Theorists, Start Your Engines

Of the theories we all talked about in class, I think my brain’s still ruminating on my own dear Armstrong as well as Bakhtin.  Even in Lit Crit, I haven’t heard anything quite like Armstrong’s argument.  I think it’s pretty interesting that she claims the rise of the novel and the middle class are indelibly linked to the formation of the new feminine ideal in eighteenth and nineteenth century England.  More fascinating to me is that she is quick to wash her hands of feminist theory.  She essentially claims that most feminists are too busy playing the victim to move forward in their thinking.  Armstrong says, glass half full: Look at the power middle-class women do have today.  She showcases the “domestic sphere,” the emotional space women have claimed as their own.  As she herself remarks, “such an authority has come hard-earned to academic women and should not be relinquished without a struggle” (255).  But it seems to me her argument falls a little short of where it could have gone.  The fact that domesticity is a specifically feminine idea and ideal is typecasting women and outlining what kind of power they can have.  I suppose this is where I diverge from Armstrong’s text, since I tend to read literature about women with a feminist-tinged lens.  And I think the part of her argument that most engaged me was in the epilogue, where she threw in a couple of extra ideas assumedly not central to her book.  The “mad” and “bad” and “embruted” woman is far more interesting to me than the woman with a straight moral compass.  No one wants to watch the Good Girls Club.  These women deviants create chaos, disrupt social groups, break rules.  Myra and Mary come to mind.  I wish Armstrong continued pursuing this avenue, but from what I’ve researched, her succeeding writing doesn’t center on bad girls in literature. For all the criticizing she does of Foucault for forgetting gender, it seems she herself has forgotten what happens to women when they break the rules of gender.  Which, I think, is why I’m still so interested in gender studies, the transgendered, and drag.  That and I like drag shows.

I had forgotten for a while about Bakhtin, and that his theory rests heavily on the novel.  The novel as having no canon, as a constantly changing literary form, as a kind of bricolage of linguistic styles, more or less means that the novel is the least confining genre.  Where a transgendered woman can exist, where her voice and the voice of her male self can coexist, and where the fight of the two over the same body is possible.  Heteroglossia is present in Enchantment, too, and is the reason the reader becomes uncertain as to what is real and what is imagined.  There isn’t a right or a wrong, and there isn’t one set view or one standardized way of expressing each view.

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