In Marge Piercy's Small Changes, Beth, one of the two central characters, dissolves in angry tears after an argument with Phil: “Oh, I wish I was better with words!” Beth views words as weapons in the battle for selfhood—a battle in which she, as a woman, is disadvantaged. She has difficulty arguing because “it's crossing taboos. You know, asserting myself, contradicting somebody. … I only want to use words as weapons because I'm tired of being beaten with them. Tired of being pushed around because I don't know how to push back.”¹ In the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, language is all but forbidden because the ruling class recognizes the power of words as weapons that can free people from bondage. Piercy's 1973 novel is set in the 1960s, the turbulent decade in which Offred's mother was an active feminist; Atwood's 1986 novel is set in the late twentieth century after a fundamentalist revolution has repressed not just the women's movement but all expression of freedom and equality. In different ways these two novels suggest the centrality of language to the process of self-realization and the struggle for equality. In fact language—the ability to speak, to tell one's own story—is at the heart of the contemporary novel by women.

Both irony and fantasy, as narrative devices, are interdependent with language in specific, complex ways. Whereas on the simplest level irony is a verbal construction—the reader is invited to question the surface validity of a statement that an author or a character makes—deeper irony, of circumstance or attitude, requires that the author create a context in which ambiguity is tolerable, a linguistic fabric that signals a stance from which she (or he) will approach whatever reality is being depicted. When Atwood opens The Handmaid's Tale with the line, “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium,” she plunges the reader at once into a world of uncertainty in which everything—including language—will be, as Offred says repeatedly, a “reconstruction”: the essential method of irony.

Fantasy is tied to language in several ways, which I will suggest here and explore in more detail later. When authors or narrators in the contemporary women's novel revise the mythologies of their lives, they are in a very direct way addressing the language of those mythologies. When, for example, Gemma, in Words of Advice, says of the fairy tale that is her life story, “Princes, toads, princesses, beggar girls—we all have to place ourselves as best we can,” she is commenting on the use of language to dichotomize people into the favored and the unfavored.² Alternatively, words and stories may free a woman to engage in fantasy that helps to empower her. In The Woman Warrior, the story the narrator's mother tells her of Fa Mu Lan allows her to dream of being a woman warrior rather than a wife or a slave. Fantasy may even be a way of avoiding the language of dominant discourse. Lesje, in Atwood's Life before Man (1979), has fantasies in which she is “wandering in prehistory,” able to “violate whatever official version of paleontological reality she chooses,”³ in order to escape from the male museum world she normally inhabits. As Margaret Homans points out, Lesje has failed to appropriate the male language of science: “it is clearly because she is a woman that she is denied access to the legitimate professional and intellectual satisfactions its native speakers should enjoy.”⁴

The issue of women's language is the subject of much contemporary debate, and it is an issue that has several dimensions. On the most basic level is the silencing and suppression of women's expression—terms taken from the titles of Tillie Olsen's Silences (1978) and Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983). Both Olsen and Russ describe the multiple barriers to women's writing over time: the conflicting demands of domestic responsibilities, the refusal of the literary establishment to take women's writing seriously, the consequent lack of models for young female writers—and so on in a vicious circle, causing women to feel insecure about their own voices. Such insecurity, as Olsen points out, has often kept women from writing honestly out of their own experience:

These pressures toward censorship, self-censorship; toward accepting, abiding by entrenched attitudes, thus falsifying one's own reality, range, vision, truth, voice, are extreme for women writers (indeed have much to do with the fear, the sense of powerlessness that pervades certain of our books, the “above all, amuse” tone of others). Not to be able to come to one's truth or not to use it in one's writing, even in telling the truth to have to “tell it slant,” robs one of drive, of conviction; limits potential stature; results in loss to literature and the comprehensions we seek in it.⁵

This uncertainty about one's own “truth” is reflected in the dual narratives of Jane Gray in Drabble's The Waterfall and Chloe in Weldon's Female Friends as they revise their lives, seeking an honest, coherent version.

Another, more complex aspect of women's use of language is the extent to which they can or should forge or reclaim a language of their own, free from the influence of male conceptualizing. Once, like Beth, having found the courage to speak up, what language do women use? How is their expression their own, as women? Alicia Ostriker, writing of American women poets in Stealing the Language, asks the same question: “Does there exist, as a subterranean current below the surface structure of male-oriented language, a specifically female language, a ‘mother tongue’?” The answer to this question, in Ostriker's view, awaits further research, but she argues that women have indeed been “thieves of language”:

What distinguishes these poets, I propose, is not the shared, exclusive langage des femmes desired by some but a vigorous and varied invasion of the sanctuaries of existing language, the treasuries where our meanings for “male” and “female” are themselves preserved. Where women write strongly as women, it is clear that their intention is to subvert and transform the life and literature they inherit.⁶

One of the ways that Ostriker believes women have transformed the literature they have inherited is by revising cultural mythologies, and this has been true in the novel as well as in poetry, in ways to which I have previously pointed: Violet Clay, the title character in Gail Godwin's novel, seeks to escape from the “Book of Old Plots” that would have her give up a potential career in art to be a homemaker. Gemma, in Words of Advice, sees her life as a constantly revised fairy tale. And The Handmaid's Tale is in some measure a rewriting of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: fundamentalist morality can mean that women are forced to be adulteresses just as it can punish them for adultery.

For some critics, such as Hélène Cixous, the langage des femmes not only exists, it is necessary for women's emancipation. Cixous maintains that women have been driven away from language just as they have been forced to deny their bodies, and she encourages full expression of the female experience as a powerful subversive force. Masculine language, Cixous believes, has been used for the oppression of women:

in a manner that's frightening since it's often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction; that this locus has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (and not sexual difference), where woman has never her turn to speak—this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures.⁷

For Cixous, as for many other feminist critics, language is tied intimately to gender: “Woman must write woman. And man, man” (877). Female writing is bound up in female biology, she maintains, because women have been taught to feel guilty about both, and the courage to claim and proclaim both language and biology is the first step toward “transformation.”

For many French feminist critics, language is seen as being in the control of men, with women left out, silenced. In Cixous' terms, language is a decisive and oppositional mechanism:

For as soon as we exist, we are born into language and language speaks (to) us, dictates its law, a law of death; it lays down its familial model, lays down its conjugal model, and even at the moment of uttering a sentence, admitting a notion of “being,” a question of being, an ontology, we are already seized by a kind of masculine desire, the desire that mobilizes philosophical discourse.⁸

For Cixous, the “desire” to enter into philosophical discourse is futile for women, because the discourse is conducted in a language that effectively silences them.

Linguist Deborah Cameron, however, comes to different conclusions about the power of male language. In Feminism and Linguistic Theory, Cameron argues against linguistic determinism—the concept that one group has the ability to fix meaning and thus deprive another group of access to the power of language: “Since language is a flexible and renewable resource, and since girls must come to grips with it as their socialisation proceeds, there is no reason in principle why language cannot express the experience of women to the same extent that it expresses the experience of men.”⁹ However, Cameron recognizes that language is closely tied to the power structures of a society, and that “the institutions that regulate language use in our own society, and indeed those of most societies, are deliberately oppressive to women” (145). When women themselves believe that their own use of language—their own talk—is important rather than trivial, Cameron believes that it will thereby become important, and can be a source of autonomy.

The differences between French and American feminist scholars' beliefs about the relationship between women and language—the former seeing women denied a language in which to express their experience, and the latter believing that women are capable of appropriating the dominant discourse for their own purposes—are summarized by Margaret Homans in a 1983 article that attempts to mediate between them. One way in which Homans bridges the philosophical gap is by pointing out that American women novelists themselves address women's exclusion from language as a theme in their fiction, thus providing thematic evidence of the French critics' position:

A woman novelist's ability to represent verbally her response to exclusion from the dominant discourse does not at all disprove the thesis that women's silence serves as the basis for the operation of language. Such an ability is constantly undermining itself: in the very act of asserting through capacious representation the adequacy of language, these novelists betray their anxieties about its sufficiency.¹⁰

Thus, even as American critics take the pragmatic and optimistic stance that women are able to take possession of language, as Cameron asserts, the texts of those who write in English proclaim that language is a central problem for women who seek to use it to overcome their oppression.

Yet a belief in the potential power of women's use of language is closely tied to the methods and goals of the women's movement. In both formal and informal ways, the movement has encouraged women to communicate, especially with each other, to understand their commonalities, to overcome isolation and silence. It is not surprising, then, that women's fiction of the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s demonstrates a central concern with language: the ability to use language, tell stories, describe experience, and revise mythologies. Language may be a weapon against male authority, as it is for Beth in Small Changes; it may be a way of ordering and giving meaning to experience, as it is in Female Friends and The Waterfall; it is above all a means of communication with other women.

