This is my take on Heroine and maybe I'm way out there, but here goes. The setting as a bathtub, the nudity within the tub, and the water suggests (from my perspective) a baptismal sacrament in which her sins are being washed away. I don't know what religious views (if any) Gail Scott has and whether they factor into the character. I also thought of the water and the washing as a rebirth perhaps, of the character. Maybe I am reading too much into this. Thoughts?
Calogero A. Miceli
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It's an interesting idea, but how do you take the masturbation within that theory?
ReplyDeleteYes, I'd be interested in seeing some textual specifics to support the proposition.
ReplyDeleteI suspect Scott's project of making a Modern "heroine," is very much a secular one, one shaped by Nietzsche's pronouncement, "God is dead," and Marx's "Religion is the opiate of the masses."
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ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, the bathtub is symbolic. It is the place where a new woman is born, a woman who does not need any more "the hole". It is the place for a new adventure, discovering herself. Yes, indeed, the water can be seen, or read, as a kind of cleaning her body, but not from sins. For G.S, if there is any sin in the story, it is the heterosexual relation. Am I out of the track???
ReplyDeleteThe heroine could have been masturbating in a bed or on a couch and still come to the same conclusion. She is like a little boy who first discovers his wet dreams. The heroine is discovering her body and desires through masturbation which happens to be in the bath. Water I can see as symbolic to the cleansing process but the bathtub is just the object that holds the liquid. What symbols do you associate with the bathtub?
ReplyDeleteTo respond to your concluding question, Mohamad, I suspect that within G.S.'s text, heterosexuality is not "sin," but that feminine competition, women's insecurity and depression, are all common pitfalls of the social, economic and psychological organization of hetero(centric)sexuality in the time and place of the narrative.
ReplyDeleteNow, "narrative," at least of the conventional kind, that might border upon being a sin within her text...
To SmeKL -
ReplyDeleteDo you think then that her bodily self-discovery mirrors the emotional and mental self-discovery that is the discussion of the book (as well as her own black book)?
Interesting... how might we think about the idea of "self discovery" sexual or otherwise, alongside the surfacing/suffering of "reminiscences?" Is there a way in which, in memory we might discover the self anew?
ReplyDeleteAnother thought: one way in which melancholy (depression) is talked about in psychoanalysis is as a withdrawing of one's psychic investment from the outside world. Without a love object, one's libido falls back into/onto one's own body...
Well, these are problematic questions. Nevertheless, I do believe that despite "reminiscences", one can discover a new self. This reminds me Jame's concept about epiphany. It is the moment where the individual starts learning something new about him/herself, and sequentially, this new thing learned will create a new person/personality.
ReplyDeleteEric Talbot, Jenny Morris, Siobhan Harvey, Jillian Boyd, Allison Roy,Marion Pynn, Melanie Akor
ReplyDelete“To the Compiler of Memory”
Susan Howe's writing is a framework for remembering and history. It relies heavily on enjambment and the lines and spacing of the work. References to historical (colonial) wrong doings such as Cromwell. A mapping of historical traumas, history through design (framework of a chair). The continuity of historical trauma and that it always has a place no matter of the time frame. The space between her and traumatic events are removed.
Thomas Sheridan created a “respelled” English dictionary (wikipedia).
She is building her own chair to sit on.
“So goes to metre and her” gives gender here. Enjambment is the entire poem. Building the chair, the different styles of chairs being constructed in the poem are related to the exploration of memory through its historical implications, the various forms of historical period design styles which are animated within the poem.
“If to see is to have at a distance, I have had so many dead Innocents distance has been abolished.”327
The chair is now. Though the poem looks at chairs as representative of their points in history, the linear “then” and “now” of history has been disrupted by the immediacy of the chair as object, so that all time-based distance is abolished. Any historical implications are still present, still meaningful.