Dialogue of the imaginary.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf observes that "[w]omen have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size" (35). Seventy years after Woolf made this observation (and according to her hopeful projection), the dynamics of the man-woman-(as)-mirror scenario have changed a bit: because a woman often refuses to be a mirror or hold up a mirror, a man must hold up his own. A mirror of one's own.

Though the mythological Narcissus was a young man captivated by his own reflection, narcissism from the Enlightenment period on has been gendered as a female tendency, with the connection between women and narcissism cemented in Freud's anxious pronouncements.(1) Freudian Oedipal economy depends on castration horror and penis desire, which results from seeing and then not seeing the phallus. And if one is caught up in her own reflection, she is not focusing properly on (fleeting) penises - unless she happens to be Freud's Medusa. In "Das Medusenhaupt," Freud takes a myth involving specularity and, as Craig Owens points out, petrifies and immobilizes the meaning of the Ovidian version (196). For Freud, Medusa's head is a fetish, an emblem of castration: decapitation = castration. Having seen herself in Perseus's shield - snake-haired, but alas! without a penis - Medusa turns to stone, her "otherness . . . acknowledged and simultaneously negated" (Modleski 162).

What Freud's version of the myth largely overlooks is the importance of appropriation and control of the gaze. In Ovid's story, Perseus begins the quest by stealing the single eye shared, passed back and forth, by the twin daughters of Phorcys. After intercepting the monocular organ, Perseus seeks the power of Medusa's evil eye, which is the ability to arrest, immobilize, and make statues of others. Perseus's "specular ruse" turns Medusa's gaze back on itself, locking her into a closed system and transforming her strength into her vulnerability (Owens 196). No longer a subject, Medusa becomes the object of her own gaze, a frozen image. In Lacanian terms, Medusa is "captured" in the imaginary order, making the myth an allegory for the Lacanian subject's identification with and captivation by its image.

In addition to what the Perseus-Medusa myth tells us about the power of the gaze, Perseus's account of his conquest speaks volumes about the various methods men have used to silence and disempower strong, threatening women.(2) This myth can serve as a cautionary tale for those who think that the feminist movement has secured our passage into a post-feminist world. Tania Modleski warns us that those who are "proclaiming or assuming the advent of postfeminism, are actually engaged in negating the critiques and undermining the goals of feminism - in effect, delivering us back into a prefeminist world . . . where there was only the universal subject - man (Modleski 3, 163).

Perseus's ruse has been given new spins of late in published and public(ized) encounters and intellectual debates between men and women - with men avoiding dialogues with feminists, and, instead, retreating to the autobiographical (historically, a denigrated genre of "narcissistic" women writers), and seeking refuge in personal narratives bolstered by the stereotypes/monuments of bourgeois humanism. At an international conference on narrative in the Spring of 1993, we witnessed within twenty-four hours two such excu(r)ses in the imaginary, both men refusing to engage the texts of those feminist scholars to whom they were scheduled to respond. The connection between these situations and the Perseus-Medusa myth becomes clear when we consider that both men brandished a shield of autobiographical narratives engraved with liberal stories mentioning liberal wives. (Subtext: Some of my best friends are feminists; as a matter of fact, my wife is a feminist.) Their narratives functioned to trivialize the papers of the feminists and to refocus the conference on the men. In these occurrences the shield/mirror signifies as it (1) makes captives of those in the audience who identify with the stereotypes, (2) immobilizes and erases the texts of those Medusan feminists with whom these men perceive themselves to be involved in a contest-conquest, and (3) allows the men to engage in exhibitionary narcissism - a perverse pleasure too intense to be imagined (alone).