At the same time, however, language is viewed in these novels and others as untrustworthy, and this is the central irony of its significance: even as women writers and their characters feel compelled to describe their experience, they are aware that language can be used to manipulate, that it can lie, as women themselves have been manipulated and lied to. Thus, in the midst of telling their stories, women express their awareness that the truth they seek to tell of is illusory, and that a fantasy could be as “real” as the observable facts of their lives. Indeed, the perception that language is arbitrary and mutable can be the first step toward liberation. When Beth, in Small Changes, overcomes her timidity about language, it is through her participation in a women's theater group in which the members learn together to use their voices as well as their bodies: “They were still learning how they felt and how to express it and create with it” (477).

As a significant issue in the contemporary novel by women, language is addressed in a number of ways that can be grouped in two general categories. One group includes challenges to male-dominated language, either by appropriating male discourse for women's purposes or by altering or subverting it. The second group of approaches is composed of those that emphasize women's exclusion from language—their silence. Writers who challenge the dominant discourse typically do so by employing some form of irony, whereas those who stress women's position outside that discourse are more apt to use fantasy as a concomitant narrative strategy. Both of these approaches and strategies may be combined in a single work, as they are, for example, in the three novels considered in the final part of this chapter: The Handmaid's Tale, The Woman Warrior, and The Color Purple. In each of these three novels, language is initially a silencing but ultimately a liberating phenomenon.

The initial step in negating the hegemony of oppressive language is to question its authority by making fun of it. Pointing to the absurdity of the official language of a culture is a method used commonly by members of oppressed groups; humor negates the power of hegemonic discourse quite simply by refusing to take that power seriously. Joanna Russ's The Female Man provides the clearest and most overt examples of this undercutting of male language and power, and at the same time makes explicit men's attempt to silence women. In fact, The Female Man extends into speculative fiction the attempts at silencing that Russ also describes in How to Suppress Women's Writing, but in her novel, the (fictional) women fight back effectively. An exchange late in the novel serves as a paradigm of both silencing and the subversion of that attempt. A man in Manland, in one of the four parallel universes in the novel, says to Jael, from the opposing camp of Womanland, “You're on my turf, you'll Goddamn well talk about what I Goddamn well talk about,” and Jael thinks to herself: “Let it pass. Control yourself. Hand them the victory in the Domination Sweepstakes and they usually forget whatever it is they were going to do anyway.”¹¹

Throughout The Female Man the various narrators parody the language—especially the clichés—of male discourse. In the chapter titled “The Great Happiness Contest,” Russ records a paradigmatic exchange between wife and husband in which the latter reveals his need for domination:

HE:
Darling, why must you work part-time as a rug salesman?
SHE:
Because I want to enter the marketplace and prove that in spite of my sex I can take a fruitful part in the life of the community and earn what our culture proposes as the sign and symbol of adult independence—namely money.
HE:
But darling, by the time we deduct the cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax bracket, and your box lunches from your pay, it actually costs us money for you to work. So you see, you aren't making money at all. You can't make money. Only I can make money. Stop working.
SHE:
I won't. And I hate you.
HE:
But darling, why be irrational? It doesn't matter that you can't make money because I can make money. And after I've made it, I give it to you, because I love you. So you don't have to make money. Aren't you glad?
SHE:
No. Why can't you stay home and take care of the baby? Why can't we deduct all those things from your pay? Why should I be glad because I can't earn a living? Why—
HE
(with dignity): This argument is becoming degraded and ridiculous. I will leave you alone until loneliness, dependence, and a consciousness that I am very much displeased once again turn you into the sweet girl I married. There is no use in arguing with a woman.

(117-18)

The very stiltedness of the dialogue, especially the man's final comments, makes it seem absurd, but the reality of the exchange lies in the man's stereotypical assumption that women are dependent and irrational. Russ's technique is to allow the man's words to make overt his normally unspoken attitudes, and thus to make clear his sense of dominance—and finally to render that dominance itself as absurd and powerless as the strutting of a small bully.

In Russ's novel it is Janet, from the all-female planet While-away, who strikes at the heart of sexist language when she asserts that if the term “Mankind” is meant to include women (as it so clearly does not), then she will insist on being called a man rather than a woman. “For,” she says, “whoever heard of Java Woman and existential Woman and the values of Western Woman … ? … Stop hugging Moses' tablets to your chest, nitwit; you'll cave in” (140). Thus emerges the “female man” of the title. As Natalie Rosinsky says, “Shocking us into recognition of the absurdity of patriarchal law and so-called truth, Russ's humor enables the reader to distance herself from unexamined experience or belief, to become a healthy renegade.”¹²

In most other novels of this period, patriarchal language is attacked more subtly, using irony rather than parody. In both Female Friends and The Handmaid's Tale, Biblical language is mocked, altered, and called into question as a means of authority. Weldon's narrator comments on women's susceptibility to words: “reading significance into casual words, seeing love in calculated lust, seeing lust in innocent words.”¹³ Yet the young Chloe, growing up in the pub where her mother works, reads the Bible at night and instinctively questions its validity: “‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, when the evil days come not—’ But supposing they do?” (72). Atwood's Offred, who refers to the Bible as an “incendiary device”¹⁴ because, like other weapons, it is available only to the ruling-class men in Gilead, similarly questions Biblical statements or finds them inadequate. As part of the handmaids' training, they are required to recite Biblical passages that reinforce their submissiveness. After reciting a passage from the Beatitudes—“Blessed be those that mourn for they shall be comforted”—Offred undercuts the power of the utterance by thinking, “Nobody said when” (89). Writing of the emotional bondage of women with children, Weldon's Chloe herself rewrites the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the orphans, and the barren of body and mind” (205).

Weldon and Atwood also question the authority of patriarchal language by demonstrating that whatever its stated intention, it all comes from the same reservoir of male discourse. Religious and political dogma blend and become indistinguishable. Speaking of the enforced domesticity for women in the period following World War II—“women have to leave their jobs and return to the domestic dedication expected of all good women in peacetime”—Chloe says, “Hitler is not coming, and neither is God; there is to be neither punishment or salvation. There is, instead, a flurry of sexual activity which will land the schools between 1950 and 1960 with what is known as ‘The Bulge’” (114). In Atwood's Republic of Gilead, the birth-rate is dangerously low, which leads to the establishment of the class of handmaids, whose “domestic” duties are a degraded, obscene version of the “flurry of sexual activity” of which Chloe speaks. Biblical and Marxist teachings are blended and distorted in the effort to brainwash the handmaids: “From each, says the slogan, according to her ability; to each according to his needs. We recited that, three times, after dessert. It was from the Bible, or so they said. St. Paul again, in Acts” (117). Offred's ironic comment “or so they said” casts doubt on the authority of the statement, and forces the reader to note also the use of the pronouns “her” and “his” as yet another evidence of the oppression of women in Gilead.

Both suspicion of and domination by male discourse are consistent threads in Piercy's Small Changes. Beth, who begins the novel as a young woman wanting and living in the marriage plot, is nonetheless initially and increasingly resistant to received linguistic tradition. Even in the midst of her wedding, she listens to the jingle of an ice-cream truck rather than hearing the “magic words” of the ceremony: “Magic words that made things happen or go away, recipes like I Love You, and I'm Sorry, and I Pledge Allegiance, and God Bless Mommy and Daddy, and Will You Marry Me, and Fine, Thank You, and I Do” (21). Beth's perception that words are agents rather than merely symbols is what causes her to fear their use as weapons against her later in the novel, but this perception also frees her, for she is able to view the language of the dominant culture ironically, and ultimately to reject it altogether. Even very early in the novel, in the chapter ironically titled “The Happiest Day of a Woman's Life,” Beth recasts her sister Nancy's description of her wedding dress, “The train comes away,” in terms that suggest marriage as a potentially detachable burden: “That meant the thing that dragged could be taken off, with a little timely help” (12). Later, having escaped her marriage, Beth confronts Dorine's statement, “I feel sometimes as if I'll go through life and never belong to anyone,” with, “But you aren't a dog, why do you want to be owned?” (88). Beth's sense of freedom and selfhood is expressed late in the novel in a poem she writes:

Everything says no to me.
Everybody tells me no.
Only I say yes.
I have to say it again and again
like a singer
with only one song.
Yes, Beth! Yes, Beth! Yes, Beth!
Yes!

