Author: emarie

While reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, I was struck by the prominent role that geographic location plays in the process of identity formation, sexual identity specifically. Because Bechdel’s graphic novel describes the process of both Alison’s and her father’s separate experiences of identity formation, we get two perspectives on how geographic location affects this process. Bruce’s process of identity formation is curtailed by his limited geographic location, while Alison, who moves more freely from place to place, is able to develop her sexual identity with fewer restrictions.

Bechdel emphasizes how her father’s geographic location curtailed his process of identity formation through two key illustrations. The first illustration maps significant places related to her father’s life (his grave, the place where he died, her family’s house, the house where her father was born) within a circle a mile and a half in diameter (30). The illustration marks these points with the letters A, B,C, and D and places them within a shaded circle with a thick black line bordering it. In addition to emphasizing the smallness of the geographic location in which Bruce Bechdel lived his life, the dark border and shading suggest that the geographic circumference enclosing Bruce Bechdel’s life was unbreachable, and that if Bruce were to cross that thick black line, there would be serious consequences. Overall, the visual that the illustration provides echoes what we learn from the narrative: that Bruce had to enclose all instances of sexually transgressive behavior or desire within a similarly delineated border of privacy.

The visuals in Bechdel’s narrative also illustrate how geographic location affected the development of her sexual identity as the character Alison. Unlike her father, Alison crosses geographic borders more frequently. As she crosses and recrosses these geographic borders, the expectations governing her sexual identity change. When the Bechdels go on a family trip to Europe, Alison is allowed to wear boys’ hiking boots, an experience that she describes as “intoxicating.” When she leaves home for college, crossing over the geographic boundary that circumscribes her father’s existence, Alison becomes intoxicated in a different way; she describes herself as “seduced completely” by the experience of being able to express her sexuality freely with Joan (80).

The contrast between Bruce’s and Alison’s processes of identity development is striking. While Bruce must constrain his non-normative sexual behaviors and desires to strict privacy, Alison is able to more freely express her sexual identity. The difference in the way that Alison and her father occupy geographic locations mirrors the way in which each is able to express their respective identity. While Bruce must contain his “deviant” behaviors to the private sphere in the same way that he lives his life within a limited geographic range, Alison is more able to publicly express her sexual identity, similar to the way that she more fluidly transitions between geographic locations.

Images of death and decay appear throughout Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night, especially in descriptions of Mala’s house and yard. While her father was still a tyrannical presence, Mala’s life revolved around tasks of cooking and cleaning that were necessary to keep her father tenuously appeased. Although the reader is not given access to the part of Mala’s life directly after she imprisons her father, we can safely assume that Mala no longer attempts to keep up the house after she moves her father to the sewing room. However, when Tyler’s narration first gives the reader access to Mala’s life after her father’s death, death and decay are by no means the predominant images. Rather, Mala’s life before she comes to the Paradise Alms house is characterized by its harmony with the natural cycles of life and death that take place around her. The presence of her father’s decaying body and of the decay taking place throughout her yard do not cause Mala to deteriorate. Instead, she and the lush vegetation in her yard thrive on the products of death. Mala’s coexistence with the decay taking place all around her can be read as her means of coping with the trauma and abuse that she has experienced.

After Mala escapes the control of her father, she lives in harmony with the cycles of death and decay that take place around her. Tyler describes, “Every few days, a smell of decay permeated the house. It was the smell of time itself passing, but lest she was overcome by it, Mala brewed an odour of her own design” (115). Here, Mala’s actions demonstrate how she has accustomed herself to living among death and decay. Rather than succumbing to the odour of decay caused by the decay of lives coming to an end around her house, Mala creates an odour of her own by boiling snail shells, which “obliterate[s], reclaim[s], and [gives] the impression of reversing decay” (115). The words obliterate and reclaim and the phrase “reverse decay” work at odds with one another in describing what Mala is trying to accomplish when she creates her own odour by boiling the snail shells. Although the act of boiling the snail shells could be read as Mala’s attempt to gain control over the passing of time that decay represents, the word reclaims suggests that she wants to use the power of decay, or of passing time, for her own purposes. The fact that her own odour comes from the boiled shells of dead creatures supports this line of thinking. Finally, the suggestion that Mala wants to reverse the process of decay by boiling the shells of other dead creatures implies that Mala wants to counteract the effects of death by creating the smell of more death.