This recourse to autobiographical narrative is anything but self-reflective. As Charles Altieri points out, "the autobiographical hero is . . . inevitably a seducer," and invariably he is the "most constant victim" of his own seductions (407). The retreat to male personal narrative is a form of nostalgia, and nostalgia is one of the primary methods of the anti-feminist. Nostalgia, nostos, the return home.(3)

Sometimes this journey takes the form of the apparently ethical move of a male critic using feminist methodologies to re-read (and re-imagine) the narratives of a male writer. A particularly stunning example of this is Philip Weinstein's recent book on William Faulkner. He describes his text as the autobiographical narrative of a formerly New Critical Faulknerian, who seeks to "find [his] Faulkner by letting [his] Faulkner go" (8). Two chapters of this narrative reread - through feminist and African-American cultural and psychoanalytic theories - the problematic nature of white male subjectivity's essential othering and the symbolic order's psychic and linguistic constraints. Weinstein argues that Faulkner's women "exist in a different relation to the narrative voice from that of understandable phenomena . . . as the nonsubjective other: noteworthy, remarkable, but continuously isolated within their own domain" (13). He argues further that Faulkner "reveals an increasingly powerful grasp of racism as a discursive dynamic . . . Faulkner's blacks are recurrently the medium through which he imagines, with both longing and repugnance, how it might feel to be non-white" (43-44). Yet rather than engaging in a dialogue with or critically responding to the other of his professional world (feminists, white and black), Weinstein appropriates their work in order to nostalgically recuperate and reinscribe Faulkner's canonical status and then, further, to delegitimize the competing claims of the other as readers of Faulkner's texts, calling their work "scandalously partial, repressing in order to have its little 'say'" (163). His co-opted "co-ducers" have been merely the new means to an old end. In other words, what emerges in his study is a new, highly theorized version of the academic transcendental signifier: modernism's version of narcissism - a relentless focus on alienated white male subjectivity's simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, doomed, romantic, angst-ridden struggles.(4)

Modleski has demonstrated how such appropriation not only allows for but encourages the shield/mirror method to counter the Medusan threat of feminists. She draws attention to

how frequently male subjectivity works to appropriate 'femininity' while oppressing women . . . [S]uch appropriations [are] . . . deeply imbedded in American cultural tradition . . . [H]owever much male subjectivity may be 'in crisis,' as certain optimistic feminists are now declaring, we need to consider the extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution, whereby men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it. (17)

This incorporation is a form of introjection, one of the basic methods (along with rejection/expulsion) used by individuals and cultural groups to deal with otherness (Schwab 114). Swallowed up and assimilated, the other ceases to pose a threat.

In "The Problem of Speaking for Others," Linda Alcoff discusses the response of a prominent theorist, who, invited to lecture at a symposium at her university, refused to speak on the assigned topic of postmodernism and politics because as a white male he felt he would be appropriating the perspectives of feminist and postcolonial theorists who initiated the critique of postmodern politics. He chose not to speak for the other voices, opting instead to lecture on architecture (5-6). At first glance, the speaker's refusal appears sensitive, responsible, and ethical; one suspects these qualities informed his intended ethos. But then again, perhaps he evaded the topic to avoid any possible criticism. Intentions aside, what was the result of his refusing to lecture on the invited topic? Alcoff replies that "[t]he effect of his refusal was that he offered no contributions to an important issue and all of us lost an opportunity to discuss and explore it" (27). In this case, to avoid speaking was to abnegate discursive responsibility; the problem of speaking for others became a problem of speaking to others. Scrape the surface of this retreat response and you are likely to find, as Alcoff observes, the autonomous conception of self in classical and liberal humanism: the grand illusion of individualist ideology which imagines that the self can inhabit a space untouched by others (20).

Though this transcendental rational subject claims autonomy for itself, its essence and worth depend on the devalued other. Marginalized, silenced, and ignored, the other has been refused what Edward Said calls "permission to narrate." Thus, the significance of the decision to substitute personal narration for dialogic interaction or for critical response varies according to discursive positionality. In terms of power, the recourse to autobiography from a privileged discursive position differs markedly from that of a marginalized or previously silenced position. Because personal narrative has been such an important form of discourse to feminist and ethnic theorists; when a prominent white male intellectual turns to personal narrative to circumvent dialogue on feminist or multi-cultural questions, his move suggests the familiar strategy of appropriating and using as a weapon the discourse of one's perceived opponent.(5) And we are back to Perseus again.

