Female Outcasts: Essays on American Novel

By Yasemin Güniz Sertel

This book analyses the cultural and social subordination of women in American society as represented in the American novelistic tradition in the context of sociological, psychological, and historical perspectives peculiar to the period. The selection of the novels has been based on a wide range of different cultural and historical periods, which enables the reader to witness the general outcast position of woman as depicted in the American novel and her subordination in this society by way of some historical and cultural forces. The endeavor has been to illustrate how, from the earliest examples of the American novel depicting colonial life to the contemporary ethnic and minority novels, the persistent negative image as social stereotypes are imposed on women as an unavoidable and unalterable destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496945969

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© 2014 Yasemin Güniz Sertel. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/09/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4597-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4598-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4596-9 (e)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. An Outcast of Puritan Society: Hester Prynne

Chapter 2. Daisy Miller: An Assessment of the New Woman

Chapter 3. Winesburg, Ohio: Women under the Thumb of Tradition

Chapter 4. The Bluest Eye: A Victim of Child Abuse and Rejection

Chapter 5. Loving in the War Years: Resistance of Chicana Militancy

Conclusion

Bibliography

In the memory of my precious

grandfather,S.Ö.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deepest thanks go to my precious grandfather S.Ö. whose guidance and support have enlightened me throughout my life. I will never forget him and his memory. I owe a particular debt to my mother, my husband and my children who encouraged and motivated me to complete this study. I would also like to thank my teachers and colleagues. My last thanks go to my pretty cats who never left me alone during my tiresome studies.

INTRODUCTION

The perspectives and positioning of members of human societies and their representation as characters in works of fiction are shaped in the main by the social and cultural norms, customs, traditions and general outlook peculiar to that social entity. Accordingly, when a culture is the issue of the material and mental hegemony of a patriarchal system, then the social and cultural norms, customs and manners in question inevitably become products of the patriarchal ideology. The universal subordination of women to men in various cultures has its roots in this widespread and notorious female destiny. Taking that universal relegation as its starting point, this study tries to make an exploration and assessment of the cultural and social subordination of women in American society as represented in the American novelistic tradition in the context of sociological, psychological, and historical perspectives peculiar to the period. The selection of the novels has been based on a wide range of different cultural and historical periods, which enables the reader to witness the general outcast position of woman as depicted in the American novel and her subordination in this society by way of some historical and cultural forces. To discuss this significant issue of the obsessive representation of woman as an outcast in the works of both male and female American fictionists, it is essential first to see that these writers were affected by the social and cultural climate of the historical period in question, and next to look deep into the negative images of women that have persisted as social stereotypes in the depiction of fictional female characters – notwithstanding the actual improvement of women’s condition throughout history. In this study, the endeavor has been to illustrate how, from the earliest examples of the American novel depicting colonial life to the contemporary ethnic and minority novels, this persistent image is imposed on women as an unavoidable and unalterable destiny. On the other hand, it would be unfair to ignore the hard endeavors of individual women to obliterate this negative image – under different circumstances and in their different roles varying from wife to mistress, from mother to daughter, from the healer and savior to the witch, and from the sex object to the liberated one. Yet, even granting that in their struggle some have been successful to a certain extent, those achievements have hardly changed women’s enduring lot in society as victims of prejudice and as social outcasts.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) as the first case in point in this study takes the reader to the ambiance of the Colonial period, to the heart of a New England town which beats with the doctrines of Puritan ideology, marking Hester Prynne as the first female outcast of the American novel by the use of the most striking of allegories; the Letter A, standing mainly for the sin of adultery. The novel first portrays Hester Prynne as living with her small daughter in a woodland hut out of town, doomed to a punishment of physical alienation meted out to her by the magistrates of Puritan society. Both this locale where she chooses to live and the way she dresses are at odds with the conventions of the society of which she is a member. Her condemnation by that society due to her adulterous relationship with Arthur Dimmesdale, one of the town magistrates, becomes testimony to Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of woman’s otherness to man as this otherness is further illustrated in the binary oppositions of men/women and culture/nature. Hester Prynne’s otherness in the Puritan society is due to her gender and can be traced back to her pre-marriage days, becoming the cause of her alienation and the reason for her punishment in the form of ostracism, whereas Dimmesdale, the male counterpart of the same adulterous relationship is totally ignored. While Hester loses respectability in the eyes of her society as a sinful adulteress, she gains strength from her motherly role trying to educate her daughter Pearl, who is also stigmatized as a social outcast. Alienated from the patriarchal Puritan society which stands for culture in its broadest sense, Hester Prynne’s affinity with nature becomes a new source of power for her as she evinces an inclination to participate in woman-centered spiritual communities, though, when actually invited, she refuses to accompany the renowned witch Mistress Hibbins in their rituals. (No wonder, then that Hester should become a figure of inspiration to the latter day New Age Spiritualities) The commonality of Hester Prynne with the Goddess-based religious systems and witchcraft as an alternative to the male-based Puritan religious system depicts her in the image of a Goddess and gives her further strength as she becomes the embodiment of the female inner knowledge, and a lover of life, love, Nature and the human body with all its inclinations and passions. Hester’s exclusion from culture and her further affinity with nature eventually bring about her transformation from sinner to healer in the process of concocting cures for those in their sick-bed. She also becomes productive with her ingenious needle-work, although, especially in her position as female outcast, hers is merely an artifice of skill, an inferior form of expression ranking below the great achievements of male artistry. Although belittled in the eyes of patriarchal ideology, the new image that Hester Prynne acquires in the town society helps her to avert and transcend her subordinate position. In her new image she becomes a reformer and an insightful guide for women, an achievement which further points to women’s developing consciousness. Yet, this change in the consciousness of women does not affect any betterment in the convictions and practices of the local Puritan patriarchy and Hester Prynne remains the first and foremost female outcast of the American novel.