However, I think that what Mala is actually trying to do here is to find some way to create life out of death, or to create the means for herself to live in the midst of decay and death. Her ritual of collecting dead insects to pin to the walls of the room where her father’s corpse rots suggests that she wants to learn how to create life out of death. When Mala pins the insects to the wall, she observes how the fallen insects have created “fodder for a vibrating carpet of moths, centipedes, millipedes cockroaches, and unnamed insects that found refuge in Mala’s surroundings. Death feeding life” (130). This process of insects feeding on the bodies of dead insects gets at the heart of what Mala is trying to do by keeping her father’s decaying body locked away in the sewing room of the house. Like the insects that feed on the bodies of their fellow creatures, Mala attempts to derive life from her father’s decay.

In her novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson reworks the myth of Hercules slaying the red-winged monster Geryon into a romance told from Geryon’s perspective. The premise of the novel itself is inventive, but the imaginative interview with Stesichoros that closes the novel is particularly inventive in its effort to remind the reader of the origins of Carson’s own work. By closing her novel with a fictional interview with Stesichoros, Anne Carson alludes directly to the process of invention by which she created Autobiography of Red and connects her own text to Stesichoros’s original inventive myth.

In the fictional interview, Stesichoros speaks about seeing, saying that he was “responsible for everyone’s visibility” (148). Here, Stesichoros is using the act of seeing as a metaphor for the act of writing. When Stesichoros says that by seeing, he was responsible for “everyone’s visibility,” he is describing the process of creating a certain vision of the world by means of a written text. Carson’s choice to portray Stesichoros as a bold artist making the world visible in new and innovative ways offers insight into how Carson perceives her own text in relation to Stesichoros’s. If Stesichoros’s original myth was responsible for creating its own vision, then Carson’s retelling renders that original myth visible in another way. By placing the interview with Stesichoros at the end of her own retelling of Stesichoros’s version of the myth, Carson draws attention to the balance between invention and influence that characterizes her text. While the interviewer’s conversation with Stesichoros reminds the reader that each piece of writing renders things visible in infinitely varied ways, Carson’s choice to place the interview at the end of her own vision of the myth serves as a reminder of the ancient influences at play in her text.

 

“Cancer is an unpredictable condition. It is the body turning upon itself. We don’t understand that yet. We know what happens but not why it happens or how to stop it” (Winterson 105).

Louise’s actions in the face of the “unpredictable condition” of her cancer suggest that she uses the circumstances of “the body turning upon itself” to create for herself a new “life narrative,” to use Halbertstam’s term, that is not contingent upon a desire for longevity (2). Although the chronology of Written on the Body is imprecise, Louise states in a conversation with the narrator that she first saw them two years ago (84). When Elgin reveals to the narrator that Louise has cancer, he also states that Louise has known about her cancer for two years (101). I want to read Louise’s decision to pursue the narrator as linked to her finding out that she has cancer. Although the reader is not given insight into Louise’s perspective on her own disease, it is likely that learning that she has cancer would have altered time in some way for Louise. Specifically, I believe that Louise’s awareness of her disease altered time for her in the same was as Halberstam describes AIDS as having altered time for the queer community. Louise’s cancer, and her subsequent knowledge of “what happens but not why it happens or how to stop it” created a “constantly diminishing future” for her, one in which there was no possibility of a life that revolved around the “reproductive temporality” which Halberstam sees as the central feature of normative time (4). By deliberately seeking out the narrator’s address and creating the circumstances of their meeting, Louise enacts the unpredictability of her disease and begins the work of creating an alternative “life narrative” for herself in which she not only exists in “queer time” but also purposefully removes herself from the normative structure of her marriage to Elgin, which binds her to the normative timeline on which reproduction is the next scheduled item. While Elgin and the narrator see the unpredictability of Louise’s cancer as a thing to be controlled, Louise embraces the fact that her body is “turning upon itself” and denying her a normative lifespan and pursuit of longevity by rejecting a marriage-bound, reproduction-based “life schedule” and pursuing unpredictability (Halberstam 1).

