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beccaelizabethI have read 23/31 of this tedious rubbish and it is now talking about castration fantasies, where teenage males dreams of sex involve sticking it in and breaking it off so it stays there. and this somehow has to do with an umbrella and a woman's moustache. and how reading someone's diary is in fact exactly like rape.
At this point, if I could erase one person from the timeline, I think it would be Freud. The influence on lit crit is pure poison.
they're not even talking about symbols that exist in the text, they're talking about how there isn't any symbol therefore all this made up gubbins must be true.
I'm embarrassed by my topic area, really I am.
English Lit would make a hell of a lot more sense if it had anything to do with actual psychology and the way real minds work instead of getting hung up on this one admittedly influential text to the point they apply it to people who hadn't read the damn thing and wouldn't have been much impressed if they had. There's this entire edifice of criticism based on the idea it's all about cock. Especially when there isn't one.
Also, and this is quite important, no amount of gender confusion is equivalent to homosexuality. No matter how many feminine traits a male character is given they will never add up to homosexuality. Nor is a masculine woman exhibiting lesbianism. Because desire for a particular gender is quite a different thing from identifying with a particular gender. 1986 ought to know better. And if it doesn't we shouldn't have to read 1986. (It is entirely possible the Victorian era didn't know better and meant to imply things, but further evidence for that must be found in the text, or else all you have is a weak man and an ugly woman.)
Additionally, being surprised, even from behind, is not homosexual rape, especially when it's an actual woman doing the surprising. Even when it's a man doing the surprising, if the 'behind' in question is a purely metaphorical implication of the surprise, since you didn't see it coming, then you're not doing literary criticism, you're doing stoned teenage word association. ... which I will grant has a lot of features in common, but we really try to conceal that before publishing anything. And if you are using the exact same incident of a man reading a woman's diary to 'prove' both that it secretly means heterosexual rape of the female character and that it secretly means homosexual rape of the male reader then your logic has no logic in it. The man read and wrote in someone elses diary, which we readers are now reading. While a violation of trust may well be involved in the character's case, we the readers have been shown the diary as part of a testimony meant to mimic a legal case with us as the jury, so we are not only permitted, we've got a whole institutional framework of permission going on. It's on the first page. It hasn't been mentioned in these 23 pages because it makes rather a lot of them wrong wrongity wrong wrong wrong. And, and this can't be stressed enough, reading is not in fact rape. Only rape is rape. There is no rape here. Seeing invisible rapes is just peculiar and disturbing.
... It devotes half of page 22 to the question, paraphrased, 'why rape an ugly woman'. Since it invented the rape in the first place this is a doubly sick question. The real question is 'why exert power over a woman who attempted to have power but is currently rendered powerless'. Which is pretty much its own answer. Trying to make it a question of sexual attraction or Freudian proof-of-cock-ownership is entirely redundant. The man does it because he can, and that's the whole of that. Him writing in her diary is horrifying because we know she kept all her secrets there and would never willingly let him know them, and he not only knows them now, he thinks her so powerless he can tell her he knows and it won't make any useful difference. It's proof she's totally helpless and trapped.
Then on page 23 it says something that makes sense again. It's talking about how she's not a lesbian. In a paragraph full of quotes about how Marian and Laura love each other and want to keep each other forever and not let each other marry men. It doesn't say it's about them being sisters and the tension between family of origin and family made through marriage, though there's a ton to say about that, about how loyalties are meant to shift with marriage. It does say that calling it lesbianism would hide that all this is "a woman's unwillingness to lend her full cooperation to male appropriations of her". Marian is trying to avoid being messed up by men and save Laura when she's messed up and stuck in an asylum. There doesn't have to be any sex in it, power inequalities are quite sufficient explanation.
Except then in the next paragraph it goes on to talk about Goldfinger and Pussy Galore and what the everloving heck has that got to do with Wilkie Collins?
Oh sod this, I'm going to go buy lunch.