Henry James’ Daisy Miller: A Study (1878), which is classified as a novella, is the second work in this study that takes the reader to an ambiance of conflict, this time between the American upstarts called the ‘nouveau riche’ visiting Europe as tourists and an older generation of American expatriates who have become Europeanized, embracing the long-established aristocratic social decorum of the Old World. This cultural conflict makes the female protagonist of the novella Daisy Miller an outcast, judged by the high social and cultural standards of the European elite, embodied in the identities of Winterbourne and his aunt Mrs. Costello. Daisy Miller’s outcast position is intensified by the sense of class distinctions as well as ideological differences, since she embodies the sub-culture controlled by the conservative discourse of the main culture formulated by the Europeanized social elite. However, Daisy Miller is further outcast-ed due to her gender role, which should be studied as a cross-cultural phenomenon. Hence, her freedom of manners proceeding from the cultural transformation of American society is deemed improper by the standards of the highly conventional and conservative social decorum of European aristocracy. Thus, marked a deviant of the aristocratic Victorian patriarchal norms, Daisy Miller is presented as a shameless coquette and a hardened flirt, quite free in her conduct toward men. Actually however, she is only the pure and innocent American Nice Girl in the mythic structure of Henry James’ portrayal of women. Daisy Miller is deemed a deviant not only because she infringes the patriarchal norms: her exclusion gets intensified by the many differences she has with the women of local high aristocracy in respect of education, age, and attractiveness. A significant aspect of the novella is the adoption of several sexual metaphors to imply the oppressed condition of women. As obedience, passivity, silence, and compliance to being watched over and controlled become proper female manners defining women’s gender role, these in fact also become the means of their oppression. Helen Cixous has related female hysteria to women’s imposed silence, and actually, in the novella we find the character Mrs. Costello exemplifying the standards of social propriety in her habitual silence and passivity, while her constant headaches can be diagnosed as an unconscious reaction of hysterics to the restrictions of her social milieu. As opposed to Mrs. Costello, Daisy Miller, reputed with her free manners, readily becomes an active participant of conversations which she enriches with her cheerful peals of laughter. Moreover, she does not consent to become the object of visual pleasure to male gazes. On the contrary, she not only takes pleasure in exhibiting herself, but also amuses herself with the opportunities of the female gaze. In this respect, she transcends the cultural image imposed on her by subverting the expectations of the social milieu and thus attains her autonomy in her new authentic image. As a matter of fact, from a feminist perspective, the tendency to read this male-authored text by tracing in it the subversive role of Daisy Miller can also be interpreted as the obliteration of the image previously imposed on her. Yet, despite the novel’s investment in the authenticity of this new image, Daisy’s symbolic death at the end of the story marks her inevitable destiny of outcast-ness not only in society but also in life, invalidating, as it were, her mission in the text.

