Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature

Kathryn James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135891183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Knowledge about carnality and its limits provides the agenda for much of the fiction written for adolescent readers today, yet there exists little critical engagement with the ways in which it has been represented in the young adult novel in either discursive, ideological, or rhetorical forms. Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature is a pioneering study that addresses these methodological and contextual gaps. Focusing on texts produced since the late-1980s, and drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Kathryn James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Under particular scrutiny are the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing and sexualizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief. Through close readings of historical literature, fantasy fictions, realistic novels, dead-narrator tales, and texts from genres including Gothic, horror, and post-disaster, James reveals not only how cultural discourses influence and are influenced by literary works, but how relevant the study of death is to adolescent fiction--the literature of "becoming."

Chapter One
Points of Departure: Death, Culture, Representation

It is impossible to define death, as death stands for the final void, for that non-existence which, absurdly, gives existence to all being.

(Bauman 2)

Death is [ … ] necessarily constructed by a culture; it grounds the many ways a culture stabilizes and represents itself, and yet it always does so as a signifier with an incessantly receding, ungraspable signified, always pointing to other signifiers, other means of representing what finally is just absent.

(Bronfen and Goodwin 4)

It has been suggested that awareness of death is the origin of self-consciousness itself, yet perhaps the most obvious thing about death is that it is ultimately unknowable. Death is “always only represented” Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin contend; “there is no knowing [it], no experiencing it and then returning to write about it, no intrinsic grounds for authority in the discourse surrounding it” (4). Indeed, the concept does not just defy imagination, Zygmunt Bauman argues, it is the archetypal contradiction in terms; death is “an absolute nothing and ‘absolute nothing’ makes no sense” (2, 15, emphasis original).

Reading Death

So how, then, can the impossible be defined, how can death be “read”? In Bronfen’s view, narrative and visual representations of death can be read as “symptoms” of a culture because they draw their material from “a common cultural image repertoire” (Over xi), while for Michael Kearl, death can be defined as a socially constructed idea: “The fears, hopes, and orientations people have regarding it are not instinctive, but rather are learned from such public symbols as the language, arts, and religious and funerary rituals of their culture” (“You Never” 22). Although the pairing of life with death does not occur by nature, semantics suggests that there can be no discussion of death without a reference to life—“death exists in a relationship to life [ … ] ‘death’ both is and is not a ‘part’ of life; it is a ‘stage’ of life (a part) and the negation of life altogether (is ‘other’)” (Schleifer, Rhetoric 5–6). Needless to say, because death “lies beyond the realm of images [that] the living body knows” (Burke 369), any reading becomes a complex process of negotiation between multiply-coded signs, symbols, and terms. A typical dictionary definition, for example, covers meanings which are corporeal, theological, representational, and mythological:

death n. 1 the final cessation of vital functions in an organism; the ending of life. 2 the event that terminates life. 3 a the fact or process of being killed or killing (stone to death; fight to the death). b the fact or state of being dead (eyes closed in death; their deaths caused rioting). 4 a the destruction or permanent cessation of something (was the death of our hopes). b colloq. something terrible or appalling. 5 (usu. Death) a personification of death, esp. as a destructive power, usu. represented by a skeleton. 6 a lack of religious faith or spiritual life. (Hughes, Michell, and Ramson 284)

Death can be represented by: a coffin; cross; crow; devil; grave; grim reaper; hourglass; journey; river; scythe; skeleton; skull; tombstone; weeping willow; the colour black; and the colour white. Death figures prominently in everyday language too. There are: death-rattles, death-rolls, death rows, death seats, death squads, death-tolls, death-traps, death-warrants, death-watches, and death-wishes. A person can: catch their death, or have a dead heat (draw); be: at death’s door, dead-and-alive (slow), dead and buried (past; over), a dead beat (loser), dead on their feet, deadpan, dead tired, dead to the world, a dead weight, or like death warmed up. Dead can be added to: boring, broke, and cold; or it can mean: defunct, exhausted, extinct, flat, or tedious. Die can also mean: disappear, fail, fizzle, founder, rot, sink, stall, or subside.¹

