver 39, 156 castration, symbolic 77, 88 Cheung, King-Kok 66–67 Chew, Martha 28, 73 Chinese women 65 Chinese American 63–64, 72–73, 167 Chopin, Kate 3, 104, 108–10, 114, 166, 174 The Awakening 3, 52, 104, 109, 112–13, 166, 174 Civil War 74–75, 130, 154–55, 173 Cixous, Hélène 49–50, 58–59, 93, 106, 114, 119, 126 Clarke, Deborah 85, 87–88, 155–56 clothes 22–23, 70, 84, 146 collective consciousness 51, 53 color, women of 122, 125 communication 49, 91, 119 nonverbal 119 community 18, 29, 39, 41, 43, 45–46, 48–49, 53, 83–84, 116, 131, 138, 140–41, 143, 145, 147, 158, 171 complicity, women’s 145 conflict 7, 29, 41, 45, 52, 58, 95, 117, 161, 172 social 40 container 20–21, 25, 34, 48, 142 container metaphor 25 control 11–12, 20, 24, 43, 53, 56, 63, 76, 82, 110–13, 115–16, 121, 123–24, 142, 156 women relinquish 110

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Costello, Judy 63, 94, 151, 168 courage 30, 57, 62, 85–86, 125, 134, 150, 154, 161 crime 9, 11, 17, 19, 29, 31–32, 94, 96–98, 115, 118, 125, 129–31, 140, 147, 151, 153–54, 164, 166, 168, 171 criminals 5, 7, 131, 141–42 cross dressing 6, 68–70, 76, 78, 91 Culberson, William C. 5, 18–19, 28–29, 163 cultural contexts 12 culture 13, 49, 59, 66, 71, 73, 103, 119, 126, 134, 160, 167, 171 de Beauvoir, Simone 107 death 14, 22, 27, 31, 43, 52, 57, 62–63, 71, 96, 99–100, 102, 107, 112, 114–15, 160, 168, 173–74 symbolic 49, 63 defense 7, 25, 151–52 Delaney, Janice, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth 135 demons 129, 141 Deutsch, Helene 171 dignity 55, 110, 139–40 disempower 103, 125 disguise 8, 68–70, 74–76, 78, 167 dominance 12, 24, 52, 56, 94–95, 135 Dong, Lan 72 Eagleton, Terry 34 Edwards, Louise 68 elderly 140, 143 emotions 38, 55, 58, 108–09, 135, 139 empathy 117–18 empowerment 7, 95, 130, 167 new 6, 32 personal 8, 19 women’s 144 Entzminger, Betina 2

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INDEX

essentialism 57–58 euthanasia 96, 102 extralegal action 2, 21, 53, 95, 125–26, 133, 145 Fa Mu Lan see Mulan failure 21, 46, 50, 89, 109 family 2, 20, 25, 40–45, 48, 61–62, 65, 67, 70, 76, 80, 86, 98–99, 116–17, 123, 132, 143–44, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158–59, 164, 166, 173 home 44, 48 Family Violence Prevention Fund 93 Faulkner, William 10, 80–90, 130, 154–57, 159–61, 173, 175 Absalom, Absalom 155 Flags in the Dust 155 The Unvanquished 10, 80, 130, 154–55, 160–61, 173 fear 14–15, 20, 24, 29, 45, 88, 94, 102, 111, 113, 117, 119, 133, 138–39, 141, 144, 150, 153, 158 fear of women 142, 166 female characters 16, 39, 74, 76–77, 81, 115, 154 female container 34–35 feminine 7, 11, 13, 22, 32, 35–36, 50, 59, 67, 70, 72, 76, 78, 81–2, 85–88, 146–47, 155, 167 attributes 81–82, 87, 89 behavior 69, 95, 126 characteristics 9, 82–83 power 32, 87–88 traits 12, 78–79 voice 119 femininity 3, 6, 10–12, 24, 30, 56, 59, 69, 85, 90–91, 107, 172 feminism 11–12, 109, 133 feminists 14, 149, 163, 165 Fictional World Theory 67

