Compulsion and Identity

Judith Butler said “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts” (140). Alison’s well-furnished Victorian house seems like it is another manifestation of such “an exterior space” with “repetition of acts”. Alison describes her home as “an artist’s colony”, where all the family members were “absorbed in our separate pursuits” which consisted of “compulsion” (134).
Alison’s compulsion shows how people willingly start to police themselves. First, it seems like they became a dictator of autonomy. Tedious rules are all set by themselves. As her father was ‘autodidact’, ‘autocrat’, and ‘autocide’ caught up in compulsive furnishing, Alison learns the fantasy of autonomy from ‘autobiography’ his father gave her in which she writes “I think” obsessively (140-141). As what the phrase says, Alison delves into herself just like what his father and other family members did.
However, the phrase “I think” was a deception. By attaching the phrase on every sentences, it scales down all the perceptions and ideas into mere murmuring that has no chance of empathy and approval. The autobiography which was first expected to be a space ruled by herself, now became a display of pretense that ruled out her real feelings and thoughts. But the compulsion cannot be stopped and the repetition of practice consolidates such façade.
The counterparts of façade that conceals what is real are Alison’s autobiography, the father’s Victorian style house, the mother’s play and also the gender identity according to Judith Butler. Therefore, various compulsions of Alison’s and her father’s are not just symptoms of anxiety of disapproval, but actually symbolizes the identification of their gender. Doubts about her father’s house thus well corresponds to the question of authenticity of her self-identity.