[kristeva: the woman question]

As I begin to write (or at least think about writing!) my thesis introduction I'm reflecting on the double-bind I find apparent in certain web fictions: a desire to multi-mimetically represent combined with a simultaneous recognition of its inadequacy. In her text on Colette, Kristeva sees representation (or creation) as incommensurable with any singular identity. For any identity must constantly be questioned, reworked, and repositioned:

"Is there a feminine genius, then? The genius of women from the last century has invited us not to elude the question and to consider this: concerns about the feminine have been the communitarian path that has allowed our civilization to reveal, in a new way, the incommensurability of the singular. Although it took root in sexual experience, that incommensurability of genius is realized in the risks that each person is capable of taking, by calling into question thought, language, one's time, and any identity that finds shelter in them." (Kristeva, Colette 426-427).

An interview with Kristeva (which I found thanks to the Continental Philosophy Blog)



She explains that the epistemological tradition underpinning modern linguistics presuppose a split between subject and object. This "soliditiy of consciousness" (Descartes anyone?) becomes contentious during periods of social flux which Kristeva suggests are times of creation and innovation. And this is her theory, that the subject is dynamic and its constitution (signifiance) is dynamic. An example of this dynamism in language is found in Joyce (for Kristeva) as he wants readers to "hear the rhythm of his sentences." I wonder how this might transform in the online environment. How might the rhythm of image come to bear on the signifiance of Red in Donna Leishman's fiction or on the autodiegetic narrator of Dene Grigar's Fallow Field?

[matricide in leishman's red riding hood]

I'm tidying up my final thesis chapter (omg!); making things a bit clearer, rephrasing, adding some quotations, and deleting what is repetitive or unneccessary. I'm finding this last bit (deleting) the most difficult as there seem to be so many things I want to say about the works I'm researching. While going over Donna Leishman's Red Riding Hood in terms of the multiple worlds that are available to the reader I've been stuck on the penultimate scene (of the linear reading). Red is in bed at her grandmother's house, with what looks to be a bag of knitting paraphernalia at her feet. As she sleeps the suspicious boy-wolf draws back a curtain and enters. He reaches over, seemingly to brush the hair off Red's face but then, suddenly and wholely unexpectedly (at least on my part) he reveals a gun which he holds to Red's head. Ok. So maybe this is *straight-forward* murder, boy kills girl. But, before the wolf entered the room the reader also had a chance to *violate* Red, though not as violently. The reader can touch Red's distended stomach to reveal a pregnancy; Red is carrying a girl. This is really a double murder, a murder of mother and daughter. But how might we interpret this? If Showalter demands the killing of "the Angel in the house, that phantom of female perfection who stands in the way of freedom" and who turns out to be Woolf herself [Showalter 265], then does the killing of Red signify the death of a blockade to Red's freedom? Is it with death that Red can escape that double-bind: the inadequacy of representation and the concomittant desire to represent her becoming subjectivity? Kristeva argues that we are always negotiating the other within as subjects in process, so here is this an overt inability to negotiate (or at least a challenge) the pivot between self and other? Also, if Red is unaware of either the wolf or of the reader touching her stomach, does this suggest a Cartesian split between mind and body, the two for Red here are seemingly disconnected? Or is this simply the death of the woman as "body"? (I'm thinking here of Robyn Longhurst who writes about pregnant woman as "containers"). Then in death that bind and that split dissolve? But, because it is the wolf who facilitates this, does that intimate that a man is necessary to bring a woman *together*, to resolve her identities? And what about choice...and, the most important question: does Red really die?