For Bronfen and Goodwin, this indeterminacy is the crux in any representation of death: death occupies a double position as “anomalous, marginal, repressed, and at the same time masterful, central, everywhere manifest”, while the corpse is a destabilising force: it is both “the here and the nowhere” (12, 19). Resembling itself (its own double), they argue, it suspends “stable categories of reference and position in time and space” (12). As Peter Schwenger contends, the corpse is “never wholly object”, for it is “always also image—an image of otherness that is also, paradoxically, the image of self, image as self” (400, emphasis original). This analogy between the image and the corpse is one that has also been drawn by Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot sees the cadaver as “its own image” because it ceases to bear any relation with the world in which it still appears, except as an image—an “obscure possibility”. In Blanchot’s words, the corpse is “present in absence”, it bears a likeness to itself, “like to an absolute degree, overwhelming and marvellous”, and yet it is like nothing (258, emphasis added). Both the cadaver and the image are the “object’s aftermath”, he argues—“that which comes later, which is left over and allows us still to have the object at our command when there is nothing left of it” (260). In this sense, says Schwenger, the image is not “inadequate” to what it is supposed to represent; rather, it means that the image “surpasses representation” (408).

Blanchot is one amongst many scholars in the more recent Western philosophical tradition (including Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) who have made a study of death. The subject of death has also been a preoccupation of contemporary social science. Jacques Choron (Death; Modern) has brought together Western views of death from Socrates to Descartes, Kearl (Endings) has provided a sociology of death and dying, and in the seminal On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross has documented the subjective experiences of the dying. It is the work of Philippe Ariès (Hour; Images; Western), however, that provides some of the most valuable insights into the ways in which death can be read in Western culture. Ariès’s comprehensive survey of death, which spans more than one thousand years, historicises death and its images in the Western world by examining death’s relationship to cultural representation. Arguing that the image is “the richest and most direct means that man has of expressing himself [when] faced with the mystery of the end of life”, Ariès suggests that, if all the images of death from this period are juxtaposed to form a sequence, they will create a “continuous film of a series of historical cultures” (Images 1). The primary changes that have occurred during the “death epochs” of Western civilisation, Ariès contends, may thus be mapped along a historical trajectory: Before the thirteenth century, death was characterised as tame, familiar, collective, and public, but from the medieval period onwards, death became progressively more individualised, medicalised, asocial, traumatic, and unfamiliar. According to Kearl’s interpretation, these death epochs reveal how “cultural shifts in the relationship between individuals and social structure are measured by changes in conceptions of death”, and the rituals and images that are associated with it (Endings 29). Ariès has been consistently criticised for the generalisation of his approach, for being overly descriptive with his interpretation, for suggesting that the West’s relationship with death has moved from healthy to pathological, and for the masculinist terms and views that inform the study and its titles.² Nonetheless, as I have argued in the Introduction, the basic thesis which informs this vast study is of interest here because it suggests that a culture’s representations of death may be read collectively as a text to give insights into a wide array of its functions, values, social order, and systems of meaning.

Reading death also refers to reading of death—to quote Garrett Stewart, the “one inevitably fictional matter in prose fiction” (Death 4). Stewart joins several others who have produced some theoretically sophisticated work in the last decade or so since the surge of interest in death has extended to the field of literary criticism, and specifically—although somewhat later— to analyses of children’s literature.³ As a summary of the main points in several of these texts reveals, much of the criticism on death in literature approaches the topic through theories concerned with language, narrative, representation, body politics, power, gender, and sexuality. Gerald Doherty, Ronald Schleifer (“Afterword”; Rhetoric), and Beth Ann Bassein all focus on narrative, rhetoric, and death, for example: Doherty by drawing on Jakobson’s system of rhetoric to argue that representations of death in the English novel are configured in either a metaphoric or metonymic mode; Schleifer in the context of discourse theory; and Bassein by calling on literary tradition to demonstrate how Woman’s transgression of accepted codes of behaviour has often resulted in her literal or symbolic death. The bond between story and mortality is Stewart’s angle too; death, he argues, is “signatory to the very charter of fiction” (Death 51). For Bronfen (Over) and Kerry Mallan (“Fatal”), death is inexorably linked with femininity—eroticised, sexualised, and subject to close inspection. They, like Laura E. Tanner, examine the relationship between literary representations of death and the power dynamics of the gaze, suggesting, in Mallan’s words, that Western culture has come to see the deaths of women as “fatal attractions calling a crowd of onlookers” (“Fatal” 175).

