Discussions: 'Literature shows us that people are always performing'
Hi all!
This is the first in my series of discussions, as promised.
This week's discussion prompt is as follows:
Literature shows us that people are always performing.
I've designed this discussion series to ensure that you get great revision that doesn't feel like revision. Just comment your thoughts! The more you engage with these discussions, the better your essay writing will get!
But remember: I'm not expecting you to write an essay! Just share your thoughts!
Prompts
If you're interested in joining in, here are some things you might want to consider. They'll help you write a more A*-worthy answer:
- Which texts are you writing about?
- What does it mean to be 'performing'?
- Are there any characters in your text that are performing?
- Are there any who are not?
- What are they performing for or about?
- Do you think the statement is suggesting that all people perform or that there's something wrong or inhuman about people who don't perform?
You might have your own questions, so don't feel bogged down by mine. Either way, comment as many times as you like! I'll be there to watch and add input where we need it.
If you want more information about how these discussion posts work, have a look at my post about the new series!
Because Mohammed A. Hafsa H. and Grace I. all said they study Rossetti, why don't I start with her! Feel free to agree or disagree with me. There's no such thing as one single reading of a text, and the more we discuss, the more we can all improve!
My answer
I think that Rossetti does show us that people, in particular women, are always performing in society! It's especially the case if we consider 'performing' to mean when the way you act with other people doesn't match the way you feel inside. In fact, I think that Rossetti is encouraging women to perform things that don't align with their true natures. When it comes to men, though, it's quite different. They're performing too but they do it to get things from women (usually intimacy).
Why do I think that? Well, often in her poetry she portrays women who chafe against societal expectations of them, showing that in their hearts, they don't really match the way society wants them to be. Sounds pretty feminist, right? Except that she also seems to suggest that people should stay like that by presenting how much better off women are when they do adhere to society's expectations, especially around sexuality.
Here are some examples;
- In 'Goblin Market', Lizzie and Laura know that they 'must not' eat the fruit of the 'goblin men' from the very beginning because they have been told horror stories like the one about Jeanie. When Laura goes against this advice, she gets punished for it both narratively and also in the language! The way Rossetti describes her wasting away and also not appreciating the small joys of life.
- In 'Maude Clare', the titular character is portrayed more favourably by Rossetti, who describes her as a 'queen', but she still ultimately ends up in a miserable position and Nell literally gets the last word, like she's won (even though to me it seems pretty tragic that she's so willing to settle for a man who clearly doesn't love her). She still ends up being cast aside by her ex for this new woman who has a better reputation.
- 'Soeur Louise de la Misericorde' and 'Twice' both describe women who break out of societal norms as tainted. The speaker in 'Twice' calls herself 'marred' like she has been damaged by going outside of societal expectations of women.
- The fact that 'Cast Out' can be read in so many different ways adds to this idea, I think. You can read it as if the person has sinned, but also as if they have done something that society doesn't like and damaged their reputation. The conflation of those two things reinforces the idea that people who don't 'perform' end up punished. The shunning by the 'shadowless' person suggests that there is no place in the beautiful 'garden' for people who don't perform as expected.
It seems to me like Rossetti is obsessed with presenting women who have a conflict between their nature and the way society wants them to be and therefore are expected to perform. When you think about her obsession with the idea of her speakers and characters achieving redemption by moving away from the way they used to act before (thinking about poems like 'Twice', 'Goblin Market' and 'Good Friday'), it seems to me she's suggesting that they should perform how society wants them to, even if their natures don't align with that.
I mean, in 'Good Friday', the speaker is really self-deprecating because she feels unable to mourn Jesus's death in the 'correct way'. She can't outwardly perform grief and therefore she questions if she's 'a stone' and asks God to 'smite' her so that she can perform how she is expected to.
With men, on the other hand, their performances tend to be not to become more godly, but to get something they want out of women. The goblins in 'Goblin Market' (i.e. the masculine presence in the poem) do great elaborate shows of 'cooing' and 'purr[ing]' at Laura to get her to eat their fruit. John in 'No, Thank You, John' has big outbursts of emotion that are completely contrasted with the speakers. We could argue his outbursts are performances. And they ultimately end up taking what they want from the women they perform for and then leaving them heartbroken in 'Twice', 'Goblin Market' and 'Maude Clare'.
What is performing?
