SOURCE: Chow, Rey. “When Whiteness Feminizes … : Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic.” Differences 11, no. 3 (fall 1999-2000): 137-68.

[In the following essay, Chow analyzes the effects of the rhetorical strategies used in Sexual/Textual Politics on the book's premises.]

IS “WOMAN” A WOMAN, A MAN, OR WHAT?: THE UNSTABLE STATUS OF WOMAN IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL CRITICISM

Since the introduction of poststructuralist theory into the English-speaking academic world, a point of tension between feminists sympathetic toward poststructuralism and feminists hostile toward it has been the controversy over the status of the term “woman” in representational politics. Whereas for Anglo-American feminist critics, the individual woman, woman author, or woman critic continues to be understood in terms of the agency derived from the philosophical foundation of individualism, of the gendered person as an ultimate reality, the pivot of French poststructuralism has been precisely to put such foundationalist thinking into question through theories of language, text, signification, and subject, so that what is hitherto considered as an irrefutable certainty, including the individual self, now becomes known more often as a referent, a point in signification that is always “en procès”—that is, constantly disrupted, deferred, dislocated, postponed, if not altogether dissolved. This bifurcation between “Anglo-American” and “French” forms the basis of Toril Moi's 1985 bestseller, Sexual/Textual Politics. Moi, whose critical sympathies lie with the French, presents Anglo-American feminist critical practice in terms of an unconscious adherence to a Lukácsian realism and humanism that remain securely inscribed within patriarchal ideology (4-7). Her conclusion about American feminist literary critics such as Elaine Showalter, Kate Millet, Myra Jehlen, Susan Gubar, Sandra Gilbert, Annette Kolodny, and others is a devastating one. To be sure, she argues, these critics are politicizing texts through readings of sexuality—but theirs is a naïve politics that leaves patriarchal aesthetics entirely intact (69). In other words, while she gives Anglo-American feminist criticism ample credit for its overt political stance, Moi charges that this sexual politics is far from being “political enough”:

The radically new impact of feminist criticism is to be found not at the level of theory or methodology, but at the level of politics. Feminists have politicized existing critical methods and approaches. If feminist criticism has subverted established critical judgements it is because of its radically new emphasis on sexual politics. …

The central paradox of Anglo-American feminist criticism is thus that despite its often strong, explicit political engagement, it is in the end not quite political enough; not in the sense that it fails to go far enough along the political spectrum, but in the sense that its radical analysis of sexual politics still remains entangled with depoliticizing theoretical paradigms.

(87-88; emphases in the original)

For these reasons, Moi needs to insert the word “textual” in her book title in order to emphasize the importance of deconstructing linguistic structures alongside a sexual politics. Reading her analyses, one has the impression that textual politics is the more radically political because that is where essentialism, including the essentialism of the term “woman,” can be properly confronted and undone. In particular, Moi is taken with the manner in which Julia Kristeva brings attention to the materiality of textual production. From Kristeva, Moi tells us, we learn that the subject position (it is no longer radical enough to talk of the self or the individual) is what indicates revolutionary potential (12).

In retrospect, Moi's discussion is interesting not least because it is an early example, within the realm of contemporary feminist studies, of an attempt to take note of cultural difference (“Anglo-American,” “French,” “Norwegian”)—indeed to foreground culture itself as having an indismissable bearing on critical practices. Yet this astute awareness of cultural difference—which in her readings translates into a critique of essentialism and a valorization of poststructuralist textual politics—does not necessarily save Moi herself from falling into certain kinds of essentialist pitfalls. In this regard it is necessary to recognize the rhetorical strategies she adopts.

Chief of these strategies is Moi's attempt to dichotomize politics and textuality. As I will go on to demonstrate in the rest of this essay, such a dichotomy is a fallacious one. Among other things, it tends to ignore completely the implications of race—in particular, of whiteness as social power—in discourses about sexuality and femininity. In Moi's text, however, this dichotomy serves important tactical purposes. It enables her to give acknowledgment to the accomplishments of Anglo-American feminist critics exclusively in terms of their politics, and to argue by the same gesture that these critics have not dealt at all with the textuality of their texts. Quickly, then, what looks at first like a straightforward differentiation turns into a specific value judgment. Accordingly, politics, which is what makes Anglo-American feminist critics Anglo-American, is simple-minded and unsophisticated—even though it is all that they are capable of. As Deborah E. McDowell points out, this category of “Anglo-American” also includes black and lesbian women: “lesbian and/or black feminist criticism have presented exactly the same methodological and theoretical problems as the rest of Anglo-American feminist criticism.” “This is not to say that black and lesbian criticism have no … importance”; rather, that importance, like that of the rest of Anglo-American feminist criticism, is to be found “not at the level of theory or methodology, but at the level of politics” (Moi 86, 87, emphases in the original; quoted with slight modifications in McDowell 161). By contrast, the French theorists are much more supple in the manners in which they deal with texts. But instead of confining them to the “text” half of her divided world (a division she herself proposes), Moi suggests that what they are doing is radically “political” as well, so that the French—and Frenchness—are, strictly speaking, inhabiting both sides of the divided world as women who not only know how to read texts but also how to do politics. As an account not simply of varied feminist practices but also of cultural difference, Moi's discussion presents Anglo-American feminists as heavy-footed country bumpkins who are trapped in their parochial women's worlds (who just want to proclaim “woman” everywhere), and the French as suave and nimble cosmopolitans because they know how to read. In terms of their respective performances, the Anglo-Americans are second-rate only even when they do their best; the French, on the other hand, are already doing revolutionary politics without necessarily even trying (as they are just paying attention to the marginality and dissidence of texts).

By bifurcating the entire question of women critics' relationship to texts in this manner, Moi inadvertently introduces a much larger problem—what might be called the feminization of culture. Taken in the broadest sense, this phrase may simply refer to a cultural process in which femininity itself becomes visible and active as an agent and producer of knowledge, yet this is exactly where the controversy begins. Indeed, the debate that revolves around Ann Douglas's book of 1977, The Feminization of American Culture, takes this issue of the relationship between women and culture as its central focus. Douglas, we recall, associates feminization with the rise of mass culture and with the conspicuous consumption habits of American society since the early nineteenth century. For her, feminization means emasculation; a culture feminized is thus a culture in demise, weakened in comparison with its previous tough—that is, manly—state. The claims made by second-wave feminism in the United States in the 1970s and the 1980s (the feminism whose proponents include many of the authors that Moi critiques in her book)¹ were thus explicitly or implicitly aimed at Douglas's unsympathetic view of women and mass culture.² Rather than the demise of culture, the tenets of second-wave feminism adamantly affirmed an independent women's tradition and genealogy, demonstrating that despite the discrimination they experienced historically in Western societies, women were creative, imaginative, and as capable of authorship as men. The feminization of culture, thus, became a feminist revision of culture, specializing in bringing women from the margins of history to the center of academic attention. Ironically, it is the overtly tough stance taken by feminists during this period, a stance that was aimed at asserting women's difference from, as well as equality with, men, that becomes in Moi's reading a sign that these second-wave feminists are political naïfs mired in patriarchal aesthetics. We thus arrive at a paradox: by focusing on “woman,” Anglo-American feminists are, by the criteria of one account (Douglas), furthering the emasculation of culture; yet by those of another (Moi), they are becoming too much like men.

