Routledge Revivals: Literary Fat Ladies (1987)

Rhetoric, Gender, Property

Patricia Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315451312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

First published in 1987, the essays in this volume focus on questions of gender, property and power in the use of rhetoric and the practice of literary genres, and provide a historicised cultural critique. They analyse the links between rhetoric and property, but also representations of women as unruly, excessive, teleology-breaking figures — intermeshing with feminist theory in the wake of Freud, Lacan and Derrida. A wide variety of texts — from Genesis to Freud, by way of Shakespeare, Milton, Rousseau and Emily Brontë — are examined, held together by a concern for the entanglements of rhetorical questions of literary plotting, hierarchy, ideological framing and political consequence.

1

Retrospective Introduction

The present Introduction, like all Introductions, is retrospective: it looks back over and offers some conclusions from what is about to follow. But it is even more so because the studies in this book, focused on questions of rhetoric, gender and property, have been the work of several years, through stages of development both in my own thinking and in the direction of literary theory and criticism. The oldest, “The Metaphorical Plot”—first published in an interdisciplinary collection on metaphor—contains the germ of the subsequent direction of the investigations here, and two of the links in the subtitle, between rhetoric and property. Extended into a reading of a particular text, it led, in the second-written essay—an analysis of Wuthering Heights for a symposium on the identity of the literary text—into more detailed interrogation of the relation between the unsettling mobility of tropes such as metaphor and the boundary markers of private property.

Neither of these earliest studies directly engages the third term—gender—except in elliptical observations in the latter on the forms of exchange marked through women’s changing proper names or in the function of the housekeeper narrator of Brontë’s novel to provide a story for the pleasure of a master—a function as “gossip” which would link her to the other gossips featured elsewhere in this book. The more recent pieces, however—beginning with the title essay, “Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of the Text”—move explicitly toward questions of gender and genre as well as of property, and the entanglements of rhetorical questions with questions of ideological framing and political consequence. A common focus of these studies is the link between the categories of rhetoric and discourse and questions of gender and ideology, the importance of rhetoric not just as a system of tropes but as a motivated discourse.

The individual essays proceed as follows, with the first two introducing questions of rhetoric and gender on the one hand and rhetoric and property on the other. The title essay explores the link between the amplification of discourse and the expansive textual figure of the “fat lady,” both within the Renaissance and beyond, into more modern instances, including James’s Fanny Assingham and Joyce’s Molly Bloom. “The Metaphorical Plot” surveys the plots at work within ostensibly neutral neoclassical, Romantic and contemporary conceptions of metaphor and the labor of metaphor within particular literary plots. Its aim is not—as with so many recent studies of this trope of tropes—to put forward a single view from among the multitude of possibilities; but rather to examine some of the most influential descriptions of metaphor and the plots they have generated, including the often unacknowledged mythoi of recent critical theory. Because of the occasion of its writing, its survey is necessarily telescopic and partial; a fuller study of metaphorical plots, of which this essay is only a preliminary sketch, would have to include, among other things, the tradition of Vico and the primacy of the metaphorical. But its original purpose, within a group of essays by philosophers, psycholinguists and others, was to give a sense of mythos or emplotment to a field of inquiry in which characterizations of metaphor proceed so often blind to the figures which structure the discussion itself.

The second group of essays addresses questions of genre and gender, of rhetorical play on the figures of rhetoric, and the relation between the limiting structures of discourse and questions of social and political control. “Suspended Instruments: Lyric and Power in the Bower of Bliss” seeks to relate the structure of subject male and dominant female in a central episode of Spenser’s Faerie Queene to the insights and methods of so-called “new-historicist” study of literary text and social text, including the ambivalent figuring of Elizabeth as Spenser’s reigning queen, but to do so within the specific context of gender and lyric forms. “Transfigurations: Shakespeare and Rhetoric” sets out to demonstrate, by analysis of paronomastic play on tropes such as “The Doublet” and “The Preposterous,” the crucial importance of the lexicon and structures of rhetoric for the interpretation of Shakespeare. Its more elliptical engagement of the relation of such rhetorical tropes and plotting to questions of gender and social ordering is taken up explicitly in its companion essay, “Motivated Rhetorics: Gender, Order, Rule,” which looks at ways in which what presents itself as a study of language or logic quickly becomes implicated in questions of social and political control. The instances here of the gendering of rhetorical figures, including metaphor, extend the discussion of the earlier “Metaphorical Plot”; its concern with wayward women and wayward tropes leads finally to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a central text within the ongoing feminist debate over Shakespeare.