“This is where the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece” (190).

The closing paragraph of Written on the Body is starkly different from the rest of the novel, which focuses overwhelmingly on bodies and the effect of language on the body. If the passage above does actually describe Louise’s return, and I believe that it does, then the narrator’s lack of focus on Louise’s body is startling in the context of their obsessive attempt to learn and possess her body throughout the rest of the novel.

The final passage reveals that “the story” is not in fact written on Louise’s body, as the title of the novel suggests. Rather, it starts in “this threadbare room,” which rapidly transforms: walls “exploding,”  windows turning into telescopes, the sun descending to rest above the mantelpiece. The room’s extraordinary transformation is at once an expansion and a condensation; while the walls explode, and the windows would need to expand outward in order to become telescopes, the moon and stars seem to have come into the room, where they are “magnified,” and the sun too now exists indoors. It would seem that the room has either expanded to accommodate the newly descended universe or that the universe has coalesced in a single room. The passage does not provide any clarification, and the paradoxical nature of the description works well as a means of understanding how the narrator’s understanding of love has transformed throughout the novel.

On the previous page the narrator asks Gail, “What else is embossed on your hands but her?” (189). The question captures the narrator’s previously narrow perspective on their relationship with Louise. The narrator was focused only on Louise’s effect on their body, was unable to recognize Louise herself. After Louise’s return, however, the narrator is able to look past their own body and Louise’s body and to recognize the significance of their relationship. All of the physical marks that Louise has left on the narrator’s body diminish in comparison to the universe that she has brought with her return. At the end of the novel, we see that the narrator has learned to look beyond Louise’s physical self and has fully recognized not her body, but the world that they inhabit together.

While the passage seems to deviate from the title and major themes of Written on the Body, I’m inclined to understand it as an illustration of the narrator having finally learning to apply the text that Louise has written on their body as a means of understanding the full scope of their relationship. Louise is no longer the only one translating and creating language. The narrator has also learned to translate something other than Russian literature, and can consequently step back from their intense focus on the body in order to appreciate the world that they inhabit alongside Louise.  

“Odd that marriage, a public display and free to all, gives way to that most secret of liaisons, an adulterous affair” (16).

The narrator’s wry observation of a public display of commitment transforming into a private betrayal is, superficially, a syntactically clever way of contrasting the publicity of marriage to the secrecy of adultery. However, the phrases “free to all” and “gives way” do the most work to convey the narrator’s attitude toward marriage and to reveal how the narrator attempts to position themself in the audience’s eyes.

The narrator’s description of marriage as a “public display and free to all” could be taken to mean that marriage is a public display that its audience does not have to pay to attend or observe. However, the word “and” between the phrases “public display” and “free to all” suggests that the phrases modify marriage separately, and that what the narrator is actually saying is that the public display of marriage can be enacted by any two people at no cost. If marriage is free, and is directly at odds with adultery, then the unstated implication is that there must be some cost to adultery. The implication that adultery is both costly and secret, while marriage is free and public, diminishes the importance of marriage while simultaneously dramatizing the narrator’s previous affairs. The narrator invites the reader’s pity by flipping the traditional dichotomy of marriage versus adultery so that marriage seems to come free and easy while adultery requires a payment in exchange for the intimacy of a secret liaison.

With the phrase “gives way,” the narrator excuses themself from blame for the destruction of their lovers’ marriages. If a marriage simply “gives way” to an adulterous affair, then there is no single explanation for the collapse. Rather, the yield implies that the marriage was not strong initially, or that its flimsy publicity caused it to folding into a secret affair. By playing up both the cost of adultery and the flimsiness of marriage, the narrator asks for sympathy for their experiences while also sidestepping the reader’s judgement.