(313)

Elaine Tuttle Hansen identifies Piercy's approach to language in Small Changes when she states that “Piercy expresses her mistrust of language but does not advocate or sentimentalize silence on the part of women. While women need to seek alternatives and to reject language and literature when they are used to keep women in their place, they cannot allow themselves to be muted; inarticulateness is not a useful weapon.”¹⁵

Kate Brown, in Doris Lessing's The Summer before the Dark (1973), is, like Beth, conscious that conventional phrases are just that—conventions—and not prescriptions for how one must think or feel. At the beginning of the novel she is “trying on” words and phrases “like so many dresses off a rack”—phrases “as worn as nursery rhymes.” And indeed they are nursery rhymes for women: “Growing up is bound to be painful! … Marriage is a compromise. … I am not as young as I once was.” Kate perceives that such phrases rarely reflect actual feelings, yet have become the common currency of habit:

Such power do these phrases have, all issued for use as it might be by a particularly efficient advertising campaign, that it is probable many people go on repeating Youth is the best time of your life or Love is a woman's whole existence until they actually catch sight of themselves in a mirror while they are saying something of the kind, or are quick enough to catch the reaction on a friend's face.¹⁶

Kate's acknowledgment at this point that people—women—are capable of recognizing the insincerity of their own formulaic utterances is magnified later in the novel when she and her friend Mary are driven to helpless laughter by the jargon referent to homemaking. Each has been patronizingly advised by a child's teacher about the child's “normal” adjustment: “The phrases followed each other: well-adjusted, typical, normal, integrated, secure, normative” (149); subsequently, even the words “wife, husband, man, woman” begin to seem to the two women hilarious clichés, and Lessing notes that “it was a ritual, like the stag parties of suburban men in which everything their normal lives are dedicated to upholding is spat upon, insulted, belittled” (150).

A second way in which women writers deal with male discourse is to appropriate it—to use, as authors and narrators, the language of the dominant culture in order to demonstrate an altered relationship with it. Joanne Frye has identified the novel as “peculiarly susceptible to feminist concern for cultural change”: “its capacity to ‘represent’ the shared experience of women's lives—‘differenced’ as women experience it, whatever its explanation or cause—while simultaneously resisting external definitions of those lives as they have been encoded within male-dominated expectations.”¹⁷ Appropriation of male discourse is the most problematic of the ways in which women deal with it. Lesje, in Life before Man, is an example of one caught in the paradox of male-defined female roles and her own professional life in the male-dominated field of paleontology. As Homans points out, Lesje uses the language of science without being a part of its creation; her creative participation in prehistory exists in fantasies, not in reality. Even her pregnancy is an act of vengeance and desperation—a way to solidify her relationship with Nate and remain in the “marriage plot.” Miriam, in Small Changes, does appropriate successfully the language of male professional discourse as a computer scientist, but she gives up her professional aspirations in order to remain, like Lesje, in the marriage plot. Beth, in the same novel, does not fail to appropriate male discourse, as she initially wishes to do, but chooses instead to express herself specifically as a woman in her women's theater group.

Other female characters, however, do use words as weapons. In Walker's The Color Purple, the turning point in Celie's struggle for self-esteem comes when she is finally able to talk back to Mr.____, the husband who has degraded her and hidden the letters her sister Nettie has written to her over the years. With the support of Shug Avery, Celie finds her voice when Mr.____ says that she will go to Memphis with Shug “over my dead body.” The log jam of Celie's resentment breaks at that moment: “You a lowdown dog is what's wrong, I say. It's time to leave you and enter into the Creation. And your dead body just the welcome mat I need.” Shocked at Celie's freely spoken resolve, Mr.____ is effectively silenced, reversing the pattern of male dominance that he has enjoyed for so long: “Mr.____ start to sputter. ButButButButBut. Sound like some kind of motor.”¹⁸ The image of Mr.____ as a piece of machinery emphasizes Celie's human transcendence over him.

Perhaps the most common and effective method by which women writers have addressed male discourse is by revising the mythologies it has promulgated. The various myths and stories that have been used as paradigms for success, heroism, and male-female relationships are perceived with skeptical irony by these authors. The efficacy of romantic love is a staple of the traditional fairy tale that is frequently deconstructed in these works. For example, shortly after Celie has confronted Mr.____ on his own terms, he asks her about her rejection of him and her preference for Shug Avery:

He say, Celie, tell me the truth. You don't like me cause I'm a man? I blow my nose. Take off they pants, I say, and men look like frogs to me. No matter how you kiss 'em, as far as I'm concern, frogs is what they stay.

(224)

By refusing to accept the role of princess, who can turn the frog into a prince, Celie refuses to identify herself as the nurturer and savior of men. Fairy tales and their revision permeate Weldon's Words of Advice. Not only is the story of her life that Gemma tells Elsa a constantly revised fairy tale, but Elsa's naive romantic view of herself—fed by fairy tales—is finally replaced by a more mature view at the end of the novel. Gemma, having lost a finger, married the frog rather than the prince, and developed a psychosomatic inability to walk, needs to recreate her life as a different fairy tale. When at the end of the novel Gemma's husband, Hamish, tells Elsa that Gemma's story has been a fabrication, Gemma responds in a passage that posits the human need for illusion:

“One story or another, Hamish,” she says. “What's the difference? It is all the same. It's the one-way journey we all make from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience. We must all make it; there is no escape. It's just that love and romance and illusion and hope are etched so deeply into all our hearts that they can never quite be wiped away. They stay around to torment us with thoughts of what might have been.”

(231)

Gemma recasts her life as a fairy tale in order to lessen the power that romance and illusion have over her; at the same time, she suggests that all our stories are fictitious—“One story or another … what's the difference?” By the end of Words of Advice, Gemma has taken the trip from “ignorance to knowledge” and is able to walk; and Elsa is home having cocoa with her brothers and sisters, ready to embark anew upon her adult life.

Moving from ignorance to knowledge frequently involves disentangling oneself from one or more mythologies. Jane Gray, in The Waterfall, has to come to terms with the fact that her life is not a novel by Thomas Hardy or George Eliot, and must write her own text. The earliest mythology that Jane must free herself from is her family's concept of respectability, composed of beliefs “in the God of the Church of England, … in monogamy, in marrying for love, in free will, in the possibility of moderation of the passions, in the virtues of reason and civilization.”¹⁹ When she marries Malcolm, she is still in the clutches of these myths; a “doomed romantic” (91), she believes it is love at first sight when she hears Malcolm sing Thomas Campion's lyrics. Like Gemma a believer in the power of “romance and illusion and hope,” Jane later places the blame for her mistake on the literature that perpetuates such ideas: “I blame Campion, I blame the poets, I blame Shakespeare for that farcical moment in Romeo and Juliet when he sees her at the dance, from far off, and says, I'll have her, because she is the one that will kill me” (92). A central irony of The Waterfall is that Jane does not, in fact, die of love the way that Juliet, Sue Bridehead, and Maggie Tulliver do. In the automobile accident the couple has when stealing away for an illicit weekend, her lover, James, is injured, but Jane walks away with only scratches. Indeed, Jane's guilt and wonder at her escape from both respectability and the old plots cause her to narrate and revise her story. At the end of the novel she revises a twentieth-century mythology—that birth-control pills are liberating and safe—by reporting that use of the pills has caused a blood clot in her leg. The Jane who feels guilty about her happiness with James is glad to have this small price to pay for it—“I prefer to suffer, I think” (256)—yet as she has so ironically shown the reader, her suffering is scarcely equal to her happiness.

However haunted Jane Gray may be by the old mythologies, she sees clearly the dangerous illusions they can foster in women's minds, and by writing of her own fulfillment outside these mythologies, she writes a truly female text in which the sensual pleasures of the female body—childbirth, orgasm—are celebrated as not only natural but also the wellsprings of female creativity. The character Jane is a poet; in The Waterfall she is the first-person reviser and shaper of her own story, so that woman and writer are finally identical. As Ellen Cronan Rose has written, “Jane's task as woman and as artist is the same: to acknowledge the existence within her self of the Other and not simply to reconcile but to encompass that division.”²⁰ The woman artist, especially in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, rejects a belief in stability and certainty—in the creation of art as well as in the middle-class respectability of Jane's parents. As Joanne Creighton comments, “Jane has discovered intuitively what post-structuralists have postulated, that reality is necessarily mediated through language and that different ‘codes’ create different discourses.”²¹ Creighton points to one of the passages in which Jane questions the “accuracy” of her own text:

the ways of regarding an event, so different, don't add up to a whole; they are mutually exclusive: the social view, the sexual view, the circumstantial view, the moral view, these visions contradict each other; they do not supplement one another, they cancel each other out, they destroy one another.