The next two essays take up differently the relation between structures of discourse and structures of property.“Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon” juxtaposes three traditionally separate domains—the descriptive display of a woman’s body; discovery and exploration narratives of a feminized New World; and descriptions of landscape and “prospect” at the culmination of two centuries of British empire—in order to elicit the historically influential links between rhetorical invention and economic inventory, between the possessive display of the female body and the progressive enclosure of land. “The (Self-) Identity of the Literary Text” deals with the relation between property, propriety, proper place and proper name in Wuthering Heights, in order to suggest why this novel has attracted formalist and Marxist critic alike.

The last essay in the book is its longest one: “Coming Second: Woman’s Place.” It had its beginning years ago in a fascination with the echoes of the creation of Eve at the very moment when Rousseau creates “Woman” as a companion for his Emile, and, more generally, with the frequency of a structure in which the narrative of a woman comes only belatedly or supplementarily. It starts from two influential paradigms for this progression—the story of the creation of Adam first in Genesis 2, and the Aristotelian conception of the female as imperfect or botched male—and extends its study of female secondariness into the instabilities of sequence in Milton, Rousseau and Freud.

Each of the studies here has been written for a different occasion, the most recent—“Motivated Rhetorics,” “Rhetorics of Property” and “Coming Second”—for the Gauss Seminars at Princeton. They are intended as essays in the older sense of attempts rather than inclusive or conclusive statements, and in the newer sense of interventions in the current state of literary criticism and theory. Because of their originally occasional nature and the requirement that each essay be complete in itself, some overlap in their references is unavoidable and has not been completely excised. The brief illustration from Wuthering Heights in “The Metaphorical Plot” is extended in the later, more detailed exploration of that novel in “The (Self-)Identity of the Literary Text,” in ways that I hope might indicate why theoretical inquiry into the control of a trope such as metaphor is bound to lead into the textual question of a masterable “identity.” Similarly, rhetorical tropes and categories which link the organization of society to the regulation of discourse appear recontextualized in several of these studies, at different refractive angles, as does recourse to the language of copia and of sexual or rhetorical “opening.” “Increase and multiply,” for example—the principle of textual, bodily and generational increase in “Literary Fat Ladies” and in the later discussions of rhetoric in Shakespeare—returns in relation to the emergence of a language of commodity in “Rhetorics of Property.” The turn here to the more concrete senses of “increase” makes explicit a continuing argument of these investigations—the implication of the rhetorical in the economic—and links it to the consequences as well as the historical background of the separation of rhetoric from something now called “economics.”

The essays have in common a number of connecting links: the textual figure of the fat lady in particular literary texts and the description in one New World narrative of the “large” and “heavy” body of Maryland displayed to her exploiters; the misogynist topos of women’s endless talkativeness and its counterpart in a vagrant female sexuality; the resilient masculinist paradigm of women’s erotic delay or holding off, a topos still operative in the text of psychoanalysis; the relation between narrative as a form of overcoming an enchantress in romance and the function of a specifically narrative telos in the plotting of sexual difference in Milton, Rousseau or Freud. There are also a number of continuing concerns. One is with structures of linearity and sequence: the Genesis narrative of male and female; Shakespeare’s exploitation of models of the sequitur, or of cause and effect; and, at a later stage of the same print culture, the preposterous narrative of Wuthering Heights. Another is with the interplay between rhetorical tropes or textual figures and the generation of characters and plots. This is reflected in the focus, in these studies, on small textual elements in order to approach larger ones, or on apparently utterly marginal characters like “Will Page” in The Merry Wives of Windsor or the Henriad’s “old Double.”

A major argument of the essays is also the importance in all three of the terms of the subtitle—rhetoric, gender and property—of the overriding notion of place, and proper place: this includes the topographical resonance of the rhetorical topos, the conception of tropes of reversal, transport or exchange as moving words from their proper place, and the influential Aristotelian and biblical traditions of the proper place of women. It is the underlying notion of place and the conception of metaphor as “alien” or dwelling in “a borrowed home,” which might be seen to be at work not just in a novel like Emily Brontë’s but in the whole tradition of the gothic, whose plots are so frequently dependent on the intrusion of an alien and the usurpation of a house.