The paradox does not end here. In an essay called “Mass Culture as Woman,” Andreas Huyssen gives our topic yet another twist by arguing that the very equation of femininity with lowbrow culture, mediocrity, and leisurely consumption—in other words, precisely what Douglas has called the feminization of culture—is characteristic of high modernism with its interest in promoting “high art.” What Douglas characterizes, by way of the twosome man-woman, as the feminization of culture, is hence recast by Huyssen as a socio-aesthetic move, in which the debasement of “woman” is part and parcel of a constructed relation between high art and mass culture that is aimed at preserving the interests of high modernism, which nonetheless is dependent on mass culture as its hidden subtext. Moreover, once the use of “woman” is historicized in this manner, Huyssen is able to reveal how high modernist art often derives its authority not so much from radical hedonism (as it would like us to believe) but rather from a kind of puritanism, one that can be said to be based on the reality principle rather than the pleasure principle:

The autonomy of the modernist art work, after all, is always the result of a resistance, an abstention, and a suppression—resistance to the seductive lure of mass culture, abstention from the pleasure of trying to please a larger audience, suppression of everything that might be threatening to the rigorous demands of being modern and at the edge of time. There seem to be fairly obvious homologies between this modernist insistence on purity and autonomy in art, Freud's privileging of the ego over the id and his insistence on stable, if flexible, ego boundaries, and Marx's privileging of production over consumption. The lure of mass culture, after all, has traditionally been described as the threat of losing oneself in dreams and delusions and of merely consuming rather than producing. Thus, despite its undeniable adversary stance toward bourgeois society, the modernist aesthetic and its rigorous work ethic as described here seem in some fundamental way to be located also on the side of that society's reality principle, rather than on that of the pleasure principle. It is to this fact that we owe some of the greatest works of modernism, but the greatness of these works cannot be separated from the often one-dimensional gender inscriptions inherent in their very constitution as autonomous masterworks of modernity.

(55)

In an uncanny manner, Huyssen's reading of man-woman through high modernism-mass culture and vice versa also returns us to Moi's account of the cultural difference within feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas Moi endorses the textual politics of the French poststructuralists with the assumption that it is a more radical and rigorous politics, Huyssen's account shows us that it is precisely this kind of assumption of itself as more modern, more ahead than others, and more at the edge of time that is characteristic of the continual workings of high modernism. By implication of Huyssen's terms, we may say that the reading practices of Anglo-American feminist critics have, in fact, been implicitly equated in Moi's reading with deluded, simple-minded mass culture (woman), while French poststructuralist écriture féminine has been equated with the rigor of autonomous high art (man).

This brief account of the divergent, often incompatible or self-contradicting, views toward femininity and feminization of culture is testimony to what I would call the supplementary logic of “woman” in the West. If the singularity of the name “man” is what is being questioned and challenged by the addition of “woman” as a category, then by the same logic, “woman” itself can hardly be expected to remain a stable, unchanging frame of reference. Even in an account that is so apparently unsympathetic toward women as Douglas's, it seems to me that the term “feminization” is much less an attempt to define the essence of woman as such than it is a manner of articulating the historical—that is, mutating—relationships among various parts of culture as they have been socially institutionalized. In the counter move, on the part of the second-wave feminists, to elevate women's status to a respectable separateness from men's, the economic and cultural resonances of Douglas's original argument seem to have been bypassed. What remains takes on the resemblance of a project aimed single-mindedly at legitimizing the idea of woman, which then easily lends itself to the pertinent charge of essentialism when poststructuralists such as Moi come along.³

Were we, however, to recognize in the epistemologically unstabilizable status of “woman” the supplementary logic of the supplement, a different type of question can be raised. No longer would it be sufficient to think of “woman” simply in relation to “man” (since that addition has already been accomplished); nor would it be sufficient simply to pluralize, to talk of multiple “women” while the assumption of something called “woman” remains intact. Rather, it would be imperative to see how, precisely at the moment “woman” is added to “man,” the world can, paradoxically, no longer be thought of in terms of the “man-woman” relation alone. This is because “woman” brings with it not only an essential content that can be added on or subtracted at will but also a function of reconceptualizing the status quo itself as fiction, a function whose most radical aspect is its irreversibility and unstoppability. By the time “woman” arrives at man's side, as it were, the coupling of “man-woman” is already obsolete, not so much because its twosomeness is heterosexist as because such a twosomeness itself will have to be recognized as part of something else, something whose configuration—as class or race, for instance—becomes graspable exactly at the moment of the supplement's materialization. This, in part, is the reason it is much more difficult to stabilize “woman” than “man.” As we have seen, both the attempts to demote and promote “woman” remain ever unsatisfactory; it is as if, once the term is invoked—once “woman” is made analytically viable—we are already, in spite of our ostensible efforts, moving in and into another realm of cultural relations that can no longer be confined to gender.⁴

To further explore this supplementary logic of “woman,” I will next turn to two fictional narrative models that give us two significant moments of the feminization of Western culture in modern times. Since one model is Anglo-American and the other French, their juxtaposition will also allow us an opportunity to rethink certain differences that some have insisted on between these two ethnic classifications. As I will try to argue, there is, to the contrary, a discernible genealogical continuity at least between the narrative models.

THE “REALIST” MODEL: THE RICH MAN'S LOYAL SECOND WIFE

The first narrative model is the familiar story of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Jane, the apparently orphaned girl who suffers wrongs and abuse at various stages of her life eventually becomes the wife of her beloved Mr. Rochester. For those interested in Brontë's classic, the presence of the other woman, the creole Bertha Mason, Rochester's first wife whom he brought back from the West Indies and locked up in the attic, has always served as a kind of narrative puzzle to be solved. For feminist critics in particular, it is clear that Bertha somehow provides the clue to the meaning of the entire novel and, for that matter, to the project of feminist revision itself. This is the reason Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar titled their notable feminist rewriting of English literature The Madwoman in the Attic. Their project, like those of their contemporary feminist critics, may be described in terms of what Cora Kaplan calls the “Subject of Feminism”—“a figure of speech who represents not a person, an author, or a character, or even an established discourse, but rather a developing stance, a set of ideas in process which question the logic of women's subordination in culture and nature” (171). Intent as their contemporaries were on consolidating the status of “woman,” Gilbert and Gubar interpret Bertha as a double of Jane. The racial and/or ethnic difference between the two women characters is thus elided in favor of what was in the 1970s a political act of unifying womanhood.⁵ In the course of time, this very political act would be recognized by many as an act of essentialism.

As it became necessary to rethink the singularity of “woman” according to the logic of the supplement, various critics have since the 1970s alerted us to the imperialist cultural underpinnings of Brontë's book. Written in a historical period during which British society took a substantial interest in ethnographic and ethnological discourses, Brontë's novel was, as Kaplan writes, symptomatic of “the proto-feminist writing that initially emphasized the female child's likeness to and/or identifications with racial, hybrid, or deformed others en route to presenting her adult self as the ethical model of national subjectivity” (181). Jane's empowerment of herself through language and writing (Armstrong and Tennenhouse) is at the expense of Bertha's ever having access to human personhood and subjectivity in the post-Enlightenment sense (Spivak). In a text that is considered one of the first major examples of a woman overcoming patriarchal and class domination in modern times, then, we have an uncanny reminder and remainder of the non-Western other—the savage madwoman in the attic—who as part of the same process must be defeated, imprisoned, and driven to destruction and suicide. The presence of Bertha compels us to think anew of Brontë's work as a story about what happens when a woman attains social status and credibility in British culture. This process of feminization, accordingly, cannot simply be considered as a matter of the ascendancy of “woman” as such, but must rather be seen as the emergence of a discursive network in which forces of class and race as well as gender become imbricated with one another.