One of the most visible discursive ruses in the imaginary was Clarence Thomas's narrative of the individualist, stalwart grandfather and the sister-as-deadbeat-welfare queen in order to head off (decapitate) what he termed "a high-tech lynching." Because of multiple inversions of gender and race, Thomas's narrative functioned as a warped mirror. While Anita Hill's testimony required her to speak of large breasts, pubic hairs, and long dongs, Thomas resorted to the old saw about boot straps, hard work, and rugged individualism - the narrative mainstays of white male Republican political rhetoric. As a Reagan appointee, Thomas had opposed those African-Americans who engaged in narratives of victimage, but at the hearings he did not hesitate to defend himself by claiming racial and sexual persecution. And as Kimberlee Crenshaw, an African-American legal scholar, has observed, "Thomas' approval ratings in the black community skyrocketed from 54 percent to nearly 80 percent immediately following his performance." Examining this phenomenon, Crenshaw says that "America simply stumbled into the place where the African-American women live, a political vacuum of erasure and contradiction maintained by the almost routine polarization of 'blacks and women' into separate and competing political camps [our emphasis!" (417).

Immediately into the Thomas-Hill hearing, it became obvious that none of the "distinguished senators" was listening. Though Hill repeatedly reminded them of the necessity of attending to the large picture, we witnessed the likes of Arlen Specter fetishizing titillating details of her testimony and Allan Simpson recounting for us passages from the anti-Hill messages he claimed to be receiving from all across the country (not to mention Ted Kennedy playing with his navel, perhaps contemplating his earlier success in suppressing Mary Jo Kopechne's narrative with his autobiographical tale of the beleagured husband-with-alcoholic wife).

The Judiciary Committee, like the academics we have described earlier, managed to have it both ways: they appeared to grant Hill the permission to narrate - in the sense of giving her time and space - while remaining fully protected from her story with their various shields, an apparently defensive gesture, which functions offensively. Anita Hill's punishment (and that of the women watching her on televisions around the world) was to see her penis-less reflection in their shields and also to know that the corroborating testimony of the other women would never be heard. Many of the women watching, who might have spoken against their own sexual harassers, were also turned to stone. Television thus provided a reflector-shield far more powerful than any Perseus might have "imagined".(6)

Lani Guinier's narrative was just as insidiously captured and contained in the imaginary. While many members of the Judiciary Committee would have conservatively and proudly declared their opposition to women like Anita Hill, brandishing not only shield but double-edged sword, President Clinton's liberal commitment to women's participation in government and his dedication to their democratic rights is well-known. Yet he nominated, rejected, and silenced Guinier almost simultaneously. Her potential as a "radical" voice, rather than as a moderate one, ensured that she would not testify before the Senate committee. Guinier commented later, before the NAACP, that she had "endured the personal humiliation of being villified as a mad woman with strange [fetishized] hair . . . a strange name and strange ideas . . . ideas like democracy, freedom, and fairness that mean all people must be equally represented in our political process" (3).

In mentioning her hair, Guinier, perhaps unknowingly, echoed the retelling of the Medusa-Perseus myth in Alice Walker's Temple of My Familiar. Walker's character Nzingha recounts her professor's narrative:

'The story he was telling was about the ugliness of the face of the African Goddess, with her dreadlocked hair - snakes, ugh, right? - and its tendency to turn men to stone. And so this brave white man, Perseus the Greek, takes on the challenge of slaying her, as he would any other "dragon," for it is as if the only invitation the white man accepts from anything that is powerful is that he come at once and kill it. And so he cuts off her head, and in all his stories says the face is hideous, and the hair like writhing snakes, and that there is nothing redeemable about her whatsoever . . . if you are from Africa you recognize Medusa's wings as the wings of Egypt, and you recognize the head of Medusa as the head of Africa: and you realize what you are seeing is the Western world's memorialization of that period in prehistory when the white male world of Greece decapitated and destroyed the black female Goddess/Mother tradition and culture of Africa . . . Actually . . . the earliest known "Athene," though Greek, had snaky hair. Only later did they give her those flowing blond locks. . . .' (269)