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187

Flagg, Fannie 9, 15, 144–46, 152–54, 160, 169–70 Fried Green Tomatoes 129, 134, 139–40, 144–45, 152, 154, 160, 169 Flanagan, Victoria 32, 68–69, 76, 78, 172 Flaubert, Gustave 110, 114 Madame Bovary 104, 107, 109 free will 126, 133, 143, 150, 164 freedom 3, 15–16, 45, 53, 63–64, 69, 75, 81, 104–05, 112, 116, 120, 131, 133, 144, 156–57, 165–66, 170 French, Peter A. 5, 17–19, 31, 38, 99–100, 141 Freud, Sigmund 136 concept of doubling 136 Garber, Marjorie 69, 71, 85 Garcia, A. M. 11 Garner, Margaret 98 gender 6–7, 12, 22, 27, 30, 45, 57, 66, 69–70, 77–78, 85–86, 88, 91, 115–16, 121, 124–25, 148, 153, 155–57, 159, 167, 169 gender roles 7, 22, 36, 51, 70, 77–78, 156, 167 traditional 61, 77 gendered roles 96, 160 Gilbert, Sandra M. 49 Gilligan, Carol 60, 67, 167 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 3, 121, 166 “The Yellow Wallpaper” 3, 121, 166 girls 11, 39, 63, 65, 68, 71, 74, 79, 97, 99, 105, 107, 121, 123, 138, 142–43 Glaspell, Susan 9, 97, 114–15, 117–19, 168, 174 “A Jury Of Her Peers” 114 Gobble, Maryanne M. 86, 173 God 23, 25, 157, 179 government 18, 31, 96 Grana, Sheryl J. 24, 116, 119

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188

INDEX

Grau, Shirley Ann 7, 19, 39–42, 44–45, 47, 49–50, 89, 164 The Keepers of the House 7, 19, 39, 40, 50, 52–53, 89, 139, 164 Greek warrior goddesses 2 grotesque 34–35, 111 grotesque bodies 35 gun 18, 57, 124–25, 151 pistols 86 Harbison, Sherrill 85 Heberle, Renée 97 Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 4, 15 Heinzelman, Susan Sage 10 hero 59 heroines 3–4, 6–9, 12, 15, 19, 21, 49, 53, 55, 59, 61, 67–68, 71, 74, 81–82, 90, 93, 95–97, 104, 110, 112, 114, 116, 126, 130, 154, 164, 166–67, 169 adulterous 114 heroism 7, 10, 62, 144, 150–51 Heyward, Carter 13 hierarchy 24, 29, 39, 50, 88, 133, 152, 154 Hobsbawm, Eric 18, 131, 147–48, 157 home 6, 10, 14, 19–27, 29, 32–35, 37, 39–43, 45, 48, 52–53, 57, 72, 76, 81, 84, 86, 93, 98, 101–02, 108, 115–18, 121, 142, 144, 164–65, 172 ancestral 48, 50, 53 family’s 45 husband’s 106 protagonist’s 25, 53 homelessness 14, 93 homicide 169, 172 honor 57, 59–61, 67, 75, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 131, 157–59 hooks, bell 11, 57 house 20, 22, 24–26, 30, 33–34, 38–40, 42–45, 48, 50, 52–53, 64, 81, 89, 115–16, 139, 142, 171–72

9780230110908_10_ind.indd 188

housekeeper 37, 44, 121 housewife 9, 108–09, 111, 160 Hua Mulan see Mulan Hurston, Zora Neale 7, 19, 21–24, 26–33, 52, 123, 151, 164, 171 Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography 23 “Sweat” 7, 19, 21, 24, 26, 29, 31–33, 45, 52, 123, 151, 164 Their Eyes Were Watching God 28, 171 illegal acts 2, 5, 69, 155–57 illegal violence 8, 19, 164 inaction 31 India 103, 107, 109, 112, 114 inequity 97, 120, 126, 143 infanticide 96, 102 injustice 1, 7, 19, 38, 51, 53, 70, 98, 101–02, 126, 131, 140, 144, 149, 169–70 correct 140, 144, 150 Inness, Sherrie A. 65 Irigaray, Luce 20, 27, 30, 51, 58–59, 61, 163 irony 83, 105 isolation 5, 116 Jackson, Stevi 123 Jacoby, Susan 2, 7, 17 Jones, Ann 15, 94, 113, 117, 126, 169, 172 Jones, Anne Goodwyn 155 jury 118–19, 166 justice 2, 4, 13, 19, 21–22, 28, 40–41, 53, 56, 90, 95, 97, 101, 118, 120, 125–26, 131, 140, 148, 150, 154, 160–61, 164, 166, 169–70, 175 vigilante 1, 6, 8, 32 Kelly, Liz 14 killers 2, 124 women who kill 93–96, 117, 126 killing 9, 100–01, 120, 168, 183