Whereas Kaplan, Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Spivak, and others (see also Sharpe 26-53 and Meyer 60-95) have drawn attention to the historical racial makings of the Jane Eyre story, I would like, as a complementary gesture, to foreground its fictional, narrative elements. By isolating these elements structurally in a kind of morphology—“a description of the tale according to its component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole” (Propp 19)—my point is to show them as constituents of a fairy tale that became convertible and transportable from one culture into another. Let me sum up these elements as follows:

1. The lonely orphan girl who becomes a loyal wife. An orphaned child who must fend for herself, Jane provides the paradigmatic example of someone who moves from complete material lack and social inferiority to the condition of “self-possession,” a condition in which she becomes her own “master.” In Victorian England, this self-possession necessarily includes knowing how to handle the demands placed on female sexuality. Jane's success in this regard can be seen in her using her intelligence (rather than her body) to attain the status of being a married woman who can reproduce biologically.
2. The sensitive rich man with a mysterious past. The orphan girl meets the experienced rich man, who has a dark secret that haunts him but that somehow he cannot articulate. Many eligible ladies of his prestigious class background desire him, but he singles out the orphan girl because he senses in her a capacity for sympathetic understanding. Importantly, even though the man is wealthy and often has dark moods, he is presented, like the orphan girl, as a kind of victim who has been wronged and oppressed.
3. The spectral other woman, the first wife. In order for the story to proceed, there has to be an obstacle or an enemy, a threat to the well-being of the main characters. In Jane Eyre, this obstacle is provided by Bertha Mason, the foreign, beastly woman-object who stands in the way of the harmony of the present society. With the presence of Bertha, the representation of “woman” is split into two. Femininity is polarized into love, understanding, and a capacity to listen to the powerful man who perceives himself as a victim, on the one hand, and uncontrolled sexuality, madness, and a refusal to cooperate with the (white) patriarchal order, on the other.
4. The confession. The rich man tries to evade the past but is forced in the end to confess to Jane the nature of his relationship with Bertha. The revelation of the truth, namely, that Bertha is the legal wife and Jane the potential mistress, leads to Jane's temporary departure, but it also bonds her to Rochester forever.
5. The setting of the enormous, stately mansion. Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre is a symbol of wealth and worldly power; at the same time, metaphorically speaking, it is also an isolated, haunted interior, like the heart of the rich man. It is haunted because there is a madwoman in it somewhere. Now that it houses another woman, what will happen?
6. The catastrophe. In terms of plot structure, the fire removes the impediment, the mad woman. But she is also the one who sets it: literally, therefore, the mad woman has to remove herself in order to liberate herself—in suicide. While the destruction of his manor leaves the rich man in a state of ruin, it also makes way for a new beginning (in the sense of an almost religious cleansing, a baptism by fire).
7. The ending: social acceptance and reproduction. Jane and Rochester are finally able to become a married couple and produce a son. The lonely orphan girl with no one to protect her becomes, in the end, a powerful agent carrying on the reproductive imperative that lies at the heart of social progress.

This intentionally reductionist and formalistic summary of Brontë's fairy tale enables certain crucial issues to emerge with clarity. In terms of the politics of gender, the most important legacy of the Jane Eyre plot is, as is already noted by critics, the structural division of “woman” into the good, passionate, but innocent new girl and the evil, dangerous first wife. The point that needs to be emphasized, though, is that this splitting of woman means that it is the man who remains at the narrative center. This point tends to be eclipsed because Jane has been constructed by Brontë as the narrator of her own tale. The medium of writing, assumed by a mature Jane who has attained social power, wealth, status, and motherhood, conveys her character as that of a knowledgeable woman whose claim to moral integrity comes with a retrospective mastery of the past. At the same time, her ability for verbal self-representation also considerably complicates—and makes less credible—the very innocence and goodness that are supposedly the qualities of this independent and headstrong female.⁶ It is, therefore, when the Jane Eyre story is translated into the medium of film—not so much in the film versions of Brontë's novel as in Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 classic Rebecca (the first film he made in Hollywood), itself adapted from Daphne du Maurier's novel of the same title—that this discrepancy between the innocent, girlish protagonist and the knowing, cerebral woman writer is effectively removed.⁷ In Hitchcock's film, which is similarly the story of a young woman's “initiation” into a mysterious rich man's haunted world through a discovery of the unmentionable past (also concerning a first wife, the beautiful and unconventional Rebecca), the nameless girlish character (played by Joan Fontaine) is diegetically stripped of her authority as the narrator of the tale except at the beginning few minutes, after which Hitchcock simply drops her voice-over. This little technical change positions the young woman much more convincingly as the helpless, unknowing one who is caught between her suffering husband and the evil females at the Manderlay household—the dead Rebecca (described posthumously by her doctor as “tall” and “dark”) and her diabolic representative Mrs. Danvers—with their apparent sinful knowledge and their capacities to do harm.

By doing away with the authoritative narrative voice of the second wife, Hitchcock enables the sexual politics embedded in the narrative positionings of the characters to be seen much more unambiguously as male-dominant. In other words, Hitchcock makes us realize that although a woman may act as the narrator, it is still a man's story that serves as the hinge of the entire narrative. In the film Rebecca, as in Jane Eyre, the man makes a confession that would constitute the critical narrative turn. By his own account, Maxim de Winter (played by Laurence de Olivier) did not actually kill Rebecca but had put her in a boat, which he let sink in the sea, after she had accidentally killed herself during their quarrel. This confession, made at the climactic point of the film when Rebecca's body is found again after she has supposedly long been buried, positions the unknowing young wife as the confidante and in the process turns her in no uncertain terms into the rich man's accomplice.⁸ It is one of the remarkable features of Hitchcock's narrative that, while the resurfacing of Rebecca's body prompts a new series of investigations jointly by the police, the law, and medicine, precisely the discovery made by these social institutions ends up concealing forever the truth of her death. The real function served by the revelation of this truth in its entirety (to the young wife and to the audience), therefore, is the production of the socially approved married couple (Max and the young wife). By finally confiding in his young wife, Max has, as has Rochester in Jane Eyre, found himself a new partnership, a female community in which his secret will be safe, while he is emancipated to be a new man.