These narratives, from the halls of academe to the chambers of the Senate, are not isolated or discrete incidents. They all describe narcissistic responses - typical of the discursively privileged and characteristic of anti-feminist strategies - which reveal an inability or an unwillingness to listen receptively, what Adrienne Rich has called "protective deafness." Thus, when Richard Rorty speaks confidently about the emancipatory possibilities of culture as a consensual conversation, when Jurgen Habermas proposes the possibility, indeed the necessity, of a universal pragmatics, or when Gerald Graff argues for the dialogic model implicit in his pedagogical theory of "teaching the conflicts," those of us confronted constantly by the reality of discursive power differentials remain skeptical. Because neo-pragmatic theories such as those of Rorty, Habermas, and Graff fail to adequately consider positional differences; they end up sneaking the autonomous transcendental subject through the back door.(7) And the transcendental ego is no conversational partner. If conversation fails, so does dialogue. An interrogation of the pieties connected to the liberal humanist faith in dialogue would seem to be the first order of business for any feminist theory of discourse.

Using the Perseus-Medusa myth both as a context of analysis for these academic and cultural demonstrations of the simultaneous claim/failure of dialogue and as a cautionary tale for feminists, our particular interrogation can remind us all of the oppressive discursive practices involved in gender politics. In conceptualizing progressive models of relationality, we should consider Woolf's description of the shrinking of the "figure in the looking glass" when women "tell the truth" (36); and bell hooks's entreaties for "subject-to-subject encounters" between men and women - which she also calls "truth-speaking" (133); and Toni Morrison's narrative solution in Beloved, in which Paul D, frightened by Sethe's monstrously "thick" love, retreats for awhile yet returns at the end, asking Sethe if he might put his story next to hers, their stories touching.

In each case, the women have assumed the discursive responsibility of telling their narratives and of disrupting the apparently seamless stories of men. As other, these women have never experienced a time or space in which they have not also had the responsibility of knowing male narratives - more problematically of always positioning their narratives in relation to men's. Yet since men historically have exempted themselves from knowing (even from hearing) the stories of the other, they are dismayed, shocked, but, more consequentially, deeply threatened by these narratives in which men's status as victimizer, intentional or not, is clear. And the more specifically and radically woman-focused (and the more overtly accusatory of men) the other's narratives are, the more keenly they are perceived as Medusan. The other has become a rebellious agent, refusing the devalued position of consolidating and undergirding the subject's imaginary vision of himself. Thus is man displaced from the site of symbolic identification, the point from which he observes himself so that he appears likable, the place of the ego-ideal that determines his imaginary form (Zizek 108).

Men who claim to be involved in dialogic relationships with women - informed by the emancipatory possibilities of feminism, postmodernism, and other egalitarian impulses - have denied the Medusan threat publicly, yet continue too often to function in terms of it. The other's I/eye is stolen, the shield transformed to mirror, the gaze reclaimed, the signifiers arrested, the narrative mythologized, the transcendental ego restored. God-man's in his heaven; all's right with the world.

Progressive models of relationality will work only when men recognize the full extent of their privilege, their oppressively complicitous practices, and their own otherness. Perhaps we will discover then, as Altieri claims, that we all share a "common plight as beings caught up in the imaginary" (410); we all need mirrors. In this case, the problem is not narcissism itself but the failure to recognize it as such or the dishonest terms people use for representing themselves to themselves.(8) Perhaps then, there can be subject-to-subject encounters and dialogues between men and women; perhaps then their stories can touch. But not before.