(47)

This passage is remarkably similar to one in The Handmaid's Tale in which Offred is reminding us once again that what she is telling us is a “reconstruction”:

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

(134)

Rose points to the postscript of The Waterfall as “a triumph of feminine form,” because of both its irony and its refusal to make a “final formulation”: “The last dramatic, heroic, ‘masculine’ statement—‘I prefer to suffer’—is followed by the feminine ending, ‘I think’” (66). But more than this, Drabble undercuts the suffering of the romantic, mythological heroine with the revisionist stance of the ironist.

As Jane Gray uses her skills as a writer to bring her life into clearer focus and free herself from the old mythologies, so Violet Clay, title character in Godwin's novel, must learn to take herself seriously as an artist and disentangle herself from the myths and stories she has both inherited and created. Violet, like Jane, is able to see herself ironically, revising her own history as she inhabits the present. Violet's grandmother, who had hoped to be a pianist, instead became trapped in the marriage plot and gave up her career. As she tells Violet, she was seduced away from Carnegie Hall by “a subversive, tempting picture”:

The picture was of that lady so feted in our day—her praises were sung in every women's magazine—the accomplished wife and mother who turns her gifts to the enhancement of Home. I saw myself, safe and rich and beautiful, seated at a nine-foot grand in Charles's ancestral home, playing the G Minor Ballade by Chopin, followed by Mozart's sonata with the Turkish Rondo, to a select cultural gathering, after which my two beautiful children would be led in by the servants to say good night.²²

Such a romantic vision did not materialize, and Violet's grandmother tells Violet her story as a cautionary tale; but Violet insists that she will not make the same mistake: “Don't worry. I have my own plans” (38). However, Violet not only marries rather than going to New York to pursue her career; when she finally leaves her marriage and makes the move, she remains caught in a romanticized image of herself as a victim of circumstance until her uncle's suicide forces her to begin to disengage from the fantasies she has so carefully constructed. As an illustrator of Gothic romances, Violet assumes that she is superior to her material, but like the Gothic heroine, she is waiting to be rescued rather than creating her own future. In order to free herself from the myth of “The Young Woman as Artist” (26), she has to confront her uncle Ambrose's failure as a novelist and hence the potential of her own. Violet's first successful painting is titled “Suspended Woman,” which aptly characterizes Violet's situation at the end of the novel: having rejected the “Book of Old Plots,” she is poised to begin life on her own terms.²³

In mocking, appropriating, and revising the language and the stories of a culture that has at the very least discouraged women's participation in its dominant discourse, the contemporary woman novelist creates fiction that is fundamentally ironic in its intent. That is, by questioning the formulations of self and experience that are imposed on women rather than arising from their own perceptions, the writer creates what Lilian Furst calls “an inquiring mode that exploits discrepancies, challenges assumptions and reflects equivocations, but that does not presume to hold out answers.”²⁴ The absence of clear answers both mirrors the historical period during which these novels were written and creates fictions that are not conclusive, because conclusions, like traditional mythologies, do not allow growth and evolution. When these novelists focus on ways in which women are silenced and excluded, the possibility of change takes the form of fantasy. Some forms of fantasy are positive and enabling, such as Kingston's dream of the “woman warrior”; others, like the dystopian vision of The Handmaid's Tale, are horrific; all, however, arise from a need for alternative realities. Fantasy theorists frequently note the function of fantasy as a critique of existing norms and structures, challenging not merely facts, but also assumptions. William Irvin, for example, states that “conventions as to factual possibility and impossibility are not the only kind that fantasies deny. There are also beliefs, interpretations, and understandings seemingly based on facts and widely enough accepted to have the status of convention.”²⁵ The use of fantasy in women's fiction is a way of exploring and challenging assumptions about women's lives.

Metaphoric of the silencing of women is the fact that characters in these novels frequently lack names, or have more than one name for more than one identity. The power of names to define women's status and role came into sharp focus during the 1960s and 1970s as feminists sought not only to rid English of sexist and exclusionary terminology (Janet's diatribe against the word “mankind” in The Female Man reflects this concern), but also to make clear that such terms as “girl” and “little woman” are demeaning. The fact that women traditionally assume first the names of their fathers and then the names of their husbands means that they go through life without named identities of their own, but instead with names that indicate their status as objects: daughter, wife.²⁶ The most extreme example of relational naming is “Offred” in The Handmaid's Tale: not even a name, this is a tag that the narrator wears to signify that she is the handmaid “of Fred.”²⁷ Significantly, the researchers who report in the “Historical Notes” section of the novel can attempt to discover Offred's identity only by determining which “Fred” her Commander was, and their efforts are inconclusive.

Margaret Atwood's narrator in Surfacing is not only nameless, but also obsessed by language and a search for identity—a search that allows her to cast off the fantasies she has constructed about her own life and enter into a primitive world of the imagination in which language is secondary to feeling. By limiting the narrative perspective to that of the unnamed narrator, Atwood allows us only gradually to understand—as the narrator herself confronts it—that she has imaginatively transformed an affair with a married man and the abortion of a child into marriage, childbirth, and divorce. The narrator clearly feels the power of language, and regards naming as a limiting, restrictive act. Of the child she pretends to have borne, she says early in the novel, “I never identified it as mine; I didn't name it before it was born even, the way you're supposed to.”²⁸ The act of getting married, she thinks, ruined the relationship with her “husband”: “We committed that paper act. I still don't see why signing a name should make any difference but he began to expect things, he wanted to be pleased” (47). Language is “everything you do” (153), and it “divides us into fragments” (172). The major obstacle the narrator confronts in trying to come to terms with her life and her fantasies is the split between mind and body, between the rational and the intuitive. Midway through the novel she comments that “the trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies”: “I'm not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn't have different words for them” (91). At the end of the novel, on the verge of accepting Joe because he is “only half formed,” she still distrusts language: “For us it's necessary, the intercession of words; and we will probably fail, sooner or later, more or less painfully” (224).

Atwood's narrator resists naming, but the narrator's aunt in The Woman Warrior has, in the eyes of her Chinese family, lost the right to her name because she has become pregnant and committed suicide. The “no name woman” has been effectively expunged from family history, so that the narrator must flesh out her mother's sparse, confidential story with her own imaginings as she tries to come to terms with the Chinese heritage that silences her. The narrator's Chinese and American identities are at war as she matures; nor can she reconcile her mother's life as a doctor in China and her timid, unadventurous manner in America. The reconciliation between mother and daughter takes place when the narrator's mother calls her by her childhood nickname, “Little Dog”: “a name to fool the gods. I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years.”²⁹

Just as Kingston's narrator, having heard the stories of Fa Mu Lan, has her fantasy of being the woman warrior, so the adolescent Miriam, in Small Changes, creates a fantasy self. Having discovered that the best parts in most plots are reserved for men, Miriam makes up stories in which she is Tamar De Luria, an anthropologist who has defended a primitive tribe from white colonialists and in return has been taught their secrets. Like Kingston's woman warrior, Tamar has both male and female characteristics: “Tamar could track people and walk so silently she never broke a twig and climb trees like a cat and scamper over buildings and fight as well as a man” (97-98). Yet “when Tamar danced, men fell in love with her” (98). As the woman warrior sends her infant son home with her husband while she finishes her conquest, so Tamar remains dedicated to the tribe that has taught her its secrets: “Because she never knew when a message would come from her island saying that her people were in danger again and she must return to save them, she could never marry” (98). In these fantasies, triggered by other stories, the female characters take on an autonomy that, as they are aware, is normally reserved for men, and escape, imaginatively and temporarily, the scripts that have been written for them as women. Similarly, Lesje, in Life before Man, uses her fantasies of prehistory to take control as she cannot do in her professional life. She is a scribe, a copyist of the language of paleontology, not a researcher who creates the language that she copies onto tags in the museum. In her daydreams, however, Lesje “allows herself to violate shamelessly whatever official version of paleontological reality she chooses”:

She mixes eras, adds colors: why not a metallic blue stegosaurus with red and yellow dots instead of the dull greys and browns postulated by the experts? Of which she, in a minor way, is one. Across the flanks of the camptosaurs pastel flushes of color come and go, reddish pink, purple, light pink, reflecting emotions like the contracting and expanding chromatophores in the skins of octopuses.