As in the case of Jane Eyre, the structural division of woman into good and evil is resolved in Rebecca through a catastrophe with symbolic significance. A fire set by Mrs. Danvers destroys the stately mansion at Manderlay. From the perspective of the evil woman, the fire is, as I already mentioned, a suicide (putting an end to Rebecca and her legacy). From the perspective of the rich man, it is a destruction of what has been haunting him and thus a brand new beginning. From the perspective of the innocent young wife, the significance of the fire can be seen, as Tania Modleski writes, as a final severance of her maternal ties—that is, she is finally leaving behind her connections with the other, older women in order to comply with the patriarchal requirements of a heterosexual marriage.⁹ Remembering the imperialist underpinnings of Jane Eyre, we may add that these maternal ties are not simply about “woman” or even the man-woman relation alone.¹⁰

If feminization is, as I mentioned, taken broadly to mean a cultural process in which “woman” becomes an active, observable agent and producer of knowledge, then the elements of the Jane Eyre narrative model may be said to constitute the generic actions of a prevalent plot of the feminization of culture in modern times. This story attributes power to woman sentimentally—on account of her original lack, her exclusion from social power unless and until she is allied with a man. As it becomes clear in Rebecca, this is an alliance in which woman has to play the subordinate role of the selfless recipient of knowledge and consenting accomplice. This subordination—this unity with the man in which he rather than she remains the center of her narrative—is what makes it possible for the successful elimination of the other woman.¹¹ To invoke the terms of Anglo-American criticism that continue to be in use, the “agency” allowed the woman as “self,” as someone coming into her own “personhood,” depends on a concrete moral choice: to live by letting the other woman live also (as a person, or as a haunting memory), or to live as a subordinate to man. The feminization process offered by the Jane Eyre model has the young woman choose the latter.¹² To this fundamental, morally self-righteous aggression against the other woman, critics such as Kaplan, Armstrong and Tennenhouse, and Spivak have added the gloss of race: they have taught us that this “woman's picture” is, historically speaking, white.

THE “AVANT-GARDE” MODEL: PROMISCUOUS AND COSMOPOLITAN, AND STILL GIVING HERSELF

In some respects, the Jane Eyre legacy may be described in the same manner that Moi has described Anglo-American feminist criticism, in terms of “the radical contradiction it presents between feminist politics and patriarchal aesthetics” (69). In the case of the fictional narrative, feminist politics is primarily a matter of an interest in the rise of the domestic woman, the wife, who must nonetheless conform with the patriarchal moral-aesthetic requirement that she be sexually virginal, and loyal only to the man and his values (however passionate and cerebral she herself may be). Eventually, this Victorian definition of female power would have to come to terms with another kind of femininity, this time of the woman who no longer stays put as the faithful little wife but who has become sexually liberated. Again, by extending the implications of Moi's terms, we may articulate a particular discursive affinity between sexual and textual politics: if female sexual chastity (in Jane Eyre and her Victorian sisters) can be seen as a kind of stable referent, which in turn accounts for the production of certain “realist” feminist practices (“Anglo-American”), then female promiscuity should, by extension, result in something quite different both in terms of sexual mores and textual politics.

It is in this light that Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour (1959, directed by French New Wave director Alain Resnais; page references in this essay are to the English translation of Duras's text) may be seen as a “French” response and complement to the Anglo-American fairy tale. A brief summary of the film, which one critic has described as “what may well be the most remarkable motion picture landmark of the century” (Cismaru 149), is as follows. Fourteen years after the end of the Second World War, a French actress comes with a film crew to Japan to make a film about Hiroshima. During her stay she meets a Japanese architect, with whom she has a brief affair. The encounter with the Japanese man triggers in the woman memories that have long remained inarticulate. These are memories of her traumatic personal experience during the war in Europe. A young girl then, she had fallen in love with a German soldier, and the two were planning to elope to Bavaria to get married. On the eve of their elopement, he was killed by partisans. She was then ostracized as a national traitor, and had her hair shorn as part of her punishment. She sank into madness for months, and her family kept her in the cellar. When she recovered, the war had come to an end, and she was sent to Paris. On the day she arrived in Paris, there was news all over the place about the atomic bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima. Fourteen years later, as a happily married woman, she has come to Japan and met a man who reminds her of her German lover. She recalls the story of her past to the Japanese architect, who urges her to stay longer with him. Caught between the past and the present, between the pain of memory and the intensity of the current romance, the woman seems not to know what will or should happen next. The film ends in this ambiguous, open-ended condition.

Stylistically, Hiroshima mon amour is obviously in sharp contrast to Hollywood dramas such as Rebecca. To mention just one instance, whereas in Rebecca the plot is important because its progress is essential to the revelation of the truth, in Hiroshima mon amour the point is rather to experiment with nonlinear narrative, in which memory takes the place of external events to constitute the main action. Instead of a well-plotted story, then, we are looking at psychodrama, the involuntary and unexpected remembrance of the woman's past. By juxtaposing such psychodrama with the documentary images of what happened to the people in Hiroshima because of the atomic bomb, the film thus problematizes the limits of representation in a self-conscious manner that is characteristic of high modernist and avant-garde works. These obvious stylistic divergences notwithstanding, I think it is far more interesting to note the affinities here with the narrative elements of the Jane Eyre story. To that extent, it would be helpful to borrow loosely from Vladimir Propp's work on Russian fairy tales the notion of “function,” which can be understood as “an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action.” For Propp, such functions are “independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled”; they “constitute the fundamental components of a tale” and tend to remain constant from tale to tale (Propp 20-21).¹³

I would contend that the functions of the Jane Eyre paradigm are most strikingly recognizable, paradoxically, when Duras introduces variations—modern-day conversions—in her film text:

1. The figure of the virginal orphan girl is changed into the sexually experienced and knowledgeable woman. Importantly, it is she, rather than the man, who now occupies the central position in the narrative as the one with the mysterious past.
2. As in the case of the rich man with a past in the Jane Eyre and Rebecca stories, in the French woman's past is the other sexual partner. But whereas in the earlier stories the other woman exists as a threat that needs to be removed, in Hiroshima mon amour, the German soldier is recalled with emotional intensity. Rather than trying to get rid of him, the French woman feels guilty that she may be betraying and losing him simply by telling their story.
3. In the present diegesis there is the new sexual partner, the Japanese architect. As Jane and the young wife in Rebecca listen to their men, the Japanese man listens to the French woman. In other words, the presence of the current partner, again, enables the revelation of what actually happened in the past.
4. Similarly, there is an act of confession (of recalling the past), with the difference that it now comes from the woman. As in the Victorian stories, this confession bonds the new lovers. The Japanese man is happy to hear the French woman say that even her husband has not heard her story.

Whereas in Jane Eyre and Rebecca it is still the man's inner world around which the plot revolves, in Hiroshima mon amour, the woman's inner world has come fully to the fore. Whereas in the Anglo-American stories “woman” remains objectified and metaphorically divided into the good girl and the femme fatale, in the French story it is man who is divided into a past and a present, with no attempt at demonization involved in the woman's own mind (even though the German soldier was a national enemy). As in the case of Jane Eyre and Rebecca, moreover, the partner in the present is put in the position of someone who has to discover what took place in the past. In Rebecca, the innocent wife at first thinks she should become more and more like Rebecca, only to find out that her husband loves her rather for her difference from the dead, older woman. In Hiroshima mon amour, the Japanese architect reminds the French woman of her former lover, so much so that she addresses him as “you” when she is talking about the German soldier. In their conversation, the Japanese man willingly plays the role of the other man. In each case, albeit in very different ways, the gendered roles involve questions of identification and disidentification—of the new lover becoming like or unlike the old one—that are critical to the progress of the narrative.

There are also the remaining elements:

1. In contrast to the stately mansion in the Victorian stories, the setting in Hiroshima mon amour is rather public—a hotel room, the street, a train station, a teahouse, and so forth. But, as in the case of the Victorian stories, these external spaces are meant to foreground the haunted “interior” of the protagonist, in this case the French woman.
2. There is also a catastrophe. The point of Hiroshima mon amour is, however, to raise questions about what the real catastrophe is. Is it Hiroshima? Is it the murder of the woman's German lover in Nevers?
3. The ending. While it remains ambiguous and open, the ending nonetheless poses a similar question of social reproduction and continuance. After this confrontation between her and him, Nevers and Hiroshima, what?

