“No Name Woman” begins the Woman Warrior with dread. Brave Orchid tells her daughter the tale as a warning of the dangers of female sexuality. Girls must be chaste and plain. Yet even if they are appropriately docile, their fate may be as awful as the nameless aunt’s. In one of her meditations on the hypothetical possibilities of the inexplicable story, the narrator muses that the unknown lover had “commanded” No Name Woman “to lie with him,” and she submitted because “she always did as she was told,” even though, as the narrator also muses, “he organized the raid against her.” 68
As if to emphasize the hopelessness of this aunt’s destiny, Kingston inserts a chilling reference to the ancient Chinese practice of foot-binding into the tale. As her mother told her, sisters “used to sit on their beds and cry together . . . as their mothers or their slaves removed the bandages for a few minutes each night and let the blood gush back into their veins.” 69 The bound feet of the women, sometimes considered symbolic of elegance and delicacy, actually ensured that girls from the age of 7 on would sit still to do their weaving. At the same time, the cultural practice signified the same hopelessness into which No Name Woman was born: a space of female oppression from which there could be no escape.
But while The Woman Warrior begins with a bleak morality tale, Kingston’s memoirs flow onward into a fantasy of escape. In the episode titled “White Tigers,” “Maxine” imagines herself ascending a magic mountain where she will be trained to become another Fa Mu Lan, a legendary Chinese sword fighter who takes her father’s place at the head of an army determined to overthrow corrupt regimes. Thus if “No Name Woman” introduces us to a retrograde dystopian China, “White Tigers” replaces that country with a utopian realm in which women wield swords, leap over houses, command armies, and revenge themselves on a world they never made.
Everything is almost Disney magical in “White Tigers”: a semidivine older couple who take the little girl in and train her to be brave and strong, a rabbit who benevolently immolates himself in a campfire when the child is starving on a cold mountainside, an enchanted water bowl in which she can see her parents far away in the valley below.70 As she grows stronger, she becomes a savior of the China that would otherwise have annihilated her. Her parents tattoo a text of revenge onto her bare back. She leads an army and is truly Fa Mu Lan, the warrior who takes her own father’s place as a commander in a patriarchal world.
But then—but then—she’s back in Stockton, where she breaks the dishes she’s been told to wash, delights in being called a “bad girl,” and declares that she’d like to grow up to become “a lumberjack in Oregon.” In her real Chinese life people say, “When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls,” and she has to “get out of hating range.” In fact, she concludes, the “swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. . . . What we have in common are the words at our backs. . . . The reporting is the vengeance— . . . the words. And I have so many words—‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too—that they do not fit on my skin.”71
In “Shaman,” the narrative traces Brave Orchid’s acquisition of a medical degree in China and her return to her native village, where she practices medicine and encounters more weird apparitions. Of all the sections, this one is most firmly situated in what can only be described as a haunting landscape of China, populated by odd birthings, grateful patients, a village madwoman, Japanese bombers, and the memories of two children who died early. Here Brave Orchid becomes a professional woman who makes her own way in the world.
By contrast, when she emigrates to the ghost world of America, she is consigned to endless days in the stereotypical Chinese laundry that the family operates, and to cooking meals that her “American” children find revolting.
My mother has cooked for us: raccoons, skunks, hawks, city pigeons, wild ducks, wild geese, black-skinned bantams, snakes, garden snails, turtles that crawled about the pantry floor and sometimes escaped under refrigerator or stove, catfish that swam in the bathtub. . . . She had one rule to keep us safe from toadstools and such: “If it tastes good, it’s bad for you. . . . If it tastes bad, it’s good for you.” We’d have to face four- and five-day-old leftovers until we ate it all.72
Brave Orchid cooks boldly for her children; her children find China impossible to swallow: indigestible.
Yet if China poses a conundrum for the children, America is a riddle that the parents are incapable of solving. When Brave Orchid’s younger sister Moon Orchid arrives in America thirty years after Brave Orchid has left China, the older sister assumes that the younger one will want to reunite with the husband who had much earlier emigrated and now lives in Los Angeles. But as “At the Western Palace” reveals, for all her canniness in talking-story and sautéing skunk, “Maxine’s” mother utterly misunderstands the situation, insisting on Chinese traditions in an American context while even forgetting some key Chinese realities.
Although Moon Orchid and her daughter point out that the husband has remarried and himself has three “American” children, Brave Orchid insists on driving the mother and daughter to L.A. so they can “claim” their rights. The trip is a disaster. Frail and shy, Moon Orchid refuses to confront the errant husband; and as for the husband, he smells “like an American” and has “black hair and no wrinkles,” reminding Brave Orchid that “in China families married young boys to older girls.”73 Accomplished and authoritative, he has become an Americanized brain surgeon, and this trauma ultimately drives Moon Orchid mad. Thus if “Shaman” showed Brave Orchid at her best in the heart of China, “In the Western Empire” reveals her vulnerability in America, the puzzle she cannot solve.