(13)

Fitting neither into the world of her male profession—except as a “minor” expert—nor into the world of women, Lesje wants to merge the two by bringing the colors of emotion into the dry world of her science.

Those women who, like Kingston's narrator, are not part of mainstream culture by virtue of their racial or ethnic backgrounds are more easily and effectively silenced. Kingston's narrator describes at length her refusal to speak during kindergarten and grade school, and links it to the fact that she is Chinese and female: “The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl” (193). Another form that her silence takes is her habit during these years of covering her school paintings with a layer of black paint. Neither her teachers nor her parents understand that in the child's imagination the black paint represents stage curtains behind which her painting waits to be gloriously unveiled. At home, the girl “spread them out (so black and full of possibilities) and pretended the curtains were swinging open, flying up, one after another, sunlight underneath, mighty operas” (192). Celie, in The Color Purple, is, like Kingston's narrator, abjured to be silent at the very start of the novel: “You better not never tell nobody but God” (11). Taking this warning literally, she begins, at the age of fourteen, writing letters to God, telling her story to the only one she believes can understand it. In Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Consuelo, as a Mexican-American woman living in New York, is at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, a fact that makes it easy for those in control to interpret her despair and rage as madness, and to silence her with drugs. When Geraldo commits her to Bellevue, no one asks to hear her side of the story: “So far no one had heard a word she said, which of course was not unusual.”³⁰ Yet it is Consuelo who is selected for contact by Luciente, from a utopian culture in 2137, who tells her that she is “an unusual person. Your mind is unusual. You're what we call a catcher, a receptive” (41). Considered merely a dangerous psychotic by those who would keep her locked up and drugged, Connie is a sensitive woman who is capable of entering into an alternate reality.³¹

In Lessing's The Four-Gated City, the authority of the psychiatric establishment is also challenged, this time by Martha Quest's rejection of it to pursue her own self-examination through empathic union with Lynda. Using both fantasy and irony, Lessing suggests that women's silence is alleviated not by remote institutions but by intimate and intuitive fantasy. The ironically named Dr. Lamb, Lynda's psychiatrist, represents the power of hegemonic culture to label, categorize, and therefore silence those who do not conform to preconceived standards of “normality.” Lynda mocks this practice when she tells Martha the joke among psychiatric hospital patients of the “nothing-but”:

You know, it's that point when they get all pleased because they can say: you're nothing but—whatever it is. They've taken weeks and weeks to get to that point, you know, and it's. You're nothing but Electra. You know, that girl who killed her mother? … It's nothing but you want to sleep with your father. Nothing-but your brother. … I'm nothing-but a depression.³²

By recognizing the dehumanizing effect of the “nothing-but” labeling, Lynda and Martha can prepare for the joint exploration of “their dreams, their slips of the tongue, their fantasies” (372) that leads Martha to self-realization. As Elizabeth Abel has pointed out, the contrast between Martha's relationships with Dr. Lamb and Mark, and the one with Lynda, points up the sharp difference between scientific objectivity and hierarchy on the one hand, and fluidity and openness on the other. When Martha enters imaginatively into Lynda's world of madness, she “takes the risk of throwing off her rational guard, thereby uncovering a portion of herself”:

The union achieved by Martha and Lynda becomes an emblem of the breakthrough essential to human survival, the transformation of the brain from “a machine which works in division” to the unified and unifying organism invoked by the Sufi tale that forms the dedication of the novel.³³

In the midst of hers and Lynda's explorations of madness and sanity, Martha articulates the connection between madness and expression, the breaking of silence, when she speaks of their not having words to describe the process they are going through:

Perhaps it was because if society is so organized, or rather has so grown, that it will not admit what one knows to be true, will not admit it, that is, except as it comes out perverted, through madness, then it is through madness and its variants it must be sought after.

(375)

Madness and its “variants”—dreams, daydreams, and fantasies—become subversive ways of overcoming exclusion and silence. “What one knows to be true” but cannot express because it will not be understood or accepted in light of one's marginal position in society emerges in fantasy. Contemporary women novelists use various forms of fantasy to show women attempting to take control of circumstances from which they are excluded, to express what would otherwise be inexpressible. Violet Clay and the Surfacing narrator must extricate themselves from fantasies they have devised to avoid confronting painful realities, but to do so they must dream other selves and relations. Kingston's “woman warrior” fantasy, like Martha Quest's approach to madness, is in itself enabling, allowing the woman access to an alternate reality that permits a more complete identity.

In The Color Purple, The Woman Warrior, and The Handmaid's Tale, the central characters are initially silenced by their cultures, but each eventually works her way to freedom through language. The central irony in all three texts is that the very thing that is denied these women—the freedom to speak up, speak out, be heard—becomes the medium through which they define themselves. Celie's letters to God and Nettie, the woman warrior's memoirs, and Offred's voice on cassette tapes all serve as records of an emergence from silence, both in terms of the way in which they relate to others and in the fact of the written record itself. Forms of fantasy work in various ways in these novels: Celie dreams of an eventual reconciliation with Nettie, the Woman Warrior narrator imagines herself as a powerful avenger, and Offred dreams of a past in which she had choices while inhabiting a speculative future that is itself the fantasy of the author. Each is aware that her present reality is oppressive, denying her individuality and her autonomy.

In Alice Walker's 1976 novel Meridian, she tells the story of the slave woman Louvinie, whose master cuts out her tongue because one of her frightening stories is presumed to have killed his weak-hearted son. Louvinie had been raised in a family of storytellers in West Africa; the loss of her tongue is equivalent to the loss of her spirit: “Without one's tongue in one's mouth or in a special spot of one's choosing, the singer in one's soul was lost forever to grunt and snort through eternity like a pig.”³⁴ Celie, in The Color Purple, is silenced by both physical brutality and admonition. Raped by the man she assumes to be her father and warned by him, “You better not never tell nobody but God” (11), Celie keeps her silence in the face of those who oppress her until emboldened by her relationship with Shug Avery. But all the while, in her letters to God and Nettie, she develops her own voice as her own storyteller.

The issue of names, here as in other novels, is a crucial narrative element. Names are closely tied to identity, and the claiming or conferring of a name is an indication of selfhood. Celie's letters to God are unsigned; during the period before she begins writing to Nettie, she feels that she is no one, has no particular identity. Shug effectively returns Celie's name to her when she names a song for her:

          Then I hear my name.
          Shug saying Celie. Miss Celie. And I look up where she at.
          She say my name again. She say this song I'm bout to sing is call
Miss Celie's song. …
          First time somebody made something and name it after me.

(75)

Late in the novel, having achieved a measure of emotional and economic independence, Celie signs a letter to Nettie in a manner that shows she has both a name and a place:

Your Sister, Celie
Folkspants, Unlimited.
Sugar Avery Drive
Memphis, Tennessee

(192)

Similarly, Mary Agnes attempts to and finally succeeds in emerging from her nickname, “Squeak.” Her real name is a badge of her personhood and dignity. When her uncle, with whom she tries to intercede on behalf of Sofia, rapes her, Harpo is sympathetic and tells “Squeak” that he loves her; but she refuses to be demeaned by both the rape and her nickname: “She stand up. My name Mary Agnes, she say” (95). Later, in the same scene in which Celie finds her voice to talk back to Mr.____, Mary Agnes wins this battle for her own name and identity. When she announces that she, too, wants to go to Memphis to pursue a singing career, Harpo initially reacts as had Mr.____ to Celie: “Listen Squeak, say Harpo. You can't go to Memphis. That's all there is to it”:

          Mary Agnes, say Squeak.
          Squeak, Mary Agnes, what difference do it make?
          It make a lot, say Squeak. When I was Mary Agnes I could sing in
public.

(183)

Harpo has not recognized until now the power of names; but the next time he addresses her, it is as Mary Agnes.

One of the most subtle and ironic instances of naming in The Color Purple involves the relationship between Celie and her husband. Having been forced to marry him, Celie seldom thinks of him with any affection or intimacy, as reflected in the fact that she always refers to him as “Mr.____,” without even a last name. The distance between them is magnified when he brings the ill Shug Avery, who has been his mistress, home for Celie to care for. Shug addresses him as Albert, and Celie writes, “Who Albert, I wonder. Then I remember Albert Mr.____ first name” (51). Yet it is Shug, loved by both Celie and Albert, who fosters whatever tender feelings the couple are able to have for one another. When Albert's father visits and taunts Celie—“Not many women let they husband whore lay up in they house”—they are united in their defense of Shug: “Mr.____ look up at me, our eyes meet. This the closest us ever felt” (59). Near the end of the novel, Celie and Albert are drawn together by Shug's departure, and he puts his arms around her with tenderness. As they sew together, Celie thinks, “He not such a bad looking man, you know, when you come right down to it. And now it do begin to look like he got a lot of feeling hind his face” (239). In her last letter to God, Celie refers to him as Albert, a fact that marks not only her sense of confidence, but also Albert's new understanding of love that allows her to grant him an identity.