Here, the most interesting point of contrast with the Jane Eyre and Rebecca stories is that Hiroshima mon amour begins with a public catastrophe (the site at which the atomic bomb was dropped), about which there is no secret. Nevertheless, as in the case of Jane Eyre and Rebecca, it is an internal journey to the past that takes us to that other, more traumatic catastrophe—with the difference that it is the woman who now assumes the center stage as confessing subject. If Hiroshima is the site of a ruin, Duras's text says, it must now share the focus with the French woman's private life, the interior of her mind which, too, has experienced destruction and desolation.

Indeed, this division of the past (and its catastrophes) into the public and the private is perhaps Hiroshima mon amour's most significant point of departure from the “realism” of the nineteen-century English woman's novel and the plot-driven drama of Hollywood. In what amounts to a competition introduced at the discursive level between the massive destruction of a population that befell Hiroshima, on the one hand, and a woman's memory of her love affair, the murder of her lover, her descent into madness, and her recovery, on the other, Duras takes the feminization of Western culture to a new stage of spectacularity, with the powerful suggestion that what happened to the woman's love life, unbeknownst to most, ultimately deserves as much attention as an unprecedented historical disaster that erased an entire city. As Leslie Hill writes, “love and the nuclear holocaust, Japan and France, remembering and forgetting—all the agents of subversion Duras enumerates exist in a relationship of reciprocal equivalence” (31). The boldness of Duras's conception is clearly indicated in the title of the film, which epitomizes in a scandalous fashion the tension between the two ways of remembering the past, and which naturally provokes the question: “Is this analogy between a personal trauma and an historical one justified? … Is historiography akin to the operation of individual memory?” (Glassman 27). But this seeming scandal is precisely the point of what I would call Duras's avant-garde moralism—namely, that yes, a banal, commonplace love affair can indeed dominate Hiroshima because in it lies (for Duras) the possibility of elevating the significance of Hiroshima above the mere documentary level¹⁴:

A banal tale, one that happens thousands of times every day. The Japanese is married, has children. So is the French woman, who also has two children. Theirs is a one-night affair.

But where? At Hiroshima.

Their embrace—so banal, so commonplace—takes place in the one city of the world where it is hardest to imagine it: Hiroshima. Nothing is “given” at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning. And this is one of the principal goals of the film: to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and “wonderful,” one that will be more credible than if it had occurred anywhere else in the world, a place that death had not preserved. …

Their personal story, however brief that may be, always dominates Hiroshima.

If this premise were not adhered to, this would be just one more made-to-order picture [film de commande], of no more interest than any fictionalized documentary [documentaire romancé]. If it is adhered to, we'll end up with a sort of false documentary that will probe the lesson of Hiroshima more deeply than any made-to-order documentary [documentaire de commande].

(Duras 9-10; emphasis in the original)¹⁵

There is little doubt as to Duras's authorial intention in these remarks. For my purposes, what matters is not whether her text corresponds exactly to her intention but the manner in which she goes about realizing such an intention. To make a story that is not “just one more made-to-order picture,” Duras, like Brontë and Hitchcock before her, makes use of sexuality as it is attached to womanhood. Not being Victorian, she does not require her heroine to be sexually chaste. Instead, she gives us an attractive and experienced married woman, to whom occasional sexual infidelity is not a moral concern. Moreover, it is this openness to sex with multiple partners, we might say, that allows the woman a unique means of access to the meaning of her existence, her post-catastrophic survival. By making her protagonist a promiscuous woman, Duras has therefore moved the narrative constituents of the Jane Eyre fairy tale to a fresh level of sophistication: not only is the “loose” sexual behavior of woman no longer an issue; it is, on the contrary, such looseness, such rejection of bygone sexual constraints that becomes the key to an intense emotional experience, transgressing and subverting the boundaries of what is conventionally (socially and nationally as well as morally) acceptable. Sex and love are, we are compelled into thinking, not so banal after all: like Hiroshima, sex and love, when attached to a liberated woman, are equally, if not more, violent and earthshaking events.

Significantly, sexuality is no longer only situated on the woman's body but primarily in her mind, her “subjectivity.” This otherwise invisible, interior depth is what is being displayed on the screen as the woman recalls the past. Instead of the body surface, then, it is sexuality as remembered in the cavities of the woman's mind which have been brought to light and laid bare in her act of confession. Like the Japanese architect, the audience becomes “voyeurs” who are privileged to enter this sexuality and engage with its unique revelations. For Duras, the French woman's act of confessing is the equivalent of a gift of the most sacred kind:

To give oneself, body and soul, that's it.

That is the equivalent not only of amorous possession, but of a marriage.

She gives this Japanese—at Hiroshima—her most precious possession: herself as she now is [son expression actuelle même], her survival after the death of her love at Nevers.

(Duras 112; emphases in the original)

Whereas the man's confession about his past in Jane Eyre and Rebecca is what makes the young second wife give her body and soul to him, here, the promiscuous woman's confession about her past is the equivalent of her giving body and soul to the new man. Despite the apparent contrasts in technique between the Anglo-American and French stories of feminization, in both cases confession is ultimately linked to the giving of herself by the woman, which is in turn sanctified as “marriage.” Albeit operating with a different set of sexual mores, the French woman arrives at this remarkable resemblance to Jane Eyre and the nameless second wife in Rebecca because Duras's presentation of her, in the final analysis, is that she is a vulnerable and helpless victim before the weight of a repressed memory. Like her Anglo-American sisters, Duras tells us, the French woman is a survivor, who has now, through her act of giving herself, successfully captured a man of her desire.

In the hands of Duras, Western female subjectivity has become fully vindicated, beyond the mere physical body, as a kind of dissident, delirious, poetic text—a text that is at “play” between absence and presence, and amply “resistant” toward the “recuperation” by public history (I am citing from the repertoire of terms that are commonly invoked to describe the revolutionary pleasures of the avant-garde text). To go one step further, we may argue that Duras's rewriting of female sexuality is homologous to the poststructuralist rewriting of textuality. Like the poststructuralist text, female sexuality is now treated as an unstable, mobile signifier, no longer to be confined to a realist referent, and that, so the logic goes, is what makes “woman” interesting. But precisely at the place at which the woman is, as Duras believes, at her most vulnerable and helpless (because she is “exposing herself” to her new lover and thus to the audience's gaze), feminization in its avant-garde form becomes racial power. If, in the Jane Eyre narrative, the ascendance of the rural, orphaned woman to second wifehood means the elimination of the other woman, in Duras, the ascendance of the cosmopolitan woman as text—in the form of her open sexuality, her memory, her subjectivity—goes hand in hand with a minimization, if not disappearance, of the other man. This is not the white man, the German lover who continues to be a cherished part of the woman's memory, but the second partner, the Japanese architect whose presence, much like that of the nameless little wife in Rebecca, is mainly for the purpose of serving as a screen on which the woman can recall and project her past.

Apart from its genealogical linkages with the Anglo-American fairy tales in terms of narrative functions, therefore, the status of the French woman's story should also be understood in contrast to the absence of a story from the Japanese architect, who is in the main presented as a male pursuing a female in the classical romantic manner. In a story that is so astutely attentive to issues of memory, suffering, and survival, the Japanese architect, who is also a survivor of the war, strangely does not enjoy the same kind of psychological and textual exploration that is given the French woman. This point, I'd like to stress, is not as simple as it may sound because it is not a matter of faulting Duras for not writing an equally profound story about the Japanese. Rather, it is a questioning of the distribution of narrative investments on the very terms that Duras herself uses to legitimate her avant-garde project.