Endnotes

1 There is a real-life connection between Woolf and Freud in terms of the Narcissus myth. In their only meeting, which occurred in 1939, Freud gave Virginia a narcissus and asked what they (the Woolfs? the English?) might have done to stop Hitler.

2 In "The Laugh of the Medusa," Helene Cixous reminds us that Medusa never had the chance to tell her story. See also Cixous's "Castration or Decapitation?".

3 See Doane and Hodges for a discussion of anti-feminist nostalgia.

4 See Barlowe's review of Weinstein, forthcoming in Novel.

5 A recent example was David Duke's inversion and perversion of the respect for diversity and difference as "political correctness" and Hollywood's corruption of feminism's relationship to motherhood in such films as Three Men and a Baby (see Modleski) and the Alien(s) series.

6 In terms of television and the gendered subject, Judith Newton and Judith Stacey point to ABC's decision to drop "all children's programs with female characters, because boys refuse to watch these, while girls will watch male leads [;] . . . to compensate for the absence of female leads, the networks endow male characters with trains conventionally gendered as female" (70).

7 See Harstock for a convincing critique of Rorty in these terms.

8 Although we have found Altieri's ideas helpful, we should mention his following disclaim in Canons and Consequences: "Finally, I must acknowledge my own inability directly to address feminist arguments regarding my basic concerns (although Chapter 10, I hope, shows what I have learned from them). I avoid the issues because the field is constantly changing, because there are deep tensions between focusing on victimage and focusing on empowerment that I do not know how to adjudicate, and because I simply cannot find a stance where I do not feel ridiculous or patronizing (or both at once)" (320 n. 3). In this endnote. Altieri means to differentiate his own position of self-awareness from the position of those critics such as Robert Scholes and Paul Smith whom he excoriates for being evasive in regard to the grounds of their critical stances. But from the perspective of our argument, Scholes's and Smith's active efforts to engage feminist theory are far more commendable than Altieri's refusal to confront feminist concerns for fear of being "ridiculous or patronizing."

Works Cited

Alcoff, Linda. "The Problem of Speaking for Others." Cultural Critique 20 (Winter 1991-92): 5-3.

Altieri, Charles. Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals. Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1990.

---. "Ecce Homo: Narcissism, Power, Pathos, and the Status of Autobiographical Representations." boundary 2 9:3 (Spring-Fall 1981): 389-413.

Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." In New French Feminisms. Eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1981: 245-64.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Whose Story Is It, Anyway?: Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill." In Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

Doane, Janice and Devon Hodges. Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Guinier, Lani. Speech before NAACP convention, Indianapolis, July 13, 1993. Toleda Blade (July 14, 1993): 3.

Harstock, Nancy. "Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories." Cultural Critique 7 (Fall 1987): 187-206.

hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist. Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989.

Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a 'Postfeminist' Age. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Newton, Judith and Judith Stacey. "Learning Not to Curse, or, Feminist Predicaments in Cultural Criticism by Men: Our Date with James Clifford and Stephen Greenblatt." Cultural Critique 23 (Winter 1992-93): 51-82.

Owens, Craig. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Eds. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

Schwab, Gabriele. "Reader-Response and the Aesthetic Experience of Otherness." Stanford Literature Review 3:1 (Spring 1986): 107-36.

Walker, Alice. The Temple of My Familiar. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Weinstein, Philip. Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989.

Molly Abel Travis is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. She has published essays on African American narrative, on Virginia Woolf, and on the nineteenth-century feminist Frances Wright. She has recently completed a book, Reading Cultures: Cultural Production and the Construction of Modern, Postmodern and Hypertextual Readers. Jamie Barlowe is an Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Toledo. She has published essays on feminist theories, American writers, and literature by women, and is currently completing a book entitled, Re-Reading Women.

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Author:	Travis, Molly Abel; Barlowe, Jamie
Publication:	Women and Language
Date:	Sep 22, 1995
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