The third example in this book treating women’s outcast position is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of various short stories separate from each other, but unified by the common elements of the setting Ohio, the male protagonist George Willard and the suffocating atmosphere of small-town life especially for the womenfolk, which alienates, inhibits and imprisons them. The novel takes the reader to the ambience of the nineteenth century conventional small town life of the Midwest. However, the general wave of industrialization gradually takes over control, bringing about changes in the traditional life-style. Yet, there is one sphere which remains uninfluenced by this wave of transformation, and that is the condition of women which, in turn creates dissatisfaction and frustration in their lives. Entrapped between traditional and modern values, the women of Ohio endure a life of secrecy and reserved existence, which renders the female state of being similar to slow death. The inability of the female characters to actualize their dreams and to acquire their authentic identities results in their consequent alienation and the experience of outcast-ness. While the reader has a chance to observe these common experiences in most of the stories, it is impossible not to note that the duties, roles, ways of behavior and even the autonomy and mystery of a female identity are defined from the male perspective and bound to male permission. Despite women’s attempts at rebellion, the dictates of current social norms consign to them the role of nurturers and dependents constantly on the wait, thus relegating them to a subject position and outcast state both in their society and in their own identities, since they cannot surmount those barriers. As a matter of fact, women’s unhealthy relationship with men lies at the heart of both their physical and psychological relegation. Their inability to relate themselves to the father figure and to communicate with men comes to full circle with the repetition of the same experience with husbands, lovers or sons. This emotional distancing and the consequent dissatisfaction lead women to a search for escape from their small-town lives, enclosures of convention defined by the institutions of religion and patriarchal family, which inevitably breed the seeds of women’s hatred toward men. Yet, the harvest of these seeds sown first in women’s relationship with their fathers and husbands, impacts their relationship with their sons too, as best seen in the examples of Elizabeth Willard and Louise Bentley. Of necessity, then, women tend to generate proper habits toward the recovery of their disillusioned identities. In the case of Elizabeth Willard, there is a yearning to become an actress which is never actualized, and in Louise Bentley’s case there is her obsessive reading habit which releases her from the narrow world of constraints and inhibitions but eventually turns into a subterfuge of escapism that makes her lose herself in a world of illusions. The small-town teacher Kate Swift who shares Louise Bentley’s reading habit appears as another disillusioned woman who tries to establish her authenticity by identifying herself with the characters in the books she reads. However, she gets the chance to transcend the restrictions imposed on her, though to a limited extent, by transmitting what she reads to her students, which, as a matter of fact, is only another version of women’s nurturing task. Yet, Kate Swift likewise ends up victim to her reading habit: being watched unawares by the town pastor during her reading sessions in the secrecy of her bedroom she becomes prey to the voyeuristic gaze of the Reverend, and is reduced to an object of pornography for his sexual entertainment

As the female characters’ reactions to their inhibitions and outcast-ness are silenced, and reduced to ineffective futile attempts, the women themselves are generally perceived as insane, mad and hysteric, although the symptoms in question are actually the products of their repression and unfulfilled yearnings. These symptoms materialize physically and symbolically as marks of bodily ugliness. Yet, actually they point to the limited mentality of the male characters who cannot grasp the mystery and beauty of these women and thus make of women’s outcast status a timeless destiny for them.