To begin to see this, we need to remember that the explicit or implicit target of much of high modernist and avant-garde literature and film is, as Moi's reading of Anglo-American feminist criticism pointedly suggests, “realism”—the hardcore “referentiality” that, for modernists and avant-garde writers, is a kind of representational ideology of a bygone era, something that is quite beneath notice. This rather condescending tone toward the realist and the referential is the one in which Moi couches her assessment of the Anglo-American feminists, who are, she implies, not as theoretically advanced as the French women theorists because they are somehow (alas, still) stuck in the primitive (Victorian) modes of representation (hence they are merely political). Duras's work, insofar as it consciously sets itself apart from what she calls “made-to-order” documentaries, insofar as it firmly rejects a realist and public historical approach to Hiroshima, must be understood also in terms of this representational dialectic between so-called referentiality and its avant-garde dislocation. It is in the context of these progressivist theoretical arguments about representation that the absence of a story about the Japanese takes on significance. For, in Hiroshima mon amour, the “primitive” modes of representation have not exactly disappeared; they are simply displaced.

In a text whose avowed aesthetic aim is to resist the superficiality of documentary realism, exactly the documentary approach is used, in an unproblematized manner, on the racial other—Hiroshima, the Japanese people, the architect and his family. There are, first, the images of massive destruction and bodily remains that accompany the camera tour of the Hiroshima War Museum and hospital at the beginning of the film. The racial other is here presented matter-of-factly in terms of a “public” history and record for all to see. The point of the nominal, cursory recognition of this history and record is in order to show that it will pale—become meaningless—in comparison with the unseen, psychological, private history and record we are about to discover lying deep inside the woman.

Remembering Huyssen's point about high modernist art—that it is, despite its adversarial stance toward bourgeois society, epistemologically bound to the reality principle rather than pleasure principle of that society—we can begin to see the evaluative hierarchy (and discrimination) that structures Duras's conception of her story. Realism and referentiality, being scorned mimetic orders, are no longer good enough for a progressive, avant-garde representation of the French woman, who embodies a profound, psychologically individuated reality. But realism and referentiality, she seems meanwhile to say, remain adequate and appropriate for the representation of yellow people, whose reality, being less profound, can continue to be treated as a mere group event. On the one hand, then, the Japanese architect is presented as a member of a collective, and his victimization, like the victimization of Japan, has this public (accessible) meaning only, in contrast to that of his lover. When he asks what kind of a film she is making in Hiroshima, for instance, the French woman says: “A film about Peace. What else do you expect them to make in Hiroshima except a picture about Peace?” (Duras 34). Cultural difference, in other words, is organized on the representational plane in terms of an opposition between the refinement of sexual and textual play, and the elementariness of a crude and old-fashioned factographicity (of that which is already understood, as the woman's words imply: what else do you expect?). On the other hand, cultural difference, even though found throughout the text and already organized in this representationally hierarchical manner, is simultaneously disavowed by authorial direction. Duras insists:

[I]t is preferable to minimize the difference between the two protagonists. If the audience never forgets that this is the story of a Japanese man and a French woman, the profound implications of the film are lost. If the audience does forget it, these profound implications become apparent. …

Monsieur Butterfly is outmoded. So is Mademoiselle de Paris. We should count upon the egalitarian function of the modern world. … This Franco-Japanese film should never seem Franco-Japanese, but anti-Franco-Japanese. That would be a victory.

His profile might almost seem French. A high forehead. A large mouth. Full, but hard lips. Nothing affected or fragile about his face. No angle from which his features might seem vague (indecisive).

In short, he is an “international” type [En somme, il est d'un type “international”]. …

He is a modern man, wise in the ways of the world. He would not feel out of place in any country in the world.

(Duras 109-10; first three emphases in the original, last emphasis mine)

What, we might ask, is an “‘international’ type” if not precisely a “made-to-order” documentary representation?

All in all, whether hierarchically organized (in which case it is disparaged as mere realism and referentiality) or disavowed (in which case it should be forgotten in favor of a modern, internationalist humanism), cultural difference—“Japan”—is there simply in order for the subjectivity—the existential survival, the attainment of individual being—of the French woman to be performed. As Sharon Willis puts it, “In refusing the capitalizing gesture, along with the totalizing gesture of the mastery of history, Hiroshima mon amour risks denying its own particular investments, the specific effects of history, and the inescapability of the referent which as much conditions the textual enterprise as does that referent's very inaccessibility” (59). As in the dialectic between high modernism and mass culture that Huyssen dissects, Duras's avant-garde text fully depends on mass culture—the “made-to-order” documentary that it consciously disdains—in order to be what it is. Only thus does her avant-garde text achieve its puritanist revolutionariness.

By the standards set by Moi, a text such as Duras's, on account of its textual radicalness, should be deemed more political than a naïve political protest against the horrors of Hiroshima. In my brief comparison of Duras's text to the Jane Eyre model, I hope I have sufficiently demonstrated—against the common belief that Anglo-American and French feminisms are drastically different phenomena—some of the structural and imaginary continuities between two major instances of feminization that bear these ethnic labels.

To clarify this further, let me reiterate that it is, of course, pertinent to recognize the different moral-aesthetic premises upon which each of these fairy tales operates. In the Anglo-American model, representation still functions on the basis of a classic opposition between an inside and an outside, so that in the course of the second wife's progress, she gradually moves from being a powerless outsider, rejected by her society, to being an insider firmly rooted in the patriarchal order, its angel of the house. Her power as woman, notably, is achieved through the removal and exclusion of others, especially other women, from her arena. Instead of her, it is these other women who must now remain forever on the outside. The plot of feminization at this juncture has simply confirmed and perpetuated the logic of a well-worn masculinist moral-aesthetic. In the French model, moral-aesthetic issues are articulated differently because representation itself, as is often the case in high modernist and avant-garde texts, is no longer assumed to be a transparent process. Whereas in Jane Eyre and Rebecca it is still possible to concentrate on the story, in Hiroshima mon amour the “story” is about the process of storytelling, the act of representation (hence Duras's many remarks as to what she wants her film text to be and how it should be received, etc.). It is in this sense that the text has taken on a material, opaque status, removing the moral-aesthetic distinctions that used to divide inside and outside, reality and fiction, or history and memory, and rendering these oppositions as different points on the same representational plane.¹⁶ Despite this highly self-conscious understanding of representation, however, despite the magisterial manner in which she has done away with the moralism of an earlier era and lifted the status of fiction and memory to a level as a solemn as “reality” and “history,” my point is that Duras's avant-garde film text reintroduces another kind of moralist opposition, this time in a progressivist manner, between the realism of “made-to-order” documentaries and the avant-gardism of her own aesthetics, into which she respectively inserts nonwhite people (as a mass) and her white heroine (as an individual).