The diverse essays in Goodwin and Bronfen’s edited collection Death and Representation (a number of which I have referred to above) are grouped together in a way which reveals similar resonances. Beginning with a section which looks at representations of death as texts, these studies collectively ask such questions as: “How does the psyche represent death? What forms does that representation take? How does the process take place? What are the purposes and meanings of such representations?” (Bronfen and Goodwin 10). The focus then turns to essays which take death and gender as their study by exploring the trope of woman/death, but also by examining the ways that femininity and masculinity intersect with death. Almost without exception, it is argued here, representations of death in Western culture are gendered, and especially gendered female: “death and femininity have formed two possible axes of negation and enigma in relation to masculine subjectivity and culture”, Bronfen and Goodwin contend, because they appear in cultural discourses as “the blind spot the representational system seeks to refuse even as it constantly addresses it” (14, 15, 20). Lastly, several chapters which analyse selected representations of death within a historical moment are clustered together. Through the workings of power and ideology, these essays suggest that death can be located in history and defined as “a social and cultural phenomenon” (15).

Theorising Death

It would be reasonable to suggest that the affinities of concern that emerge from the analyses in Death and Representation may provide some key directions—or points of departure—for my own inquiry. It is these salient observations which I therefore now take up, and which can be summarised as following: death is both threat to and instrument of power; death is gendered; death is inextricably tied to sex/uality; death is the constructed Other; and death is physical (Bronfen and Goodwin 15, 20).

Death is Both Threat to and Instrument of Power

The importance of death to any theory of representation is clearest, Bronfen and Goodwin contend, by recalling that the term representation “comes to current critical usage from essentially two sources: politics and psycho-analysis”, meanings which relate to each other chiefly through issues of power (4). Representations of death necessarily engage questions about power, they argue: “its locus, its authenticity, its sources, and how it is passed on” (5). To speak of power in a discursive sense—and particularly in relation to bodies—is unavoidably to speak of Foucault. Much of Foucault’s theory is instrumental in revealing how power is installed into discourse, how it operates in relation to other discourses, and how it produces real material effects (McHoul and Grace 19, 21). For Foucault, “death is at once the locus and the instrument of power: that is, an independent power inheres in death itself, but other forms of power rely on death to disclose and enforce themselves” (Bronfen and Goodwin 5). As Bronfen and Goodwin explain: “Death—not in the abstract, but people dying and the processes by which they die—may signify by turns a monarch’s sovereignty, a people’s own power, and the primacy of biology over culture”; Foucault essentially asks “Who has the power over these deaths? [ … ] What do these deaths signify, what do they represent? What power can I/we exercise over them?”(5).

The Foucauldian concept of “biopower” is helpful in expanding on these ideas about death and political representation. It begins with the view that populations have an economic value—that they are a resource which aids in the production of strength, wealth, and power for the state: “biological existence [is] reflected in political existence”, Foucault argues (History 142). In the chapter “Right of Death and Power over Life” in The History of Sexuality, Foucault historicises death and state power, arguing that in traditional modes of power, the privilege of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death; a right of seizure of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself. Since the classical age, however, these mechanisms of power have been transformed in the West, so that “this death that was based on the right of sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life” (History 136). Thus, “the ancient right to take life or let live is replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (History 138, emphases original). For Foucault, this is the function of the bodies of knowledge and the administrative apparatus (social/human sciences, and the “policing” institutions which are concerned with criminal activity, health, and welfare) that have formed during this process: to watch, regulate, discipline, and control populations—to aid in “the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (History 140).

Very simply, then, biopower is the term used for the “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (History 140). It is therefore not really death itself that is the issue for Foucault, but rather control over life because “it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it” (History 138). The mechanisms of power are “addressed to the body, to life”, says Foucault, and the way that individuals and populations come to understand themselves, their behaviours, values, and aspirations are all produced by, and subject to, the forces of the apparatuses and technologies of this power (History 147). A culture’s perception of what constitutes “healthy” and “normal”, for instance, is created discursively through these institutions (thus making notions of normality powerful ideological tools). For Jean Baudrillard, the ultimate example of that which is abnormal and unhealthy is death, because death is “an incurable deviancy [ … ] nothing else is as offensive as this” (126). Our social survival depends on prohibiting, manipulating, and legislating death, Baudrillard argues—to ward off death “in order to evade the unbearable moment when flesh becomes nothing but flesh, and ceases to be a sign” (180). Like Foucault, Baudrillard sees death as an instrument of power: Death helps to divide and circulate power in culture because power is established over those divisions where the dissolution of unity between life and death (or the disruption of exchange) occurs. This is why “every death and all violence that escapes the State monopoly is subversive”, he contends: It is “a prefiguration of the abolition of power” (hence the fascination wielded by “great” murderers, bandits, or outlaws) (175). Death, therefore, “ought never to be understood as the real event that effects a subject or a body”, Baudrillard argues, “but as a form in which the determinacy of the subject and of value is lost” (5, emphasis original).