Celie's initial silence is a continual reference point in her letters to God. When Albert's sister urges her to fight for a decent way of life, she writes, “I don't say nothing” (29). When Albert comes home from seeing Shug, Celie has “a million question,” but she does not ask them: “I pray for strength, bite the insides of my jaws” (34). When rumors begin to circulate about Shug's illness, “I want to ast, but don't” (48). First meeting Shug, Celie wants desperately to welcome her to the house, but “I don't say nothing. It not my house” (50). Yet in her letters to God and later to Nettie, Celie not only breaks her silence, but creates a vivid tapestry of her life that shows her to be a sensitive, perceptive woman who sees the ironies of her own experience. By using the epistolary form, Walker allows Celie the freedom to shape her existence in vivid, expressive prose. The changes in Celie's style during the course of the novel reflect her growing sense of worth. In the earliest letters her writing is inhibited and cryptic, but as writing increasingly becomes a mode of ordering her experience, her style becomes more fluid and scenic; in short, Celie becomes the novelist of her own life. One evidence of this is that she guards her dialectical speech. In Memphis, Darlene attempts to correct Celie's grammar, but Celie resists: “Pretty soon it feel like I can't think. My mind run up on a thought, git confuse, run back and sort of lay down” (193). Her resistance to changing her language is essentially rooted in her common-sense integrity: “Look like to me only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind” (194). As Elizabeth Fifer puts it, “By using dialect, the only language she knows, when all public communication is forbidden, she discovers and exploits a powerful tool in her development of awareness through self-expression.”³⁵

Significantly, Celie gains strength and confidence from a community of women: the resilient Sofia, the loving Shug Avery, and her sister Nettie with whom she dreams of being reunited. Shug is the agent by which Celie's dreams are realized. She awakens Celie to her own sexuality, finds the letters from Nettie that Albert has hidden, and makes possible the pants-making business that gives Celie economic independence. Yet it is ultimately Celie's taking control of language that allows her to put her life together. When she refuses to let Albert stop her from going to Memphis with Shug, she effectively reverses the balance of power in their relationship, becoming the one who teaches him—about sewing, about the larger world, and about love. Having dealt with the sexual oppression in her life, she ultimately addresses racism by using what she has learned from Nettie's letters. Revising the Genesis story according to the Olinka tribe's beliefs, Celie proposes to Albert that the first human beings were black, and that they considered the occasional white child that was born an aberration. “So really Adam wasn't even the first white man. He was just the first one the people didn't kill” (239). When she has achieved her own identity, Celie is in harmony with the natural world, and language seems to be supplied by agencies outside herself. Cursing Albert for his history of meanness, Celie muses, “Look like when I open my mouth the air rush in and shape words” (187).

By questioning the authority of received tradition and her own oppressor, Celie demonstrates her freedom from arbitrary justification for sexual and racial oppression. In significant ways, her life begins anew. Her last letter is addressed not merely to God, but to the entire “Creation” she has told Albert she wishes to enter: “Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything” (249). Celie and Nettie, reunited, appropriately, on Independence Day, “totter toward one nother like us use to do when us was babies” (250), and this last letter ends with a declaration of youth and hope: “I think this the youngest us ever felt” (251).

Kingston's novel, like Walker's, opens with an admonition to silence: “‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (3). This highly autobiographical work also shares with The Color Purple a focus on cultural marginality: both Celie and Kingston's narrator—the latter a first-generation Chinese-American woman—are excluded from the language of the dominant culture by their racial and ethnic origins. King-Kok Cheung wisely cautions against readers or critics taking these two texts as representative of the authors' respective cultures, pointing out that Walker and Kingston are imaginative writers rather than cultural historians. Further, Cheung reminds us that the sources of sexism and silence are quite different in the cultures from which their authors come:

[B]lack silences, deepened by the history of slavery, are not the same as Chinese American silences, which were reinforced by anti-Asian immigration laws. Celie's repression is much more violent and brutal than Maxine's, and her resources are at the beginning much more limited. Celie expresses herself tentatively at first because she lacks schooling; it is in school that Maxine becomes totally incommunicative (because she has to learn a second language).

But Cheung agrees that language becomes for both characters an empowering force, and that “gender and ethnicity—inhibitive forces when these texts open—eventually become the sources of personal and stylistic strengths.”³⁶

Celie's husband Albert, angered by her defiance of him, attempts to reduce her to nothingness: “You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all” (187). Kingston's narrator experiences a similar humiliation when her parents reflect the traditional Chinese belief that girls are worthless: “Better to raise geese than girls” (54). Both Walker and Kingston also avoid traditional linear narrative. Celie's and Nettie's letters to each other are hidden and misdirected, so that they do not follow a pattern of response and exchange, and Walker leaves it to the reader to fill in the gaps between the episodes Celie narrates. The five sections of The Woman Warrior are free-standing narratives that overlap and enrich each other rather than following a clear narrative continuum.

Yet Celie's progress toward freedom from oppression unfolds as a steady, gradual process, mirrored in the increasingly confident style in which she writes and in the actions and attitudes she records. Kingston's work, on the other hand, is what Suzanne Juhasz has called “circumstantial, complex, and contextual”: “In their form, women's lives tend to be like the stories they tell: they show less a pattern of linear development toward some clear goal than one of repetitious, cumulative, cyclical structure,” which is similar to Hélène Cixous's description of a “feminine text” as one that “is always endless, without ending: there's no closure, it doesn't stop. … [A] feminine text goes on and on and, at a certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues.”³⁷ As part of this unfinished circularity, Kingston constantly alters the form of her narrative, which makes it difficult to classify as fiction or autobiography.³⁸ Roberta Rubenstein has identified the five major sections of the book as follows:

The first three of the five major divisions of The Woman Warrior might be viewed respectively as a morality tale, a fairy-tale epic, and a series of “ghost stories” and adventures completed by the reconciliation between mother and daughter. The fourth section, “At the Western Palace,” is a tragedy, and the final one, “Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” is a combination of confession and legend.³⁹

While such identifications should be viewed as suggestive rather than fixed, Rubenstein's comments indicate the complexity of The Woman Warrior's formal characteristics.

Language, irony, and fantasy are interdependent in The Woman Warrior, for it is the multiple ironies of her life that the narrator must resolve, and it is through fantasy that she finds the language to do so. Two sets of related ironic circumstances affect the narrator's life. Juhasz identifies one set of ironies when she states that The Woman Warrior “is about trying to be an American, when you are the child of Chinese emigrants; trying to be a woman, when you have been taught that men are all that matters; trying to be a writer, when you have been afraid to speak out loud at all.”⁴⁰ All of these paradoxes serve initially to silence the narrator. As her aunt, the “no name woman,” “gave silent birth” (13), so the young narrator is silent in school—a Chinese girl among Americans. “It was when I found out I had to talk in school that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery” (193). Because she is uncertain of either her Chinese or her American identity, she retreats into silence in the face of “Chinese communication,” which is “loud, public” (13). Even as an adult, though she is “getting better,” the narrator notes that “a telephone call makes my throat bleed and takes up that day's courage” (191).

Speaking of the work of Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Margaret Homans has noted that these writers “differentiate between the linguistic exile they experience as minorities and that which they experience as women,”⁴¹ and so does Kingston. In the public, “American” world of school, her ethnic identity, not her gender, silences her; but at home in the immigrant community, girls are by tradition considered useless: “When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, ‘feeding girls is like feeding cowbirds,’ I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I couldn't talk” (54). Her inarticulate rage brings the response that she is a “bad girl,” which the narrator suggests might be an advantage: “Isn't a bad girl almost a boy?” (56).⁴² Since she cannot transform herself into a boy, she fantasizes being a woman warrior, and through relating such fantasies, emerges from her silence.

