Essays from this year: Is literature more effective in making political arguments in direct, unambiguous ways, or by using indirect, oblique means?

 Finally got my final marks for the semester and thankfully I passed everything :D My best mark was distinction for my final English minor class which surprised me but of course I won't complain about that. 

The question I went for was whether literature is most effective at making political arguments (although I slid into ethical arguments at some points), it certainly an interesting question but anyone who has studied aesthetics and propaganda the answer is quite obvious.

The two readings I chose were Woolf's A Room of One's Own and Morrison's The Bluest Eye. 

 

 

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Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675)

In the realm of non-fiction, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, her extended essay from, spoken originally to the Newnham and Girton Colleges of the University of Cambridge, two women’s colleges, deals with the fraught political position of women, post-Suffrage, and stemming from that questions of social and economic factors that have led to a lack of women in literary spaces over the previous centuries. Just like the material world inserts itself continuously into modernist literature, the material context of the Woolf’s essay is vital to understanding it, as Woolf advocates for private, physical space in which to practice one’s craft vigorously, she implicitly must also be advocating for education, economic freedom and equity within traditional households. “Even allowing a generous margin for symbolism, that five hundred [pounds] a year stands for the power to think for oneself.” (105) Woolf proclaims with little metaphor, connecting the economic to the artistic pursuit, Woolf demystifies the romantic imagery of artistry as singular, immaterial and visionary, instead frankly proclaiming to the audience, both the modern readers and women of these colleges, that economic freedom is vital to the development of one’s craft, where money pays for housing and food, for help, time not working either paid labour or affective domestic labour is time spent on craft. Even in the frank writing of an essay, Woolf cannot deny the power of the metaphorical in engaging the minds of her audience, “let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith.” (48) her candid description of Judith Shakespeare’s short, brutal life exemplifies the persistent oppressive factors that had prevented any woman from “creating the work of Shakespeare in Shakespeare’s time,” (48) even if she had the education, to find the time, space and support to practice and subsequently publish her craft is an insurmountable barrier, as proven by the lack of woman writers and poets from the Elizabethan and Jacobean age, even among the educated classes. Although this argument is direct, as is the figure of Judith Shakespeare a clear allegory for the disenfranchisement of women throughout Western literary history, Woolf can’t help the ‘suggestive’ power of literature in forming this point: that the women of these colleges have a privilege that the many women before them didn’t and secondly, that they still lack the most fundamental privileges compared to their male counterparts which have allowed the proliferation of the male perspective and the side-lining of the female perspective. 

The class divide of who is allowed to define the perspective of a people is furthered under these conditions. But Woolf’s essay falls short in some fundamental ways, due perhaps the medium of the essay itself, Woolf’s proto-intersectional argument of women as a class fails to mention the other classified peoples, that being people of colour, hired primarily as labourers in the homes of richer, whiter people, including women. There must be someone who works for the money thusly if it is the woman then her time and energy to write is compromised, if there is not someone to work for the money, then her ability to have a private space is compromised, otherwise there can be an assumption of wealth and therefore the primary voice writing the female perspective is skewed yet again, and if there is a way to avoid working for one’s money, to maintain a private abode and to leave the household labour to someone else, then the working class servant who performs this labour (likely to be women) continue to be disenfranchised from their own craft without time, space and energy (Davis 210-211). In this way, A Room Of One’s Own has a distracting blind spot for many modern readers, confined by its thesis and by the audience who are being urged by it, Woolf can only spend so much time on the subject of working class women and mothers and spends no time on people of colour, especially those dispossessed by colonialism and slavery. 

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison treads familiar ground in this sense, the intersections of class, race, femininity and youth are visualised extensively through each character, in particular the ability of one to advocate for themselves is an underlying question and the factors that lead to helplessness. Morrison doesn’t waste time in obscuring the fate of Pecola, The Bluest Eye does not befuddle the audience and in doing so rejects traditional narrative devices, “We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow… our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody’s did.” (3) The generational breakdown is front and centre in the Bluest Eye, followed up by “since why is too difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” (4) Morrison implies here that there is not singular prescriptive source of Pecola’s tragedy and the effect it had on those around her. As Morrison states in her foreword, her intent to make Pecola was not a ‘representative’ character but instead an extreme case of how, and when, racialized beauty standards took hold in young black girls, within the boundaries of cultural, social and familial rejection that leads to such a brutal breakdown of the self and the structures around these young girls. Morrison too rejects flattening characters, like Pecola, even the vilest actions are steeped in the broken social structures these characters struggle to exist in, both Pecola’s mother and father, Mrs. Breedlove and Cholly, embody these failed familial structures but Morrison strays away from villainising them, instead choosing to explore how their own flawed foundations, built by a racist, classist and misogynistic society, could have led to Pecola’s destruction, her internalisation of these same oppressive ideals. Much like Woolf, Morrison cannot help but see resonance between oppressions, the Breedlove’s poverty is as much a product of their race as their ugliness is produced by poor conditions. Pecola and Frieda’s vulnerability to sexual abuse is as much a product of their age as it is their gender as is their vulnerability to absorbing the white beauty ideals of little girls, which Morrison focalises through Shirley Temple, other white actresses are evoked as a form of compliment by Mr. Henry such as Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers, even Hedy Lamarr is mentioned as an ideal of beauty, in specific reference to her hair, a highly politicised body part of both black men and women with traditional and natural styles being banned and policed in school and workplaces for decades (Davis, 5-6). 