ETA: I read the rest of it. It descends into utter babble, and ends by talking about the author's rib injury. Which they feel has something to do with all that Freudian garbage they've just been spouting.
Can I have those hours back?
At this point, if I could erase one person from the timeline, I think it would be Freud. The influence on lit crit is pure poison.
they're not even talking about symbols that exist in the text, they're talking about how there isn't any symbol therefore all this made up gubbins must be true.
I'm embarrassed by my topic area, really I am.
English Lit would make a hell of a lot more sense if it had anything to do with actual psychology and the way real minds work instead of getting hung up on this one admittedly influential text to the point they apply it to people who hadn't read the damn thing and wouldn't have been much impressed if they had. There's this entire edifice of criticism based on the idea it's all about cock. Especially when there isn't one.
Also, and this is quite important, no amount of gender confusion is equivalent to homosexuality. No matter how many feminine traits a male character is given they will never add up to homosexuality. Nor is a masculine woman exhibiting lesbianism. Because desire for a particular gender is quite a different thing from identifying with a particular gender. 1986 ought to know better. And if it doesn't we shouldn't have to read 1986. (It is entirely possible the Victorian era didn't know better and meant to imply things, but further evidence for that must be found in the text, or else all you have is a weak man and an ugly woman.)
Additionally, being surprised, even from behind, is not homosexual rape, especially when it's an actual woman doing the surprising. Even when it's a man doing the surprising, if the 'behind' in question is a purely metaphorical implication of the surprise, since you didn't see it coming, then you're not doing literary criticism, you're doing stoned teenage word association. ... which I will grant has a lot of features in common, but we really try to conceal that before publishing anything. And if you are using the exact same incident of a man reading a woman's diary to 'prove' both that it secretly means heterosexual rape of the female character and that it secretly means homosexual rape of the male reader then your logic has no logic in it. The man read and wrote in someone elses diary, which we readers are now reading. While a violation of trust may well be involved in the character's case, we the readers have been shown the diary as part of a testimony meant to mimic a legal case with us as the jury, so we are not only permitted, we've got a whole institutional framework of permission going on. It's on the first page. It hasn't been mentioned in these 23 pages because it makes rather a lot of them wrong wrongity wrong wrong wrong. And, and this can't be stressed enough, reading is not in fact rape. Only rape is rape. There is no rape here. Seeing invisible rapes is just peculiar and disturbing.
... It devotes half of page 22 to the question, paraphrased, 'why rape an ugly woman'. Since it invented the rape in the first place this is a doubly sick question. The real question is 'why exert power over a woman who attempted to have power but is currently rendered powerless'. Which is pretty much its own answer. Trying to make it a question of sexual attraction or Freudian proof-of-cock-ownership is entirely redundant. The man does it because he can, and that's the whole of that. Him writing in her diary is horrifying because we know she kept all her secrets there and would never willingly let him know them, and he not only knows them now, he thinks her so powerless he can tell her he knows and it won't make any useful difference. It's proof she's totally helpless and trapped.
Then on page 23 it says something that makes sense again. It's talking about how she's not a lesbian. In a paragraph full of quotes about how Marian and Laura love each other and want to keep each other forever and not let each other marry men. It doesn't say it's about them being sisters and the tension between family of origin and family made through marriage, though there's a ton to say about that, about how loyalties are meant to shift with marriage. It does say that calling it lesbianism would hide that all this is "a woman's unwillingness to lend her full cooperation to male appropriations of her". Marian is trying to avoid being messed up by men and save Laura when she's messed up and stuck in an asylum. There doesn't have to be any sex in it, power inequalities are quite sufficient explanation.
Except then in the next paragraph it goes on to talk about Goldfinger and Pussy Galore and what the everloving heck has that got to do with Wilkie Collins?
Oh sod this, I'm going to go buy lunch.
ETA: I read the rest of it. It descends into utter babble, and ends by talking about the author's rib injury. Which they feel has something to do with all that Freudian garbage they've just been spouting.
Can I have those hours back?