Fall 2007, Volume 26, Number 2

"Negotiating Woman: Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés and Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño"

Mercedes Maroto Camino

Readers of Ana Caro’s El conde Partinuplés cannot but notice the multiple connections between this play and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s acknowledged masterpiece, La vida es sueño. The intertextual links between both plays, some of which are analyzed in this paper, bring to the fore Caro’s challenge of the sociocultural construction of gender in Golden Age Spain. In “Negotiating Woman: Ana Caro’s El conde Partinuplés and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño,” Mercedes Camino argues that El conde Partinuplés not only tests received notions of hegemony and kingship, but also vindicates magic and female powers, including the right to a degree of agency, individual identity and, above all, to enjoy female friendship and solidarity. Caro’s El conde Partinuplés demonstrates that the concept of woman prevalent in early modern Spanish dramas, is, by no means, a monolithic patriarchal design. “Woman,” for Caro, is the subject of continuous negotiation on and off the stage, as seen by her own writing persona, as well as the main female characters of her play. Nevertheless, Caro retreats from subversion to present, instead, women who compromise by marrying and occupying their designated social space. In spite of this apparent conformity, Caro’s women are able and willing to manipulate the play’s action in order to demonstrate their ability to deconstruct established notions of passivity and acquiescence

"'A Track to the Water's Edge': Learning to Suffer in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins"

Anna Maria Jones

In “‘A Track to the Water’s Edge’: Learning to Suffer in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins ,” Anna Maria Jones reassesses feminist critical accounts of late-Victorian New Woman novels like Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893). Critics tend to regret either the novels’ retrograde politics or their aesthetic flaws, both of which mar the enjoyment that a feminist reader might otherwise experience. Jones argues, however, that the apparent flaws are, in fact, integral to the novels’ political project: training readers to suffer for the sake of future generations. Using The Heavenly Twins as an example, Jones shows that the New Woman novel places its readers in a position to feel dissatisfaction with the social order that imprisons them, even as it allows them to envision a distant utopian future to which they will never have access. The dissatisfactions of The Heavenly Twins—abortive plots, failed heroines, and disjointed structure, to name a few—all combine to teach its readers to suffer for future women who, ironically, will not appreciate the sacrifices of previous generations.

"Sitwell Beyond the Semiotic: Gender, Race, and Empire in Façade"

Marsha Bryant

Marsha Bryant’s reassessment of Sitwell’s best-known text in “Sitwell Beyond the Semiotic: Gender, Race, and Empire in Façade” moves beyond the feminist psychoanalytic approaches that restored the poet to critical attention, while keeping gender as a key component of her analysis. Kristevan approaches to Sitwell have provided an important means of revaluing the poet’s notorious play with sound, but they tend to overstate the subversiveness of her Façade poems. Examining the racial stereotypes and geopolitics that shaped Sitwell’s riotous rhythms, the essay argues that Façade both unsettles and reinforces British imperial unity through its depiction of Africans and Asians. The motif of the “shady lady” proves especially important to this cultural analysis. Besides considering popular constructions of the Hottentot figure in the press and on the stage, Bryant also engages with Façade’s performance history by considering stage design and William Walton’s accompanying music. Sitwell’s performance of race and empire in Façade prompts us to return this neglected poet to the center of modernism.

"'De Talkin’ Game': The Creation of Psychic Space in Selected Short Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston"

Doris Davis

“‘De Talkin’ Game’: The Creation of Psychic Space in Selected Short Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston,” by Doris Davis, considers the role of verbal, vocal skill in the empowering of women featured in Hurston’s short stories. Like her other work, the short stories are rich in the black, oral tradition of language. Revealing a “doubled-voiced” technique, they evince the persuasive voice of Hurston the storyteller and depict characters whose voices claim ownership of their own psychic spaces. Hurston offers the ultimate model for her assertively-voiced female through her depiction of Big Sweet in Mules and Men and Dust Tracks on a Road. In fact, Huston functions much like Big Sweet in her delineation of the character and voice of her female protagonists. That voice involves rhetorically the talents of the signifying monkey and assumes the stances of the trickster. In such stories as “Story in Harlem Slang,” “ Cock Robin Beale Street,” “Muttsy,” and “Drenched in Light,” Hurston depicts female characters skilled in the signifying antics of verbal trickery. In “Sweat,” a small masterpiece in the trickster-tricked tradition, Hurston offers a heroine in Delia who, like her other protagonists, uses her voice and her determination to survive, however difficult that may be.

"Exploring the 'Mind of the Hive': Embodied Cognition in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems"

Jessica Lewis Luck

According to “Exploring the ‘Mind of the Hive’: Embodied Cognition in Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems,” by Jessica Lewis Luck, through the metaphor of the hive, Sylvia Plath’s bee poems explore a model of the mind/self that is embodied, emergent, and distributed. Plath’s status as both beekeeper and poet creates a fruitful nexus of science and poetry that allows her to examine, in her lyric laboratories, the structures and mechanisms of her own consciousness, her hive-mind, and a new foundation for her sense of self that runs deeper than a disembodied or surface model that she explores elsewhere in her poems. Luck argues that Plath tries on a performative model of identity at the beginning of the sequence in “The Bee Meeting,” but she finds that this surface-oriented performance can only go so far in its act of resistance and self-assertion. The remaining poems progressively delve more deeply into the structures and mechanisms of the autopoietic, distributed system of the hive, revealing the vicissitudes and possibilities of a nonessentialized biological body that is volatile, mutable, and always in excess of the limits and scripts imposed upon it. Ultimately, the “neural geography” of the hive offers Plath a more potent site for feminist resistance.

"Rum Histories: Decolonizing the Narratives of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor"

Jennifer Nesbitt

“Rum Histories: Decolonizing the Narratives of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor,” by Jennifer Nesbitt, examines how the historical and cultural affiliations of rum trope colonialism as a force that perpetuates itself through economic institutions and internalized belief systems. In The Flint Anchor and Wide Sargasso Sea, literal and figural scenes of intoxication image the subjection of characters to gender ideologies supporting colonialism. Through the figures of Antoinette Cosway and Julia Barnard, both of whom are considered drunkards, the novels illustrate the Englishwoman’s position of complicity in and resistance to gender ideologies that maintain her privileged racial and class status within a context of sexual oppression and economic dependence. However, intoxication with rum generally marks all subjects, whether they are advantaged or disadvantaged, as constructed by colonial ideology. Patriarchal men, for example, are shown to acquire their power from the role they play in colonialism rather than from natural right. Although an analysis of rum as a trope for colonialism reiterates its hegemonic power, alternative scripts appear when we link dispersed scenes of alcohol use by disempowered groups (middle-class women, slave communities, ex-slaves like Christophine, and working-class women) to form a narrative that recognizes shared economic oppression without diminishing differences in the specific conditions of oppression.