The second set of ironies—and the one that eventually gives Kingston's narrator her language—consists of multiple versions of “truth” that relate to her history, her identity as a Chinese-American woman, and her role as a writer. Confronted at every turn by contradictions, the narrator must, like the reader of an ironic text, formulate her own version of reality. When the narrator reaches puberty, her mother tells her the story of her aunt in China, who disgraced the family not only by bearing an illegitimate child, but also by drowning herself in the family well. The story is, as Rubenstein says, a “morality tale,” meant to warn the young girl about sexuality and family honor; yet she is simultaneously admonished never to tell it to anyone else—to deny, in fact, the existence of the aunt:

“Don't tell anyone you had an aunt. Your father does not want to hear her name. She has never been born.” I have believed that sex was unspeakable and words so strong and fathers so frail that “aunt” would do my father mysterious harm.

(18)

The story of the “No Name Woman,” who both existed and did not exist, introduces Kingston's narrator to the power of both language and silence.

As she must revise and recreate the story of her aunt, so the narrator must reconcile the story of her mother's heroic actions as a woman doctor in China with her docile, hard-working American presence. Brave Orchid, who rid her medical school of ghosts and delivered babies in pigpens, is in America a woman surrounded by ghosts, who tells her daughters that they are not worth feeding. The confusion of her mother's two selves mirrors the split between a Chinese identity and an American identity: “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America” (6). Yet it is the stories of this “invisible world”—her mother's “talk-story”—that ultimately allows the narrator to create herself by telling her own story. As Rubenstein puts it, “Rejecting her mother's entrapment in a culture that devalues females, yet identifying with Brave Orchid's talent—and in tribute to her—Kingston became a storyteller, committed to giving expression to the muted females of her culture” (179-80).

However, it is not only members of Chinese-American culture for whom Kingston's narrator speaks up. As difficult as speech remains for her, she tells her employer at an art supply store that she does not like his calling a color “nigger yellow”; her voice is a “bad, small-person's voice that makes no impact,” but she nonetheless says the words (57). Later, she loses a job when she confronts an employer with the fact that the restaurant he has chosen for a banquet is being picketed by members of naacp and core: “‘I refuse to type these invitations,’ I whispered, voice unreliable” (58). As unreliable and ineffectual as her spoken voice may be, however, Kingston's written language uses myth, fantasy, and memory to penetrate the ironies of identity and avoid the madness that overtakes Moon Orchid when she arrives from China to find her husband remarried and thoroughly Americanized. In the final section of The Woman Warrior, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” the narrator says, “I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves” (216). The closest the narrator comes to madness is the eighteen-month “mysterious illness” she suffers after physically and emotionally abusing a young Chinese girl who refuses to speak. Having gone to the extreme of castigating someone so like her younger self, she retreats from life to stay in bed: “It was the best year and a half of my life” (212).

By returning to the narrator's childhood, the final section of The Woman Warrior underscores the circularity of the search for truth in the midst of ironic paradox and contradiction. Fittingly, the book ends with a “talk-story” begun by the mother and finished by the daughter. The mother tells of her own mother outwitting bandits by having the family take everything they owned with them when they went to the theater. The narrator completes the story by imagining that at the theater her grandmother has heard the songs of Ts'ai Yen, a female second-century poet who brought songs to China from her barbarian captivity. Both parts of the story speak to the transforming power of fantasy and language. The narrator's grandmother decides that “our family was immune to harm as long as they went to plays” (241); and the narrator reports that Ts'ai Yen's “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” was adopted by the Chinese because “it translated well” (243), the statement that concludes the book and testifies to the narrator's translation of her own experience into a meaningful whole.

If The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior show women emerging from silence into language as part of their authors' feminist desire for women to claim autonomy, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale posits a future culture in which such feminist dreams have been replaced by a fundamentalist patriarchy that divides women into rigid categories based on function: Wives, Marthas (servants), Econowives, Handmaids (surrogate mothers for the children of Commanders and their Wives), Aunts (who train the Handmaids), and Unwomen—those from whom language has removed gender because they are unfitted for any other category. Atwood's dystopian novel—which has been called a “futuristic feminist nightmare” and a “science-fiction fable”⁴³—is in significant ways a cautionary tale: a message from the future to those of us in the present who may be able to prevent the Republic of Gilead from coming to pass.⁴⁴ Six years before The Handmaid's Tale was published, Atwood commented on the writing of fiction in a way that seems to anticipate the novel:

What kind of world shall you describe for your readers? The one you can see around you, or the better one you can imagine? If only the latter, you'll be unrealistic; if only the former, despairing. But it is by the better world we can imagine that we judge the world we have. If we cease to judge this world, we may find ourselves, very quickly, in one which is infinitely worse.⁴⁵

The element of contrast between one reality and another that Atwood suggests here is the method of irony.

Indeed, in addition to being a fantasy, The Handmaid's Tale is essentially an ironic text in a more fundamental way than are most other works considered here. At every point Atwood invites the reader to question the validity of the narrative. Not only is Offred an unreliable narrator, in the sense that she is enmeshed in the experience she describes and has an imperfect understanding of the culture that controls her, but she constantly reminds the reader that her story is a “reconstruction.” Early in the novel, remembering the horror of having her five-year-old daughter taken from her, Offred speaks of the “truth” of her story:

I would like to believe that this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance.

If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

It isn't a story I'm telling.

It's also a story I'm telling in my head, as I go along.

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.

Even when there is no one. …

I'll pretend you can hear me.

But it's no good, because I know you can't.

(39-40)

In this deceptively simple passage, Offred addresses the relative “truths” of our actual experiences and the stories we tell ourselves about them, the prohibition of language in Gilead, and the storyteller's need for an audience.

Later, Offred announces, “This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction.” If she ever escapes to tell her story, she realizes that will be a reconstruction also, “at yet another remove.” And, as the author of her own story, she understands the limitations of language in conveying experience: “It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact …” (134). Having announced that language cannot tell the whole truth, Offred begins to alter her story deliberately. When her Commander asks her to kiss him, she imagines stabbing him while she does so: “I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands.” But she immediately corrects herself:

In fact I don't think about anything of the kind. I put it in only afterwards. Maybe I should have thought about that, at the time, but I didn't. As I said, this is a reconstruction. … He was so sad.

That is a reconstruction, too.

(140)

Later, after three paragraphs describing her first sexual encounter with Nick, the Commander's chauffeur, Offred begins again: “I made that up. It didn't happen that way. Here is what happened” (261). By constantly inviting the reader to question what she says, Offred compels the reader to participate in the process of irony by questioning and revising the language of the text.

Atwood creates the ironic framework in other ways, as well. Offred tells most of her story in the present tense, giving it the immediacy of direct experience; she speaks as one imprisoned, remembering the past but knowing no future beyond the present moment. Yet the reader learns in the “Historical Notes” coda that Offred's “manuscript” was itself reconstructed from voice recordings on cassette tapes found in an Army surplus footlocker in what had been Bangor, Maine. The “soi-disant manuscript” was thus recorded after Offred's escape on the “Underground Female-road,” rather than at the time of her life as a handmaid. To further cast doubt on the authenticity of Offred's story, Atwood has Professor Pieixoto note that the tapes were in no particular order, so that he and his associate have guessed at their proper sequence: “all such arrangements are based on some guesswork and are to be regarded as approximate” (302). Not only the order, but also the language of Offred's narrative is made dubious by Pieixoto's comment about “the difficulties posed by accent, obscure referents, and archaisms” (302). Atwood thus not only deepens the irony of Offred's text, but also comments on the nature of “truth.”

The exclusion from language that Celie and Kingston's narrator suffer is, in The Handmaid's Tale, magnified and made part of the repressive culture of Gilead. Women—even the Aunts—are denied books, paper, pens; only the Commanders may read even the Bible, and the shops are identified by pictures rather than by names: “they decided that even the names of shops were too much temptation for us” (25). In a society governed by The Word, words are themselves forbidden. Because biblical language is used for oppression rather than for redemption, hymns with the word “free” in them are banned, as are popular songs, and biblical language is altered and mixed with political slogans. Like Celie in The Color Purple deciding that God “must be sleep” (163), Offred attempts her own version of the Lord's Prayer, but finally concludes, “I feel as if I'm talking to a wall” (195).

Yet perhaps because of the prohibition of language, Offred, who had previously worked in a library, is fascinated by words, by puns and word-play. Waiting for the household to assemble for the evening Bible-reading, Offred thinks: “The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a ship. Hollow” (81). By such word associations, she exposes the hollowness of the concepts of home and family in Gilead. When Offred plays with word associations while remembering the past, she points up the contrast between freedom and oppression for women. Passing what was once a movie theater that had Humphrey Bogart festivals, she thinks of Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, “women on their own, making up their minds”: “They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then” (25). Later, remembering how she had loved books, Offred thinks of her job in the library:

It's strange, now, to think of having a job. Job. It's a funny word. It's a job for a man. Do a jobbie, they'd say to children when they were being toilet trained. Or of dogs: he did a job on the carpet. You were supposed to hit them with rolled-up newspapers, my mother said. I can remember when there were newspapers, though I never had a dog, only cats.