Duras's example demonstrates that the maneuver of textualizing politics, while oftentimes a necessary and instructive complement to the simple practice of politicizing texts, is not itself ideology-free, although “ideology” has now taken the form of theoretical “advancement”—by way of a subtle division of narrative/representational investments. If the most radical aspect of the textualization of politics—of the move to dislocate even an obvious historical referent such as Hiroshima—turns out to be dependent, for its own avant-garde battles, on a recuperation of referentiality as the semiotic ghetto in which to banish the non-white other, then “French” is, we might argue, not so distinguishable from “Anglo-American” after all. Duras's text, which I have, for my own purposes, used as a referent for the fraught politics around feminization and representation, simply goes to show that sophisticated textualist politics does not necessarily preclude cultural imperialism, which is most successful when victimhood can continue to be used to expound particular subjectivities at the expense of other historical victims, when the difference between their respective representational statuses is, a priori, raced.¹⁷

If I am suggesting an alternative way of “politicizing the text” in order to counter the poststructuralist euphoria of “textualizing politics,” it is not simply by way of a return to Lukácsian realism. Rather, it is a practice of reading that, even as it must become sensitive to textual nuance and experimentation, would also be on the alert to detect precisely the avant-garde, textualist, and theoretical complicity with the perpetuation of any racialist hold on victimhood itself as cultural capital.¹⁸

WHAT AILS WHITE FEMINISM?

Whether the text concerned is Victorian, modernist, or avant-garde, then, the tendency to monopolize victimhood is, to parody the title of Susan Gubar's 1998 article, what ails white feminism, which, since the second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, has been reluctant to dislodge white women from their preferred status as the representatives of alterity throughout Western history. As Sherene H. Razack puts it: “Confronted with white racial superiority, white women can deny their dominance by retreating to a position of subordination—that is, since we are oppressed as women, we cannot be oppressors of women of colour” (14). Razack argues that only an “interlocking analysis” can remind us “of the ease with which we slip into positions of subordination … without seeing how this very subordinate location simultaneously reflects and upholds race and class privilege” (14).

This racialist reluctance to give up the hold on victimhood is what Nancy Armstrong in her work on Anglo-American fiction refers to as the lingering power of the discourse of captivity, a discourse she traces in the captivity narratives that were produced during British colonial days in America, and that were circulated back to the mother country and remade into sentimental novels. The power of captivity lies in its twin capacity for sustaining victimhood (as a way to legitimize social protest) and for transforming victimhood into the very means of cultural domination itself. In the context of Jane Eyre, for instance, Armstrong argues that it is Jane, rather than Bertha, who personifies the power of captivity. In her personal development as a heroine, Jane becomes both a critic of the sexism of the dominant order and an agent of English imperialism. Jane's “claim that ‘this social order is bad, because it excludes me,’” Armstrong writes, “is perfectly compatible … with the claim that ‘this social order is good insofar as it includes me.’” This is because exclusion, subordination, and captivity—negative experiences which justify Jane's anger as a social outcast—are in the course of the narrative converted into the means of her empowerment, her final acceptance by the social order that entails her own control and expulsion of others. “Where the first claim launches a critique,” Armstrong adds, “the second claim limits that critique to a demand that never threatens but, indeed, updates the status quo and imbues it with a sense of adequacy” (“Captivity” 390).

Once the lingering power of captivity is understood, the complaints we hear from time to time from second-wave feminist critics about the current theoretical climate in the academy can be seen as part and parcel of an endeavor to keep the cultural capital of victimhood on the side of white feminism. This is the light in which I, for one, read Gubar's text “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” The title itself provides the key to the Victorian mode in which Gubar conceives of her narrative. Accordingly, it is feminist criticism itself that now occupies the position of the wronged and abused heroine. This remarkable “woman,” so the logic of this tale goes, was filled with healthy rage at an unjust social order and made her rightful protests. But despite the battles she had to fight and despite the accomplishments she has made for herself and others, she is once again maligned, besieged, held captive—this time by “a number of developments in the eighties and nineties,” that pose “a hazard to the vitality of feminist literary studies” (880). These developments include, on the one hand, “racialized identity politics,” which “made the word women slim down to stand only for a very particularized kind of woman,” and, on the other, poststructuralist theory, which “obliged the term to disappear altogether” (901, emphasis in the original). Gubar's account is filled with the vocabulary of disease, such as “maladies,” “infirmities,” “sickbed,” “ailment,” and the like. For scholars like her, who, to borrow the words of Razack, “have been arguing from a point of subordination, a position of innocence and non-implication in systems of oppression,” “it is white women who are really disparaged … and it is they who are the outsiders in the academy today” (169-70).

Despite having become dominant, in other words, white feminism as voiced by Gubar continues to view itself as a culture on the defense. Armstrong's words about the larger historical implications of the lure of captivity offer a sobering account of what is really at stake:

Even after the culture held captive has become the dominant culture, the captivity narrative represents that culture as a culture on the defense. Compelled by its own logic to expand the domain of capital, this culture defines its distinctive values in precisely other than economic terms and imagines those values as perpetually in danger. For this culture imagines itself in a feminine position under conditions of cultural warfare, in which the purity of its women, the safety of its children, and the sanctity of its basic unit, the household, are up for grabs. This is no less true for England and the United States under conditions of globalization, instantaneous communications, and hi-tech warfare, than it was during the epochs of Richardson, Austen, and Brontë.

(“Captivity” 395)¹⁹

As Robyn Wiegman points out, what Gubar fails or refuses to see is that perhaps it is precisely the new, interdisciplinary developments of intellectual inquiry, demonized by her as “debilitating” her heroine, that are keeping feminist criticism alive and healthy today. But whereas Wiegman sees the tensions and conflicts brought by these other developments as opportunities for feminist criticism to rethink its tasks—indeed, to reassess the conditions of its own continued existence—Gubar chooses instead to hold onto the sentimental language of captivity, injury, defense, and healing. The history of feminist criticism she writes remains articulated from the “celebratory vantage point of a gender privileged approach” (Wiegman 370), for which the emergence of “woman” is the originary, Edenic event, while any attempt to challenge it, however historically reasoned such an attempt may be, will have to be construed as a rude assault on the identity of an innocent victim.

So, when whiteness feminizes … the myth is that the world would from then on be fairly redistributed on the new basis of a man-woman relation. As white feminists soon discover, things have not quite stabilized in the way they expect. Because she is figured as supplementary to man, “woman” by necessity comes with two possible types of epistemological consequences. One of these would always involve attempts to strip the supplement of its supplementary force and recontain it within a single entity; the other would follow the supplement's logic to make way for other supplements to the supplement that is woman. In the morphology of fictional elements I have discussed (Gubar's narrative about feminist criticism being one of their latest variations), it would appear that what often surfaces in classic white feminine/feminist texts is precisely the restriction and containment of the supplement. Nevertheless, the supplements to “woman” will undoubtedly persist. In the form of demons and specters, or else in the form of made-to-order documentaries, these other supplements—the other kinds of women, the non-Western men as well as women—will continue to remind us of the fundamentally open, if ever discontented and unfinished, business known as the feminization of culture.

Notes

1. This second-wave feminism is sometimes known as “difference” feminism or “gynocentric” feminism. All of these terms designate the turning point at which Western feminists systematically developed women-specific approaches that generated more complex explanations for the problem of women's oppression than the ones hitherto provided by classical Marxist analyses. For a succinct account that highlights feminists in nonliterary disciplines, see Nicholson.

2. In opposition to Douglas, Tompkins, for instance, affirms women's sentimental fiction by arguing that literary sensationalism can be a form of political intervention.