All this is learning material for “Maxine,” who progresses from terror at the constraints of Chinese femininity to a more nuanced understanding of her mother’s weaknesses. Because Brave Orchid never steps outside the narrow community of Chinese “villagers,” she sets herself up for defeat. In “Song for a Barbarian Reedpipe,” however, “Maxine” finally struggles with her own place in America. Here, as she is whipsawed between Chinese school (where everyone is noisy and free) and American school (where she covers blank pages with black ink and cannot speak), she finally expresses her rage at the American silencing of the Chinese girl, as she bullies a mute Chinese double. Her behavior is wicked, so she is punished by a long illness. Yet at the same time, she has won through to her own song—the song for a “barbarian reedpipe” that was sung centuries ago by a captive Chinese poetess, who probably told her how she could herself become another Chinese poetess, telling her own story among the barbarians of America. Or would she become an American poet, telling her own story against the alien backdrop of China? Reconciling the tensions between the fantastic homeland of the past and the confusing home of the present, she emerges triumphantly as both Chinese and American in a talk-story of the dialogue between two cultures.
THE DINNER PARTY
While Kingston was teaching high school in Hawaii and beginning to draft The Woman Warrior, we were team-teaching in Bloomington, Indiana, and then beginning to write The Madwoman in the Attic. At that time, the idea of gathering a constellation of women writers who had never been assembled before felt like putting on a celebratory dinner party.
But perhaps it was also a kind of wake, a space of mourning. For we celebrated the genius of nineteenth-century literary women, but at the same time saw the painful circumstances of their lives—Jane Austen hiding her manuscript under a blotter when guests came to call; Charlotte Brontë responding to Robert Southey’s dictum that “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be” by noting, “I have endeavored not only to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them”; Emily Dickinson taking a young friend up to her room and locking the door with the comment “Matty: here’s freedom.”74
The contradictions between the achievements of these literary women and the constraints that bound them were compelling. We knew we had to write a book and as soon
as we parted in the fall of 1974, we began to write—and to write like mad. Through the intervention of a friend, we got a contract with Yale University Press, but we were somewhat alarmed by the size of the manuscript we’d produced: nearly a thousand pages, which would turn the book into a fat 700-page volume.
At a Modern Language Association meeting, we plunked half the pages into one typewriter paper box, half into another, hoping that our wonderful editor, Ellen Graham, would think we were giving her two copies of the work. But she was too shrewd: “That’s the first half of the book and that’s the second, isn’t it?” she said in her lovely Southern accent. It was the shoebox of cards for the massive index that almost did us in; but then The Madwoman was quickly reviewed, and one of its first reviewers, the eminent scholar and mystery writer Carolyn Heilbrun, would become a beloved mentor. In 1979, the year the book came out, every day felt like a surprise party.
And then there was a celebratory artwork, called The Dinner Party, to top things off. The feminist artist Judy Chicago, who chose as her last name the name of the city where she grew up so she could discard the patriarchal names of father and husband, planned a massive installation to honor both the female domestic arts of needlework, pottery, and weaving and the female heroes of history. Festive banners honoring the goddess lined the entrance to the exhibit. Their solemn message was utopian:
And She Gathered All before Her
And She made for them A Sign to See
And lo They saw a Vision
From this day forth Like to like in All things
And then all that divided them merged
And then Everywhere was Eden Once again75
In the huge, dimly lit room of the installation, a large triangular table evoking the delta of Venus was loaded with hand-sewn runners, goblets, and beautifully painted plates representing thirty-nine female heroes whom Chicago had chosen to celebrate. These ranged from Boadicea to Virginia Woolf, from Hrosvitha to Emily Dickinson, from Elizabeth I to Georgia O’Keeffe. The colors and designs were sometimes fierce, sometimes subtly nuanced, reflecting Chicago’s response to the figures she was representing. And the basic structure was vaginal. Too vaginal! argued some of the installation’s stoniest critics. “Vaginas on plates,” Chicago summed up their attacks, encapsulating the review of Hilton Kramer, the art critic at the New York Times, who concluded by calling it “an outrageous libel on the female imagination.”76
Yet for the one of us (Sandra) who saw the exhibit when it first opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, there was something ceremonial about the banquet room. King Arthur’s round table had become a female triangle, and instead of knights in armor who would stab their food with knives, the guests would be the very women who might have been trophies for those knights. The installation space was hushed, as people moved around, quietly studying each place setting, the runners, the banners: a stage-set for a silent opera in which all the historical heroines who might have been sacrificed by Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, et al. were instead resurrected.
But yes, there was something problematic about reducing each woman to her sexual parts—labia, vulva, vagina—every woman except, that is, the one Black woman represented, Sojourner Truth, whose plate featured—instead of the central vulvar core—three faces. And wait: why depict Emily Dickinson as a vagina surrounded by delicate layers of pink lace? Nothing volcanic or Vesuvian about pink lace! On the contrary, something frivolous and fragile.
Reactions to the exhibit turned out to be predictive of conversations that would evolve as later feminists built on the work of the seventies, questioning its racial awareness as well as its emphasis on a fixed essence of womanhood. Why was Sojourner Truth the only African American included in The Dinner Party and why was she presented without a slit? And what about that slit at the center of all the other plates?