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INDEX

Kingston, Maxine Hong 60–62, 64–68, 71–74, 81–82, 84, 90, 150, 167 The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts 8, 55, 60–62, 64–66, 69, 73, 91, 150, 167 Kinser, Brent E. 33 Kissel, Susan 46 Lacan, Jacques 58–59 Ladd, Barbara 11 language 24, 48, 56, 58–59, 67, 73, 91, 109, 119, 166–67 language system 56, 58–59, 119 laughter 49, 89 law 3, 5–7, 14, 17, 19, 25, 27, 29, 42, 49, 70, 97–99, 116–18, 120, 122–23, 125–26, 129–30, 138, 142, 144–48, 160–61, 165–66, 168–70, 172 lawyer 5, 47–48, 120–24 legal recourse 2, 19, 31 lesbianism 132–33, 136, 138 Lips, Hilary M. 11–12 Lizzie Thynne 138 Locke, John 18, 31, 141 love 61, 67, 75, 77, 80, 86, 91, 98, 101, 108, 113, 123, 136, 151–52, 163, 173 Lowe, John 28 loyalty 45, 57, 67–68, 123, 152 MacDonald, Myra 119 MacKinnon, Catherine A. 10–11, 83, 98–99, 112, 116, 122, 125, 163 madness 3, 86, 88–89, 95, 97, 168–69 Marcus, Jane 132, 136, 143 marriage 10, 23, 30, 43, 46, 72, 75–76, 89, 104–08, 110–12, 117, 119 Martindale, Kathleen 14, 58, 74, 90, 103, 123, 165

9780230110908_10_ind.indd 189

189

masculine 6, 12–13, 22, 25, 32, 36, 50, 59, 67, 70, 72, 79, 82–83, 87–89, 91, 95, 156, 167 masculinity 10–12, 69, 76, 84, 155, 181 maternal 37, 39, 42, 77, 82, 144 Maynard, Mary 11, 14, 165 menopause 130, 132–36, 144, 175 menstruation 62, 71 metaphor 25–26, 35, 45, 63, 112, 116, 118, 121, 132–33, 174 Mikolchak, Maria 104, 109–11, 174 mirroring 136–7 miscegenation 40 Mitchell, Juliet 13 money 22, 52, 100, 121–22, 142, 158 monsters 95 moral dilemmas 60 morality 3, 25, 31, 63 Morrison, Toni 26, 96, 99–101, 182 Beloved 96, 98–99, 101–02, 174 mortality 60 Mother Nature 43 Mothering-morality 10, 130, 136–37, 145, 161 Motomura, Koji 87 Mukherjee, Bharati 9, 96, 102– 03, 105–07, 110, 168 Wife 9, 102–04, 109, 114, 120–21, 168 Mulan 64–65, 67–68, 72–73, 167 murder 9, 32, 41, 57, 91, 95–101, 104, 113–15, 117, 120, 125– 26, 151–53, 167–69, 171 murderesses 94 Murphy, Jeffrie 17 narrator 39, 52, 62, 121–25, 137–38, 152 nature 36, 43, 57, 59, 70–71, 74, 155 performative 159–60

