Foe Lecture Notes PDF - Gender, Sex and Storytelling

Section 1: ​ Feminist Re-Vision ○​ “Let me tell you my story,” said I; “for I am sure you are wondering who I am and how I came to be here. My name is Susan Barton, and I am a woman alone.” ○​ Tell new stories previously invisible or silenced ○​ How...

Section 1: ​ Feminist Re-Vision ○​ “Let me tell you my story,” said I; “for I am sure you are wondering who I am and how I came to be here. My name is Susan Barton, and I am a woman alone.” ○​ Tell new stories previously invisible or silenced ○​ How can starting with gender and sexuality open up new things in a story? ○​ Re-vision, Re-presents, Representation: not natural, not neutral, not effortless, has to be fought for, involves versions, choices ○​ Absence is a part of representation ○​ Informed by reality and pushes back on reality ○​ The novel Robinson Crusoe begins with lineage, naming, and national heritage. What is missing? ○​ Cruso’s narratives are closed systems ​ “He had come to be persuaded he knew all there was to know about the world.” ○​ Susan believes Cruso’s narratives are unreliable ​ “So in the end I did not know what was truth, what was lies, and what was mere rambling.” ○​ Susan believes Cruso is unable to represent himself accurately ○​ “Re-vision” is re-writing, making better, more accurate, revise ideas ○​ At the core of representation ○​ Looking back and not accepting as fact/only version ○​ Giving voice (to silence) ○​ Making visible (to invisible) ○​ Challenging depictions (that lack women or of women) ○​ Susan need individuality, posterity, specificity, needs to self-represent, because women historically lack this ○​ What does it mean to find a woman where there wasn’t one, or a woman who doesn’t fit representative models? ○​ She’s a problem, problematic character, tricky and confusing, problems of representation (more toward end of the novel) ​ Language ○​ “I might have lived most happily on the island. But who, accustomed to the fullness of human speech, can be content with caws and chirps and screeches.” ○​ Susan wants language, Cruso doesn’t ○​ “You special as if language were one the banes of life” ○​ Susan believes that through language you can arrive at truth, and can have memory and posterity ○​ Susan wants to record their experience on paper or in stone, Cruso builds terraces in silence for future travelers to inhabit/expand island (manifest destiny)  ○​ But language is not universal, not ebay to communicate, differences ins peaking and/as seeing ​ Many different interpretations reflect different psychologies “It was as though he wished his story to begin with his arrival on the island, and mine to begin with my arrival, and the story of us together to end on the island too.” ​ Themes of wind, sound, and silence ○​ Cruso only teaches Friday as few words as necessary to interact ○​ Cruso claim that Friday’s tongue is cut out and cannot achieve speech ○​ Susan disbelieves his story.description behind Friday ○​ It is possible that Friday still has his tongue ○​ Without language, Susan is uncomfortable around Friday, treats him a less than human ○​ But she eventually plugs her ears (from the wind) and “became deaf as Friday was mute.” ​ Gender Roles ○​ “While you live under my roof you will do as I instructed!” ○​ Gender power dynamics in Susan and Cruso’s interactions, with allusions to domesticity, marriage roles, intercourse, and “desire” ○​ “King” of island, his hut his “cast;e” ○​ Susan subordinates herself ​ Apologizes for several things (shoes, arguing) ​ Undercuts herself, claims it’s Cruso’s strength that get him through illness not her round-the-clock nursing ​ Stays in the hut at first, domestic realm “Nevertheless, I prudently obeyed, and stayed at home, and rested ​ Mock Marriage “There were many retorts I might have made; but, remembering my vow, I held my tongue.” ○​ “After years of unquestioned and solitary mastery, he sees his realm invaded and has tasks set upon him by a woman. I made a vow to keep a tighter rein on my tongue.” ​ Sex and Storytelling ○​ “I do not wish to hear of your desire,” said Cruso. ○​ Acquiesces to Cruso’s advances when he is ill on island; pity sex, coercion, rape accepts gender stereotypes of male needs ​ “No doubt I might have freed myself, forI was stronger than he. But I thought, he has not known a woman for fifteen years, why should he not have his desire.” ​ Philosophy of chance, of quick changes, of new voices, of being open to these voices  ○​ Conflates sex and storytelling when they are on rescue ship ○​ Offers possible stories/futures to titillate him ○​ Offers her body to titillate him ○​ Erotics of narrative, “This is our coupling: this swimming, this clambering, this whispering.” Section 2 ​ Susan’s Story ○​ “If I cannot come forward, as an author, and swear to the truth of my tale, what will bet the worth of it?” ○​ Claims she is not an artists, has no “art” ○​ Insists on authoring her story ○​ Insists on her story telling truth, not lies ○​ Themes of fact, fiction, and lies ○​ “Their trade is in books, not in truth” ○​ Will have a man give it rights to be published, asks For to give art to her letter recitation ○​ But Susan speaks artistically in her imaginings, in the very imaginings where she describes that she has no art ​ The Body of the Story ○​ “Return to me the substance I have lost, Mr. Foe: that is my entreaty/ For though my story gives the truth, it does not give the substance of the truth.” ○​ Lacks “existence” and “substance,” describes herself as a “ghost” ○​ Parallels having no existing story about herself, must write herself, invent herself ○​ Allusion to having no body ○​ “Truth” related to the body ○​ Body part of authorship ​ “How I wish it were in my power to help, Mr. Foe! Closing my eyes, I gather my strength and send out a vision of the island to hang before you like a substantial body, with birds and fleas and fish of all hue and lizards basking in the sun, flicking out their black tongues, and rock covered in barnacles, and rain drumming on the rooffronds, and wind, unceasing wind; so that it will there for you to draw on whenever you need it.” ​ What is a “substantial body?” The human body? The ‘body’ of a narrative? Susan feels insubstantial without Foe’s contribution, yet she offers a substantial narrative vision. What other creative forms offer substantial/substantive bodies? ○​ One way the body is made substantial is through childbirth ○​ Male authors/Cruso have many strengths, but”invention” is not one, allusion to birth/procreation ​ Human Connection Versus Human Unintelligibility ○​ “I tell myself I talk to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will.” ○​ Friday’s Music and Dance Scene ​ Is Sunsan’s wish to ‘educate’ Friday benevolent (for him to benefit from language and expression), selfish (for him to converse with her in her loneliness), oppressive (for her to dictate to him/power over him), or desperate (as the only medium through which she perceives “truth”)? ​ Susan Barton ○​ “And who is this child he sends us, this mad child? Does he send her as a sign? What is she a sign of?” ○​ Daughter/Doppelganger enters as writing accelerates ○​ Susan denies “girl” Susan is her daughter ○​ Susan writes and watches a girl from the window; Is she a stimulus or hindrance to artistry? ○​ Parallel names/identities ○​ Actual daughters share their mothers’s identity through their DNA; have literally shared a body ○​ Daughter searching for mother is the “unwritten story” ○​ Disowns daughter to Cruso, redirects parentage to him not her, abandons girls in forest, declares she is “father-born,” allusion to Shakespeare ​ “She is more your daughter than she ever was mine.” ○​ Disconnects creativity and procreativity ○​ Writes herself instead ​