A Worm in the Apple: French Critical Theory and the Metaphor of the Child in the Work of Atwood and Broner

Abstract

A Worm in the Apple: French Critical Theory and the Metaphor of the Child in the Work of Atwood and Broner Sally L. Kitch Wichita State University What is at stake is to move from a patriarchal society, of class and ofreligion . . . this process involves going through what is repressed in discourse, in reproductive and productive relationships. (Kristeva, "La femme" 141) Julia Kristeva's statement represents perhaps the most challenging aspect of recent French critical theory—the linking of discourse, with its feet in the camps of both communicative and literary language, to the key elements of a gendered culture, reproduction and production. In Kristeva's view, literature has cultural rather than simply Cultural implications, and the task of literary criticism becomes a political rather than simply an aesthetic act. Literary critics also become cultural critics as Kristeva and other French theorists of discourse reveal key relationships between the individual's acquisition and uses of language and the structures and relationships ofculture, including the structures and relationships that have produced patriarchy. This view of discourse identifies language as the crucible in which the individual meets the culture and through which he/she adapts to its mandates. As constructions in language, literary works participate in those cultural mandates and document the inevitable compromises of individuals to their culture. Because they are rooted in psychoanalytic theory, such theories of discourse also assert a connection between literature and the individual unconscious. Therefore, these theories also suggest ways in which literary works can disrupt fixed cultural relationships through their release of repressed and hidden language and imagery. Psychoanalytic theory describes an individual's entry into the Symbolic Order of Language and Law (of the Fathers)—the patriarchy—as coincidental with the oedipal crisis. At that stage, the child experiences the loss of the maternal body and the repression of desire for the mother and for imaginary unity with her and the world. The phallus symbolizes this loss and separation, as well as the Symbolic Order itself. Repressed pre-oedipal experience and affects—regarded 35 36Rocky Mountain Review as "feminine"—reside post-oedipally in the unconscious, dubbed by several theorists as the Imaginary. Such a theoretical underpinning has often been viewed as contradictory to the goals of American feminism, grounded as it is in "ethical discourse as prescription for action" (Jardine 43). Yet, in its French interpretation, psychoanalysis supports a fundamental insight ofthe American women's movement—"the personal is political." Seen from one perspective, both the American slogan and the French theories imply that individuals speak, act, and identify themselves from within culture, according to its power structures and world view rather than according to their own desires (which are often hidden from their conscious minds). Included in the conflation of personal and political, therefore, is the construction of gender: men and women speak and act as culturally gendered beings who have internalized externally imposed definitions and role expectations for their sex. Conversely, both feminism and psychoanalysis also suggest that all apparently personal acts of individuals must be understood as having public, political significance. Such common ground cannot, of course, eliminate the differences between French critical theories and American feminism, including the continuing controversy over the very term "feminist." There have been some recent signs ofmerger, however. Through exposure to AngloAmerican feminism, the French have acknowledged the need to connect their theories ofgender with the lives ofactual women (Jardine 42-47). By the same token, French theories have already heightened the awareness of American feminists that patriarchy runs deeper than the policies and actions of government and other public institutions. Because of French influence, American feminists have begun to recognize the importance of unconscious levels of sexism, embedded in the psychology of Western family structures and derived from ideologies of gender endemic to those and other Western structures. French theories have been particularly compelling in the field of feminist literary criticism through their concepts of language acquisition and use. In literature, as in the individual psyche, language signifies both the compromise of individual desire—via the Symbolic Order—and the expression ofthat desire—via the potential expression ofrepressed material stored in the Imaginary. Because ofthe structures of Western culture, the Imaginary has "feminine" overtones...