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190

INDEX

Noe, Marcia 115 nonviolence 9, 56–58, 62–63, 70, 90, 123, 125, 151, 165 Nussbaum, Martha C. 158 O’Connor, Thomas 5 Oleksy, Elzbieta 41 Olsen, Tillie 3 Yonnondio 3 opposition 29, 76, 136, 138, 155, 173, 175 oppression 2–3, 9, 13, 91, 97, 110, 114, 121, 123, 126, 144, 150–51, 163–64, 166–67 outlaws 18, 131, 147 ownership 27, 44, 101 Parker, Pamela Lorraine 46 passive resistance 97, 123, 165 patriarchal justice system 119, 168 patriarchy 11–13, 39, 51, 56, 58, 68–69, 113, 134–35, 148, 164–65 Pavel, Thomas G. 65, 67 peace 73, 82, 84, 173 Pearson, Patricia 14 personal identity 21–22, 53 personal transformation 51–52 personhood 3–4, 60, 74, 82, 107, 133, 135, 168–69 Peterson, Christopher 98 phallus 58 Pipher, Mary 107 Plath, Sylvia 3 The Bell Jar 3 plot 1, 4, 15, 50, 66, 94, 104, 143, 169 wifely adultery 104 women’s 3 women’s fictional 169–70 women’s literary 2 Polk, Noel 82, 84–85, 158–59 power 8, 10–11, 13–14, 19, 21–27, 29, 35, 39, 48, 52, 55–58, 64, 70–73, 87, 91, 94, 96, 103, 107, 116, 123, 125,

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129, 132, 134–35, 139, 149, 152–53, 160, 175 social 42, 48 uneven distribution of 134, 169 power dynamics 59, 66, 124 powerlessness 33, 46, 55, 58, 63, 121, 124, 145–46, 165 Powers, Peter Kerry 23 Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman 33 Price, Joshua 20 primitivism 42–44, 152 protection 6, 34, 36, 63, 72, 96, 100, 120, 123, 126, 151 punish 21, 44, 47, 53, 100, 102, 142–43 punishment 2, 8, 17–19, 31–32, 50, 62, 100, 117, 141 purity 10, 70–71, 141 queens 2, 8, 10, 172 Quinby, Lee 73 Rabine, Leslie W. 66 race 6, 11, 45, 49, 56, 79, 89, 121–22, 148, 152–53, 155, 158, 169, 171 rage 46, 57, 121, 123, 136, 143, 157 rape 120–22, 141–43, 169 rapists 122–23, 141–42, 165 Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan 7, 19, 32–35, 37–39, 52–53, 164, 172 “Gal Young ‘Un” 7, 19, 32–39, 52–53 Rawls, John 13 realist texts 7, 94–95, 125 reality 20, 37–38, 60, 65–67, 83, 106, 108, 110, 122, 146 realization, woman’s 160 redemption 63, 90 relationship 13, 36, 39, 42–43, 60, 83, 116, 120, 122–24, 131, 136–37, 139, 152 representations 11, 22, 49, 53, 56, 69–71, 91, 117, 130, 135, 152–53, 166

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INDEX

resistance 2–3, 5, 7, 52, 94, 109, 123, 138–39, 164 individual acts of 9, 169 women’s 94 retaliate 8, 19, 164–65 retribution 19, 31, 86–87, 100 revenge 2, 7, 17, 19, 25, 48, 51–52, 73, 100, 124, 131 women’s 2 Rich, Adrienne 130, 137 rights 105, 112, 144, 151, 169 women’s 5, 99, 163 Rockler, Naomi 152 Rosoff, Betty 58 Rubin Jr., Louis D. 88 Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. 100 Saunders, Martha 14 Schipper, Mineke 20, 34 Schlueter, Paul 40–42 Seidel, Kathryn Lee 26 self-care 10, 137, 148–49 self-defense 19, 63, 94–95, 123, 131, 151, 165 self-sacrifice 55–56, 62, 83, 89, 94–95, 103, 113–14, 126, 139, 148, 168 sex 7, 12, 28, 58, 78, 87, 89, 112–13, 122–23, 135, 154, 167, 172 sexuality 27, 30, 56–57, 68, 70–71, 91, 112, 133, 145, 159 shame 88, 134–35, 141, 158 she–warrior 7, 56, 67, 83 Showalter, Elaine 10, 172 Simmons, Diane 62, 68 skillet 25, 151–52, 175 slavery 11, 79, 98–101, 158 slaves 38, 64, 159 Slotkin, Richard 124, 131 Smith, Sidonie 66 snake 21, 29–31, 164–65 social constructions 91 social dysfunction 35, 40 social order 3–4, 29, 32, 44, 129, 158