Death is Gendered

Any analysis of a representation of death therefore needs to determine not only how this representation claims to portray death, say Bronfen and Goodwin, but also (however suppressed) what else the representation in fact represents: “assertion of alternative power, self-referential metaphor, aggression against individuals or groups, formation of group identities and ideologies, and so forth” (20). With their destabilising, enigmatic nature, representations of death are inexorably associated, for example, with those of the (similarly) multiply-coded feminine body. Death and femininity have been discursively constructed as “the point of impossibility” within Western culture, Bronfen and Goodwin argue, because both are viewed as radically other to the norm (14). As Bronfen explains, Woman is “a symptom of death’s presence, precisely because she is the site where the repressed anxiety about death re-emerges in a displaced, disfigured form”; over representations of the dead feminine body, “culture can repress and articulate its unconscious knowledge of death which it fails to foreclose even as it cannot express it directly” (Over xi, 215). Efrat Tseëlon makes a similar argument when she writes that Woman “serves the dual function of signifying a fear and the defence against [death] at the same time” (101). Drawing on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Tseëlon argues that Woman and death share many characteristics. In the same way that the sight of the female body triggers male anxiety of castration, she contends, the sight of the dead body triggers anxiety of mortality. Thus, in the patriarchal cultural imagination, both are mysterious, ambiguous, unrepresentable, silent, and a threat to stability; both are the eternal Other; and both are a metaphor of disruption and transgression (113). As suggested by the conjunction between death, femininity, and aesthetisation, both have also become aligned with beauty in the West (Bronfen, Over; Tseëlon). Indeed, it is this association which doubly inscribes Woman as death, Tseëlon argues—she is a signifier for death (lack, castration), and her beauty is a veil for death (the illusion of wholeness):

The aesthetisation of death and the beautification of the living are defensive strategies. They are designed to protect the person from realisation of some lack by creating an illusion of wholeness and immortality. Death is the lack or cut in the physical and the social body, while castration is a lack that creates the awareness of sexual difference. (117)

So how, then, does Western culture characterise or define the relationship between death and masculinity? According to Bronfen, it is the age-old discursive association between Woman and death that allows masculinity to be constructed as that which lacks death: “Woman is symptom for the hope of masculine wholeness and because her relation to death is seen as a relation to Otherness, she enacts precisely the fact that this relation is missing from the masculine” (Over 218). Death in war has also helped to define manhood as so many cultural commentators have pointed out. Stories about sacrifice, heroism, and the noble, manly endeavours of soldiers have been prominent ones in Western cultures, although, even here, the vulnerability and corporeality of the body can be ignored by placing “life” on the side of the masculine. As Leigh Astbury argues, war memorials (which “act as surrogate grave sites for the bodies of the dead”) can work to reconstruct “the unblemished beauty of the intact male body” by depicting the warrior as youthful, powerful, and graceful (72). War is constructed in this way as the “enemy of life”, a term that is also frequently applied to those models of masculinity which threaten the hegemonic ideal represented by the warrior. The homosexual male is consistently associated with pathology and death, for instance—a link, Jonathan Dollimore contends, that is often imagined to include both suicidal and murderous impulses in which homosexuals court death, contract the AIDS virus, and then knowing of their impending death, willingly infect others through sexual contact (x)....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Beginning with Endings: Death in Children’s Literature
• 1 Points of Departure: Death, Culture, Representation
• 2 Matilda’s Last Dance: Death and Historical Fiction
• 3 Verisimilitude: Representing Death “In the Real”
• 4 Beyond Consensus Reality: Death and Fantasy Fiction
• 5 Imagined Futures: Death and the Post-Disaster Novel
• Conclusion: Mapping the Landscape: The Unknown Country
• Notes
• Bibliography