Part of what underlies these studies, finally, is a statement about the continuation of the categories and organizing structures of a more self-conscious rhetorical tradition well beyond its apogee in the Renaissance, even beyond the disparaging of rhetoric and trope which accompanied the consolidation of the civil state in the era of Hobbes and Locke. The tradition of the “partition” of discourse is in need of excavation if we are to read the extensive and punning exploitation of such rhetorical terms in Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other Renaissance writers. But it was still being perpetuated—along with neoclassical notions of the impropriety of metaphor—in as influential an eighteenth-century text as Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, whose chapter on the art of partition in sermon discourse outlines the principle Emily Brontë as a preacher’s daughter would have known in its practice if not in its theory, the one which informs the proliferating partitions of a sermon in a nightmare chapter of Wuthering Heights. The juxtaposition of texts in “Rhetorics of Property” also depends on the conviction that the apparent effacing of “painted rhetoric” in Baconian science and subsequent strictures against tropes masked what was a continuation and recontextualizing of terms and structures simultaneously rhetorical and economic, as well as the subtle gendering of a whole rhetorical tradition.

The essays do not attempt to apply contemporary theory, including theories of rhetoric such as Barthes’ or de Man’s, to the different focus of much older texts; but rather, deliberately, to stay within the problematics of rhetoric at work in specific texts and traditions of decorum, governance and disposition. If at points this more particular study begins to recall certain contemporary theories, we need to remember that much of the continental theory that has had such an impact in the past two decades is informed by an education which included classical rhetoric: the texts which Shakespeare, or Hugh Blair, knew well in their originals or in redactions, have come back through a French door so to speak. My own bias is that if we were to attend to this largely forgotten language even in modern texts which so clearly advertise their relation to it—Joyce’s Ulysses, say—we would be better readers of contemporary as well as of more remote texts.

The theoretical apparatus of these essays (as with the use of Foucault and Derrida to approach the structures of Wuthering Heights) is a largely heuristic one. When “Suspended Instruments” was first delivered as an English Institute talk, one of its hearers remarked that its use of Laura Mulvey on the male gaze worked much better for Spenser than for cinema, where its legitimacy has been much debated. This may be because the powerful scopic drive she describes is already long a feature of literary romance and Petrarchan lyric. The evocation of the romance paradigms at work behind Lacan’s movement from the “Imaginary” to the “Symbolic,” the name of the Father and the Law, is also not to apply a post-Freudian psychoanalytic terminology to an older Renaissance text, but to suggest the culturally loaded paradigms informing the work of Lacan himself, whose complex relation to the question of gender, and to courtly romance, the recently appearing Seminars are just beginning to suggest. Similarly, the placing of Freud at the end of “Coming Second” and at the end of this book, is to suggest that a figure read more frequently as the beginning of a certain history might, with a shift of historical punctuation, be read as well against the background of one.

I have used contemporary theoretical formulations heuristically partly to indicate how critical practices generally considered in isolation, or as mutually exclusive, necessarily meet over problems such as property, the institution and instability of gender hierarchies, or the ideologically charged rhetorical instruction which enjoyed such a dramatic rise in England in the sixteenth century. The evocation of both Macherey and Derrida at the end of “Motivated Rhetorics” summons names often wielded by opposing camps: yet the discourse of rhetoric and the decorum of tropes in the Renaissance calls out for an analysis which attends not only to the surpluses and reserves of language but to its specific historical status as a political instrument. Similarly, the discussion of Wuthering Heights in “The (Self-)Identity of the Literary Text” brings both Foucault and Derrida to bear on the consideration of a text which anticipates the twinned questions of the “ghost” and the “proper” which have preoccupied so much continental theory and narratology. I have drawn on Foucault’s early description of the classical or Enlightenment episteme in dealing with property in relation to this text, and on Derrida and Blanchot to raise the question of its “self-identity,” because of the limitations of older Marxist notions of representation which would ask only how such a novel “reflected” property laws and practices in its day and, in its need to stabilize the text in order to answer that question, would elide its fissures and formal complexities. It is not that the relation of the novel to those laws and practices is unimportant or that it has been more than superficially dealt with in earlier treatments of the subject; but rather that “property” is also an epistemological and ideological question affecting both “real” property and the other senses of the term which Brontë’s novel so powerfully evokes.