 In imbuing Pecola with these extreme forms of disenfranchisement, her agency is removed gradually through the course of the book. In a form of cyclical violence, from the society on to the girl/woman and then from the mother to daughter: “Physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in human history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap.” (120)  Pauline, Mrs. Breedlove, herself at one point an avid movie-goer, absorbs these white faces of cinema and their Hays Code approved lifestyles as ideal and innocent and her own husband and children as sinful. Morrison’s attempts to humanise and bring forth the past of each character in to the text of the story, in service of her argument about the racialised state of American beauty standards (extending to all Western beauty standards) and the necessity to not only refute these standards but to interrogate how they came into being and how they work to further the oppression of black people in America.

Both A Room of One’s Own and The Bluest Eye make superficially similar arguments, both Woolf and Morrison have observed how the intersections of oppression have led to the disenfranchisement of lower classes and women and therefore under these conditions, poor and working women are stripped gradually from their agency (Weldon), but in the realm of fiction and working under the other conditions of race and age, Morrison is able to craft a story featuring the most vulnerable member of society, the most disenfranchised case in which she can question the gendered, racialised violence of beauty, though Pecola herself is not, by Morrison’s own admission, a representative character, she is able to be a reflective one, in which the readers own biases are continuously reflected back at them. Woolf on the other hand, in the medium of the non-fiction essay is constrained by her own biases and the biases of those the essay was first addressed to, within the constraints of directness, Woolf still relies on the metaphor of Judith Shakespeare to evoke the audience’s imagination of the recent direness of women’s oppression, to bring contrast into the recent privileges of the women to access tertiary education (Liao and Gendler). The power of comparison, of narrative voice, is for both Morrison and Woolf the most effective way to relay to the audience their standing in society (Kroon and Voltolini). Even in the case of non-fiction, A Room of One’s Own persists in the imagery of a private room (Sheikh) and of the many Judith Shakespeare’s of history Woolf evokes, in as much as The Bluest Eye and Pecola’s wish for them as a stand-in for beauty persists in it’s through breakdown of racialised beauty standards. Even the most explicative moments are able to suggest greater empathy by the use of the indirect and symbolic. Paraphrased from Woolf’s own words (101); there is power in the suggestive voice-- that direct voices which are prone to being blocked by another’s own pre-conceptions-- have in dispensing complicated and interconnected ideas of the commodified and politicised bodies of oppressed peoples be they gendered, racialised or both.  

 

References:

Davis, Angela. Women, Race & Class. Random House, 1981, pp. 5–10, pp.200–211

Kroon, Fred, and Alberto Voltolini. “Fiction.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2019, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019, plato.stanford.edu/entries/fiction/#TrutThroFict.

Liao, Shen-yi, and Tamar Gendler. “Imagination (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu, 2011, plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination/.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. Penguin Random House (Vintage), 2019.

Sheikh, Sheheryar B. “The Walls That Emancipate: Disambiguation of the “Room” in a Room of One’s Own.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 42, no. 1, 2018, p. 19, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.42.1.02.

Vickroy, Laurie. Reading Trauma Narratives the Contemporary Novel and the Psychology of Oppression. Charlottesville; London University Of Virginia Press, 2015, pp. 5–20.

Weldon, S. Laurel. “Intersectionality.” Politics, Gender and Concepts, by Gary Goertz and Amy G. Mazur, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 193–204.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1928. Penguin Group (Australia), 2009.

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This is slightly truncated, I don't think I gave Woolf a real fair shot, of course that wasn't the question and I think in such a propagandised world, the answer is obvious and offered up by Woolf herself in the loaded imagery of a private room. Although I have to say, both works are worth a read, especially in relation to one another. They made for an interesting points of contrast, despite both being diminutive works, The Bluest Eye is an incredibly dense book, able to fill itself with sharp and exacting observations on white beauty as and extension of white supremacy and the oppressive effects that have upon people of colour, especially and specifically black people. 

I'd also suggest taking a look at Davis' work, Kroon and Voltini as well as Weldon if you are interested in a topic such as this.