3. For an exemplary critique of feminist essentialism and its philosophical origins, see Spelman.

4. The unstable and unstabilizable status of “woman” is in part what has provoked some recent debates about the status of Women's Studies as a field of inquiry. See the essays in the differences special issue “Women's Studies on the Edge,” in particular Cook and Henry with Scott.

5. Gilbert writes that “Bertha … is Jane's truest and darkest double: the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead” (“Plain Jane's Progress” 492). In a recent essay, Gilbert upholds and updates her previous views by reading Jane Eyre as a Cinderella filled with intense sexual passion. As for Bertha Mason, Gilbert emphasizes her whiteness (“The beautiful but dissolute daughter of a ‘Creole’ [probably French and Spanish] mother, Bertha is most likely of European descent, although her upbringing in the hot West Indies has led to a tradition of critical speculations that she is racially mixed” [“Jane Eyre” 360]) and then proceeds to read her as a woman driven mad by her excessive and unsatisfied sexual hunger. In thus adopting what in the context of Jane Eyre is Rochester's (racist) view of Bertha's sexuality (a view that equates dark-skinned peoples from hot climates with overly sexed natures), Gilbert proves herself, even in the late 1990s, an unswervingly compassionate and loyal wife to the master (in terms of the argument I am making). For a considerably more nuanced discussion of the ambiguity of Bertha's race, see Meyer 63-70.

6. Armstrong and Tennenhouse's reading is responsive precisely to this fact of Jane as a writer; they argue that language and writing are the very means by which Jane empowers and socially reproduces herself despite her utter deprivation. See also Kaplan for a discussion of the differences in Brontë's novel between the innocent child protesting social injustice and the well-seasoned, knowledgeable adult Jane retelling her past.

7. There was some controversy over plagiarism regarding Rebecca (raised by the family of a Mrs. MacDonald who wrote a novel called Blind Windows, which they claimed De Maurier's story copied). According to Du Maurier, the case was legally dismissed (see Rebecca Notebook 14-15). Du Maurier, who has made references to Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights in her memoirs (Rebecca Notebook 106-07; 120-21), has not, to my knowledge, indicated any borrowing from Charlotte's work, but the remarkable resemblance of her story to that of Jane Eyre speaks for itself. In “Jane Eyre,” Gilbert writes that “Jane Eyre is more a romance in the mode of such diversely Gothic descendants as The Turn of the Screw, Rebecca, and Wide Sargasso Sea than it is a ‘realistic’ novel in the mode of The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch” (368). As my essay will make clear, I am much less interested in the issue of plagiarism than in what I think are the generic features of prevalent narrative elaborations of whiteness as whiteness undergoes feminization.

8. Although in the film version of Rebecca, Max describes Rebecca as having accidentally killed herself during a quarrel with him, in the novel he actually confesses to having killed her. Du Maurier clearly registers this sense of complicity on the part of the young wife, the narrator of the tale, in these words: “I had listened to his story and part of me went with him like a shadow in his tracks. I too had killed Rebecca, I too had sunk the boat there in the bay …” (Rebecca 266).

9. “Rebecca is the story of a woman's maturation, a woman who must come to terms with a powerful father figure and assorted mother figures (Mrs. Van Hopper, Rebecca, and Mrs. Danvers)”; “Rebecca shows the heroine's attempt to detach herself from the mother in order to attach herself to a man” (Modleski 46, 50; emphases in the original).

10. The strongest evidence for this is found in the character of Mrs. Danvers, who is fiercely defensive about her lost female idol. (See Berenstein, and Samuels 45-57, for discussions of the lesbian implications of Mrs. Danvers's affections and the circulation of feminine desire.) By her doctor's account, when Rebecca went secretly to see him about what she thought was a possible pregnancy, she did so under the name “Mrs. Danvers.”

11. In Rebecca, in the scene in which Max de Winter makes his confession, the young woman's entire demeanor changes as she discovers, for the first time, that her husband has never loved Rebecca. This discovery gives her the strength to help him because the other woman is, at this point, clearly out of the picture—as the common enemy against whom husband and wife will now unite. Du Maurier's text reads as follows: “the rest of me sat there on the carpet, unmoved and detached, thinking and caring for one thing only, repeating a phrase over and over again, ‘He did not love Rebecca, he did not love Rebecca.’ … [S]omething new had come upon me that had not been before. My heart, for all its anxiety and doubt, was light and free. I knew then that I was no longer afraid of Rebecca. I did not hate her any more … Maxim had never loved her. I did not hate her any more. Her body had come back, her boat had been found with its queer prophetic name, Je Reviens, but I was free of her forever … I was not young any more. I was not shy. I was not afraid. I would fight for Maxim. I would lie and perjure and swear, I would blaspheme and pray. Rebecca had not won. Rebecca had lost” (Rebecca 267).

12. Insofar as I think that even a strong woman character such as Jane Eyre is ultimately subordinate to man, my reading departs from the critical tradition of protofeminist arguments, made in the 1980s by critics such as Tompkins, about sentimental fiction. The reasons for my departure should, I hope, be clear from my arguments throughout this essay.

13. Propp's morphology of the folktale has been modified and critiqued by various structuralist theorists, among whom is Lévi-Strauss (“L'analyse morphologique” and “La structure et la forme”), who argues that the empirical discovery of functions is insufficient for a generic understanding of the folktale as form (or as a completed kind of narrative). My purpose in referring to functions is different here; I am primarily interested in demonstrating the detectable continuities between the Anglo-American and French narratives, and not in developing an entire meta-narratological model.

14. Hill describes this “elevating” in the following manner: “place names in Duras function consistently—particularly, say, in Hiroshima mon amour—as shorthand ciphers for a series of catastrophic events that have somehow broken loose from the confines of geography and history” (97).

15. Duras's emphasis might also have been a response to the fact that Resnais was originally commissioned in 1958 to make a short documentary on the atomic bomb. He decided he could not do so and instead proposed an alternative that led to the Japanese-French coproduction of Hiroshima mon amour, with Duras as the writer of the screenplay.

16. See Glassman 24-33, for instance, for a lucid discussion of the gender and existential implications of Duras's uses of visual representation as opposed to language and narrative.

17. Insofar as this racing of representational statuses is a priori, Duras's placement of the Japanese in factographic referentiality is not categorically different from, for instance, Julia Kristeva's placement of Chinese women in the so-called preoedipal stage (see About Chinese Women). What is common to both cases is the perfunctory, theoretical simplification—that is, primitivization—of the non-white other, in contrast to the psychical and textual complexity that is copiously endowed on the white subject.

18. Sherene H. Razack's comments on complicity are worth citing at length: “An attention to complicity has not strongly emerged in feminism because, for the most part, we continue to avoid any inquiry into domination and our role in it when we confront issues of difference and diversity. Instead, each of us feels most safe in these discussions anchored in our subordinated position by virtue of our being of colour, disabled, economically exploited, colonized, a lesbian, or a woman. … Knowing the difficulties involved in confronting our own role in systems of domination, we may find that being anchored on the margin is more preferable. Yet, if we remain anchored on the margin, the discourse with women subordinated to ourselves stops, and various moves of superiority, notably pity and cultural othering, prevail. We become unable to interrogate how multiple systems of oppression regulate our lives and unable to take effective collective action to change these systems” (132).

19. For a comparative discussion of this situation by way of political philosophy, see Brown's analysis of the notion of injury in late modernity.

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