The Book of Job.

(173)

The word “job” leads Offred inevitably back to newspapers and books, and the Book of Job is a fitting metaphor for the suffering she endures in Gilead.

The story of Job, however, is a story of survival, and language enables Offred to survive. Telling her story is, in Rubenstein's words, “the self-generated act that opposes the obligations of procreation” (103). By creating an ironic fantasy, Atwood doubly compels the reader to participate in the creation of meaning. It is, finally, in the interaction between writer and reader, between reader and narrator, that the meaning of The Handmaid's Tale exists and that Offred triumphs as the author of her own story. Linda Hutcheon, writing about the shift from the lyrical to the narrative mode in Atwood's fiction, has suggested that although writing “can only employ the static counters of language, [it] is capable of being resurrected in the equally dynamic process of reading, the bringing to life of the dead black marks on the white page.”⁴⁶ Atwood herself feels strongly about the interaction among writer, text, and reader, and has described the writer as one who says, “There is a story I have to tell you, there is something you need to know”:

All writers play Ancient Mariner at times to the reader's Wedding Guest, hoping that they are holding the reader with their glittering eye, at least long enough so he'll turn the next page. The tale the Mariner tells is partly about himself, true, but it's partly about the universe and partly about something the Wedding Guest needs to know; or at least, that's what the story tells us.⁴⁷

Officially denied language in Gilead, Offred escapes to tell her story, however “reconstructed,” and tells us something we need to know about the human capacity for survival.

Notes

1. Marge Piercy, Small Changes (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 266-67.

2. Fay Weldon, Words of Advice (1977; reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1978), 20. Gemma's statement is also an example of irony, as is the entire story she tells.

3. Margaret Atwood, Life before Man (1979; reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1987), 12-13.

4. Margaret Homans, “‘Her Very Own Howl’: The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction,” Signs 9, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 196.

5. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delacorte, 1978), 42-43.

6. Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 211.

7. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 879.

8. Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981): 45.

9. Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 144. Cameron is here arguing specifically against the theories of Saussure and Whorf, which maintain, respectively, that the meaning of language is absolute and therefore outside the control of an individual language user, and that language is a “mode of action that interpenetrates with experience to the extent that words are things” (97).

10. Homans, “‘Her Very Own Howl,’” 191.

11. Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975; reprint, London: The Women's Press, 1985), 174-75.

12. Natalie M. Rosinsky, “A Female Man? The ‘Medusan’ Humor of Joanna Russ,” Extrapolation 23, no. 1 (1982): 32.

13. Fay Weldon, Female Friends (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), 108.

14. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 87.

15. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “The Double Narrative Structure of Small Changes,” in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, ed. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 213. I am indebted to this essay for its clear, succinct analysis of the way in which Piercy approaches both language and narrative structure in the novel.

16. Doris Lessing, The Summer before the Dark (1973; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1974).

17. Joanne S. Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), 18.

18. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982; reprint, New York: Washington Square Press, 1983), 181.

19. Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall (1969; reprint, New York: Fawcett, 1977), 51.

20. Ellen Cronan Rose, The Novels of Margaret Drabble: Equivocal Forms (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 61.

21. Joanne V. Creighton, Margaret Drabble (London: Methuen, 1985), 63.

22. Gail Godwin, Violet Clay (1978; reprint, New York: Warner Books, 1979), 39-40.

23. In Living Stories, Telling Lives, Joanne Frye analyzes the way in which Godwin uses the narration of Violet's own story as a means of uniting the two selves of woman and artist (111-39). I would extend Frye's excellent study of the novel by pointing out that a major way in which Godwin accomplishes this narrative strategy is by using ironic discourse, much as Weldon does in Female Friends and Drabble does in The Waterfall, to allow her character to step out of and thus revise her own story.

24. Lilian R. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 9.

25. William Robert Irvin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: University of Illinois press, 1976), 61-62.

26. For analyses of feminist attitudes toward naming, see Nancy M. Henley, “This New Species That Seeks a New Language: On Sexism in Language and Language Change,” and Nan Van Den Bergh, “Renaming: Vehicle for Empowerment,” both in Women and Language in Transition, ed. Joyce Penfield (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).

27. One reviewer of the novel stated that “The real meaning of Offred … is Afraid; though since it is not her real name, she is also Not Afraid” (Patrick Parrinder in the London Review of Books, 20 March 1986; quoted in Carol Ann Howells, Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s [London: Methuen, 1987], 58-59.) Roberta Rubenstein suggests that the name “encodes her indentured sexuality: both ‘offered’ and the property ‘of-Fred.’” (Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987], 109.)

28. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 39.

29. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1977), 127.

30. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976; reprint, New York: Fawcett Crest, 1977), 17.

31. The issue of whether Piercy means for this to be an actual utopia or the product of Consuelo's hallucinations has sparked lively controversy among critics, as I will discuss in a later chapter. See, e.g., Sheila Delaney, “Ambivalence in Utopia: The American Feminist Utopias of Charlotte P. Gilman and Marge Piercy,” in Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern (New York: Shocken Books, 1983), 157-80; Margaret Atwood, “Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time, Living in the Open,” in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 272-78.

32. Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City. (1969; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1970), 224.

33. Elizabeth Abel, “(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women,” Signs 6, no. 3 (Spring 1981):419.

34. Alice Walker, Meridian (1976; reprint, New York: Washington Square Press, 1977), 44.

35. Elizabeth Fifer, “The Dialect and Letters of The Color Purple,” in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, ed. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 158. Fifer also points to the irony of the fact that Nettie, better educated than Celie, writes in a standard English that Celie does not speak, so that it is Nettie's letters that must be “translated” when Celie finally finds them.

36. King-Kok Cheung, “‘Don't Tell’: Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior,” PMLA 103, no. 2 (March 1988): 162-63.

37. Suzanne Juhasz, “Towards a Theory of Form in Feminist Autobiography: Kate Millett's Flying and Sita; Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior,” in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 223; and Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” 53.

38. Most critics approach The Woman Warrior as an autobiography, and there are surely bases for its experience in Kingston's own life as a Chinese-American woman. Kingston herself, however, has called the book “five interlocking short stories” (discussion at the University of Missouri-Columbia, 9 March 1988). Mere classification of a work should of course not be the goal of the literary critic; what is significant is, as I pointed out in the introductory chapter, that the line between fiction and autobiography is blurred in works by contemporary women authors. See chap. 2, “Politics, Literary Form, and a Feminist Poetics of the Novel,” in Joanne Frye's Living Stories, Telling Lives.

39. Rubenstein, Boundaries of the Self, 176.

40. Juhasz, “Towards a Theory of Form in Feminist Autobiography,” 231. In a Belles Lettres interview, Kingston has expressed her own fears about publishing The Woman Warrior: “At first I said to myself, ‘I must write this.’ Then I tried to fool myself by thinking that I didn't have to publish it. I even started thinking that the work could be published after my death, and then everything would be fine. All of that was fooling myself so that I could keep going. Then I did publish it, thinking that it was only in English and therefore my parents and most of their friends would not be able to read it. When it was published in Chinese, I felt very much afraid. Some people read one chapter and didn't continue, feeling that it was too horrible. So they never saw that in The Woman Warrior there is a reconciliation of beauty” (Angeles Carabi, “Special Eyes: The Chinese-American World of Maxine Hong Kingston,” Belles Lettres [Winter 1989]: 11).

41. Homans, “‘Her Very Own Howl,’” 198.

42. This comment echoes Miriam, in Piercy's Small Changes, who, realizing that “women were supposed to be dull and good,” decides that she would rather, like men, be “bad and exciting” ([Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1973], 97).

43. Rubenstein, Boundaries of the Self, 77; and Howells, Private and Fictional Words, 63.

44. In this respect, Atwood uses a technique similar to that of Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time: one of the visits that Consuelo makes to the future is not to the utopia to which Luciente has invited her, but rather to a dystopia that could be a natural result of current tendencies.

45. Margaret Atwood, “Witches,” in Second Words, 333 (italics mine).

46. Linda Hutcheon, “From Poetic to Narrative Structures: The Novels of Margaret Atwood,” in Margaret Atwood: Language, Text, and System, ed. Sherrill E. Grace and Lorraine Weir (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), 17.

47. Margaret Atwood, “An End to Audience?” in Second Words, 348.