The essays draw more than once upon Foucault: on the notion of the episteme with regard to Wuthering Heights, and on the relation between power and the circulation of a discourse in “Motivated Rhetorics” and the discussion of exploration, landscape and blazon in “Rhetorics of Property.” But again they do so with an implicit revision and critique, especially of the epistemics of Les Mots et les choses. Foucault’s commitment to ruptures or breaks requires him in his early writing to characterize, preposterously, a prior Renaissance episteme based on resemblance and metaphor from the perspective of a classical or Enlightenment difference from it, and to do so in ways that make it only too easy for scholars more faithful to the Renaissance to recognize the distortions of this characterization and hence to reject Foucauldian analysis more generally. What the Renaissance models of linearity and the “rule of reason” treated in “Motivated Rhetorics” make clear is that what Foucault identifies as the linearity of a later “classical” discourse—from Hobbes to Locke and into the eighteenth century—is an intensification of something already present in the Renaissance and already related to the controlling of linguistic tropes. From this perspective, one link between the sixteenth-century models of linearity and consequence in “Motivated Rhetorics” and the beginning, with Locke, in “The (Self-)Identity of the Literary Text” would be the Hobbes of the Leviathan, whose preoccupation with the control of tropes such as metaphor and with the linear “chain of discourse” marks the culmination of earlier Renaissance models of linearity, and the intensified expunging of tropic ambiguities in the service of a new science and an even greater consolidation of civic power.

The relation between the text of something called (for better or for worse) “literature” and something called (for better and for worse) “theory” is anything but a sens unique. The upsetting of proper place and linearity in Brontë’s novel comes more than a century before contemporary writing like Luce Irigaray’s on the patriarchal orders of linearity, property, and proper name, as it does before Derrida’s treatment of the “ghost” which haunts any notion of the “proper.” But to juxtapose all three might suggest the possibility of a kind of feminist inquiry which would not be dependent on artificially isolating female characters from the narrative and rhetorical forms in which they appear. The Derridean logic of the supplement, taken up in the more recent analyses of Sarah Kofman and others, already, as Kofman’s own subtle allusiveness suggests, has its anticipation in the secondary creation of the female in Genesis. “Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of the Text” alludes at its end to the affinities between the language of the rhetorical tradition it foregrounds and French feminist celebration of “écriture feminine”: the literary texts it treats already long anticipate Cixous and Irigaray on the female body, female tongue and phallic “point.”

The texts treated in what follows include Genesis and Milton; Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Rousseau’s Emile; textual bodies and their loquacious counterparts in Shakespeare, in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, in the era of “feminized” novels like Pamela and Clarissa, and in more modern instances from Dickens, James, Joyce and Beckett; a number of Shakespeare plays—Othello, Hamlet, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Henriad, The Merry Wives of Windsor and others less extensively; the inventory of a woman’s body in Cymbeline, New World narratives like George Alsop’s Character of the Province of Mary-Land, and eighteenth-century descriptions of landscape and property; Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Freud’s texts on female sexuality, including On Narcissism and The Taboo of Virginity. The book’s title—“Literary Fat Ladies”—is used, in the terms of the Irigarayan epigraph of the title essay, “mimetically”: to “make ‘visible,’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible,” “to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it.” The cover illustration—Eve’s passing from patriarch to Patriarch—is of one of its recurrent fat ladies, the ongoing representative woman of Western culture, original garrulous female and translative detour. The essays as a whole figure constructions of gender in relation both to the rhetorical tradition and to discourses of property. The concern with rhetoric throughout is in the conviction that only taking it seriously can make us better formalist readers of texts in a wide variety of periods; but that it is precisely such a concern with language and its ordering structures which might lead us to re-pose the question of moving beyond ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Retrospective Introduction
• 2 Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of the Text
• 3 The Metaphorical Plot
• 4 Suspended Instruments: Lyric and Power in the Bower of Bliss
• 5 Transfigurations: Shakespeare and Rhetoric
• 6 Motivated Rhetorics: Gender, Order, Rule
• 7 Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon
• 8 The (Self-)Identity of the Literary Text: Property, Proper Place, and Proper Name in Wuthering Heights
• 9 Coming Second: Woman’s Place
• Notes
• Index