As to the first question, maybe Judy Chicago had refrained from using the slit on the Sojourner Truth plate because she couldn’t imagine a Black woman with a vagina, as Alice Walker among others speculated.77 Or, a more sympathetic viewer might argue perhaps it was because Judy Chicago believed that Black women historically had been reduced to nothing but their reproductive/sexual parts. As to the second question, Chicago had created a work that rhymed well with what many racially diverse feminists had been brooding on throughout the seventies and indeed back into the sixties and even the fifties.
Women had for centuries been defined by that slit, which enabled them to give birth—and to be raped—and to be silenced as trophies. Whatever each one had accomplished, she had done through a flowering around and about and above the slit. Perhaps the plates had been designed to show both the immanence, the materiality, of woman (the sexual/maternal slit) and her transcendent/spiritual accomplishments (the flowering around the slit). If the trendy French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan could define the penis/phallus as the “transcendental signifier,” couldn’t Judy Chicago counter that the vagina, too, is both immanent and transcendent?
Chicago wasn’t alone in claiming that each woman is in some way rooted in the X chromosome, even if her femininity is at the same time created by societal imperatives and constraints. The opening of The Dinner Party at the end of the seventies confronted us all with the dilemma that feminists had long been facing: vaginas (nature) on plates (culture)! Is that what women have been—and are? This is a point that a number of trans and nonbinary thinkers would set out to refute in the twenty-first century. But the groundwork for their rebuttal was established earlier by poststructuralist feminists who decried what they called “essentialism,” the idea that female anatomy determines women’s destiny.
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the category women started to implode within the women’s movement, while the movement itself came under increasingly virulent attacks from secular as well as religious conservatives. By the end of the seventies, feminism had become fully visible to its antagonists: and, as Shulamith Firestone had warned, “Power, however it has evolved, whatever its origins, will not be given up without a struggle.”78
SECTION IV
REVISIONS IN THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES
8
Identity Politics
FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE, the eighties began with grim news. The Republican Party elevated Ronald Reagan to the presidency, opposed abortion rights, and withdrew its support for the ERA, which failed to gain ratification. “It’s morning again in America,” proclaimed the Reagan reelection campaign in 1984, featuring images of white couples buying homes and shiny new cars in leafy landscapes. Were the eighties witnessing the dawn of a new age or, rather, a new/old age—the fifties reborn?
In what seemed to be a call for a return to the fifties, Betty Friedan argued in 1981 not only that the women’s movement was over but that it should be over: “In reaction against the feminine mystique, which defined women solely in terms of their relation to men as wives, mothers and homemakers, we insidiously fell into a feminist mystique, which denied that core of women’s personhood that is fulfilled through love, nurture, home.”1 And in 1982 a New York Times Magazine essay about “post-feminism” reported that quite a few younger women considered feminism “a dirty word.”2 This was the period when some of our undergraduates began telling us, “We’ve come a long way, professor! We’re shattering glass ceilings!,” or they floated the dispiriting declaration, “I’m not a feminist, but . . .”
Yet gains from seventies activism kept on mounting: the armed forces, NASA, and most men’s colleges had begun to welcome women. Between the years when Alice Walker and then Toni Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Geraldine Ferraro ran for the vice presidency and a Newsweek poll ascertained that 71 percent of women believed the women’s movement had improved their lives.3 TV shows such as Murphy Brown and The Golden Girls were popular, while Oprah started her media reign. Inside museums, the Guerrilla Girls protested the male monopoly on art; and inside Nora Ephron’s romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan simulated
orgasm at a deli table to the amusement of other customers and of moviegoing audiences. In the film Nine to Five, which generated a TV series and a Broadway musical, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton waged war against their sexist boss.
Certainly, feminism had taken hold in parts of the entertainment world and in the academy. Our students could tell us that they’d “come a long way” because they had taken, or been offered, a range of courses in the women’s studies programs that were proliferating on campuses. The activism of the seventies had largely disappeared from the streets, and now was cloistered in the ivory tower. The new culture of academic activism enlarged our conversations, but it was notably different from the public activism that preceded it, and that now became less a mission, more an object of study.
As social safety nets unraveled under Reagan, with his constant baiting of “welfare queens,” the feminization and racialization of poverty became more evident.4 A deadly virus afflicting the gay community led to panic that fomented prejudice against homosexuals. When complications from AIDS became the leading cause of death among men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four, sexual anxiety led to the scapegoating of gay men as well as feminists who supported gay liberation. Violent demonstrators tried to shut down women’s health-care clinics while right-wing publications fanned the flames of what were called “the culture wars.”
How should we characterize the evolution of the second wave in the mostly conservative eighties and nineties? Waves, after all, travel at different speeds and sometimes in sets. At the end of the twentieth century, two approaches reshaped feminist thinking: identity politics, which we discuss in this chapter, and poststructuralist theory, which we broach in the next. Under their influence, feminists questioned the word women, which became suspect for conflating people with divergent backgrounds and orientations.
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