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191

society 2, 4, 8, 12–13, 19, 29, 33, 35, 39–40, 51, 53, 65, 70, 80, 90, 94, 96, 113–14, 117, 132, 135, 167 soldiers 18, 59–60, 72, 75, 77, 80, 82, 155 Southern womanhood 79 assertive 159 new 154 Southern Women’s Literature 173 Springer, Kimberly 79 Stacey, Jackie 12 status quo 1–2, 28, 82–83, 95, 160–61 stereotypes 6, 11, 79–80, 85, 95, 142 subordination 12, 87, 103 suicide 3, 62, 95–97, 102, 114, 166, 168 surrender 9–10, 29, 55, 80 Sweeny, Megan 101 swordswoman 73 symbol 20, 29–30, 87, 108, 118 Tarr, Rodger L. 32–33, 39 terror 18, 24, 119 threat 23, 28–29, 65, 96, 123–24, 159 threshold 21, 53 Thynne, Lizzie 138 tradition 51, 71, 81, 96, 103–04, 121, 131, 140 transcend 59–60, 159 transgress 48, 69–70, 155 transvestism 68–69, 172 trial 107, 115, 151, 153 truth 13, 49–50, 67, 74, 131, 173 Tung, Charlene 79 Twine, Richard T. 57 unhappiness 111, 133–34, 149 Union Army 155, 157 Union soldiers 155–56 United States 2–3, 8, 14, 73–74, 93, 103, 107, 112, 130, 143, 145, 160–61

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192

INDEX

values 12, 24, 40–41, 52, 61, 63, 84, 87, 129, 137, 142–43, 150, 158–59 vengeance 2, 5, 7, 17, 19, 31, 40, 48, 50, 67, 73, 96, 100, 102, 129, 141, 164 woman’s 2 victimization, women’s 127 victims 11, 93–95, 131, 140, 166 victory 70, 72, 173 vigilante acts 8, 15, 63, 96, 102, 141, 145, 163–64 vigilantes 3, 5–6, 8, 14 vigilantism 3–6, 15, 17–18, 29, 97–99, 102–04, 129, 138, 145, 154, 163–64, 166, 172 destructive 8, 18 violence 7–8, 11, 14–15, 18–20, 51, 55, 60, 64, 79, 87–88, 90–91, 93–97, 105, 116, 119, 122, 151, 159, 164–65, 167–68 domestic 57, 93–94 emotional 14, 53, 93 gendered 125 household 24 physical 4, 9, 15, 38, 104, 116, 155, 168 retributive 39, 86 women’s 14, 96 virgin 34, 71, 106, 149, 172 Walker, Alice 9, 26, 97, 120, 122– 23, 125, 168 “How Did I Get Away With Killing One Of The Biggest Lawyers In The State? It Was Easy” 9, 120, 168 Wall, Cheryl A. 22–24, 98 warrior woman 8, 55, 60–66, 68–69, 71, 73, 80–81, 85, 150, 160, 167 warrior women 2, 57–58, 61, 64, 71–73, 80 water 43, 62–63, 70, 98

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weapons 8, 25, 55, 57, 72, 91, 95, 122, 166, 172 wedding 84, 86, 106 Wheelwright, Julie 70–71 whip 25, 30 whiteness 24, 45, 152 Whitford, Margaret 20 widow 33–34 wife 2, 9, 22, 27–28, 36, 46–47, 50, 64, 68, 71–72, 76–77, 102–03, 109–10, 112, 114–15, 120–21, 168–69 Wild West 1 Williams, Carla 174 witches 141–42, 147 woman average 33 changed 144 common 80 elderly 145 elderly servant 152 false 50 feminine 10 legendary 42 loose 148 mother- 109 newlywed 107 situated 59 slave 79 sound 34 unmarried 172 woman-as-victim 94, 125 woman warrior’s arsenal 57 womanhood 11, 38–39, 76, 85, 95, 122, 136, 167 actual 36 assertive 56 womanly activity 25 womanly behavior 6 woman’s body 9, 35 womb 25, 34, 39, 126 women abused 125 battered 21 fictional 60

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INDEX

oppress 12–13 real 55, 61, 63 strong 3, 84 violent 96 younger 136, 149 younger generations of 13, 161 women writers 1, 3, 133, 167 women’s fiction 2–3, 15, 121 women’s sphere 3 Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia 71

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193

Woodell, Harold 173 Workman, Thom 58 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram 158–59 Yaeger, Patricia 35, 43, 89, 111, 136 “Amphora Princess” 35, 86, 89 Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Womens’s Writing 35, 43, 74

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