The next two novels exemplify the outcast position of women as depicted in the works of two female writers; Toni Morrison and Cherrie Moraga. The common point of these two novels with the previous ones is, with no doubt, the representation of the outcast position of women in the American novel. However, the significant difference of these two works from the others is their writers’ personal experiences of outcast-ness in American society due to both their gender and their ethnicity. This genuinely felt experience creates a different sensibility and a distinct type of writing, gynocriticism, a term coined and defined first by Elaine Showalter.

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) is the penultimate novel chosen for this study to exemplify the multiple political oppressions and hence multiple outcast positions of black women, the first level of which is associated with their gender and class and the second level with their race. Black women’s outcast-ness has its first roots in the victimized slave experience of their Afro-American ancestors as a heritage, and the unrecorded stories of that heritage. However, in the novel this historical coercion is imbued with the contemporary tactics of oppression which have been evolved with the body politics of the dominant Western society and the positioning of black women in relation to the hegemonic policies of the West. Narrated from the perspective of a black girl, the novel portrays the desperate experience of a small black girl Pecola whose outcast position begins first in the family and then spreads to every sphere she has connection with, such as the educational and religious institutions, as well as her social environment and contacts. Besides these influences, Pecola also experiences a psychological outcast-ness that is in close relationship with a conditioning which we may call ideological. As already implied in the book’s title, Pecola yearns to have blue eyes but her inability to attain this yearning generates in her a self-hatred and a race-hatred which become the means of her eventual alienation, first from her own identity and then from her society as a whole. Not having those blue eyes causes Pecola to see herself as unsightly and believe in her own ugliness. Clearly, this conviction of the little girl is the issue of a larger belief braced with support from several ideologies and bigoted discourses, evolving into a controlling mechanism at he hands of the white race, with the aim to generate in black women low self-esteem and loss of self-confidence.

One of the most significant of these ideologies is belief in the beauty of whiteness, fundamental to the Body Politics shaped by the racist Western ideology. This ideology formulates a standard of beauty comprising the slender body of a white woman with blue eyes. While this image inhibits black women from embracing their own identity and reality, it also victimizes them by marshalling them, as it were, toward a delusion as exemplified in the case of little Pecola. For poor little Pecola has come to idealize the whiteness and blue eyes of the Shirley Temple baby dolls which actually are commercialist traps of the Western capitalist system: Pecola becomes thus a victim of consumer economy. On top of this, she becomes victim of an eating disorder known as compulsive eating, a habit which she develops by consuming lots of Mary Jane candies and drinking large quantities of milk to achieve the Shirley Temple image on the coffee cups. However, Pecola is not the only victim of this ideology in The Bluest Eye. Her mother Pauline, too, suffers great disappointment since, do what she will, it is never possible for a black woman like herself to achieve the beauty of white movie stars such as Jean Harlow, oft paraded by the media industry.

The familial alienation of Pecola has its roots in the domestic violence applied to her mother in the form of wife-battery and to Pecola in the form of incest rape, both of which generate feelings of revulsion in children and, in the case of Pecola, additionally, a longing for non-existence. Pecola’s rape by her own father which impregnates her also initiates her early womanhood and motherhood as well as detaching her from her naive childhood. Thus, she ends up an outcast in all these female positions, since her stillborn baby denies her the experience of motherhood, and the impossibility of returning to her childhood consigns her to a life of womanized child.

Besides her father, Pecola’s inability to form a healthy and satisfying relationship with her mother Pauline is closely related with Pauline’s being another outcast woman herself. Physically handicapped, overburdened with problems in her struggle to make a living, and abused by her parasitic husband, she tries to find release either in the fantasy world of movies or in the affluence of the wealthy houses where she works as a maid. Yet, she is unaware of her victimization and outcast state in both cases. Pecola’s outcast position reaches its peak after her visit to Soaphead Church, the sham spiritualist who tricks her into believing that she actually has blue eyes.