Being something we are not -> to what effect
- To please
- To hide
Are we always performing? are there ever times when we are not performing
- No we are not always performing, we are taught by society the roles we are meant to perform -> a learnt condition based on social context as opposed to an innate state of being. Therefore one state in which we do not perform is when we are isolated/alone as who is there to uphold these expected actions (i guess)
What roles are people performing in society
- Gender -> ultising Judith Butler's modern notion of gender performitivy, it shows that we are performing what society defines as a woman/man based on the conventions taught to us.
- Class -> what does it even to be of a higher class? good aesthetics, birthright, potential Marxisty ideas in there somewhere
Oop, didnt see the prompts, but they do really help!
In A Doll's House "performitivy" is quite interesting because the word "performance" suggests there is a state where one is not performing. Now i may slightly contest my earlier statement, this may not make sense at all.
Everyone in A Doll's House is meant to perform a role - literally in the context of it being a play where characters are performed by actors and in the sense of the characters "performing" gender, middle class respectibility and anything else im missing. In the case of Nora, her subjucted performance in front of Torvald initially appears quite purposeful. Until the admission that Nora "simply took over [Torvald's] taste in everything or pretended [she] did-I don't really know". This insinuates that there is not as much of a disinction between "performance" and "reality" - true of the text and true for women in the real world. If our worldview is so deeply shaped by these social constructs we exist in, not just exist in but act and perform daily, how do we know when the performance ends and we begin? Nora's journey to find herself ends with the emphatic "door slam" at the end of ADH, her performance withing the context of the play in the Helmer house ends, her performance to us the viewer also ends. How realistic is this? Are women simply able "door slam" it and leave these patriarchal confines? Is it idealistic - maybe Ibsen is too reliant on his humanist perspective and disregard of feminist theory (speech to Norwegian Woman's Right's League 1898 - "my task has been the desciption of humanity") that he fails to recognise the broader systems woman live in and that everyday woman dont get a closed curtain and appaluse when they decide to contest what is societally expected.
Zara This made me smile because you've clearly embraced my method of pulling apart the question before you start! We need more students like you in the community!
It would be nice to expand on Judith Butler's gender performativity theory a bit more! I think it's important to highlight that, according to Butler, gender is made by how we perform! So it's not even just that we're performing scripts of how men and women 'should' act, but rather that you can't divorce gender from performance. Gender is performance. We build our gender through our choices (in language, dress, activities, etc) and therefore we always perform to align with our ideal gender. It's not performance in the sense of falsity or a disconnect between appearance and reality, but more that gender can't exist unless we present it, display it in some way!
So according to Butler's theory, gender (and I would even argue some other identity-based things) aren't really innate in us because gender is a social construct and so can only be understood socially. Gender doesn't become real until we make it real!
So I guess you could separate performance here into two different things:
- An outer, exterior self we put on to conceal our inner feelings. Synonymous with duality or duplicity. This ties quite nicely into the Victorian context. The Victorian era is known as a period of extreme duplicity/duality – hence why it's such a big topic in the Victorian Gothic! People were so 'proper' in their public lives and that would be completely undermined in their private lives. Think how people thought Jack the Ripper had to be an upperclass man. For me, that's so interesting, becase it suggests that there is a class layer to the idea of duplicity – that people were expecting upper-class people to be duplicitous! You can definitely tie that to Marxist theory. Then there's the fact that William Gladstone, a Victorian Prime Minister, was discovered in the Red Light District in London and claimed he was 'rescue work' (we don't know how true that was. You can also tie it back to Nietzsche and the idea that subscription to the social sphere necessitates the repression of free will!
- How we act for the benefit of other people and how other people see us. This doesn't have to be falsity, but more it's deliberate action with the knowledge someone is watching (fits into Judith Butler's theory)
You could then tie this really nicely to Freud's Id, Ego and Superego. Where do they fit in this? Are people really being duplicitous? Or are they just navigating the conflict between their Id and their Superego? Does that mean the Ego is performance?
How does Torvald fit into this? Would you say there's a public face vs a private face with him? And does that suggest duplicity or a separation between his Id and his Superego? What about gender? He clearly (at least, in my opinion) leans into the performativity of gender, to the point where his masculinity seems defined by his actions towards his wife, and the covering up of anything that doesn't align!
And I guess my next question would be, can we perform for ourselves? What does that look like? Does anyone do it?
The closest we get to see Nora not performing is when she is alone, which is not often, but even then you can see that she is preoccupied with thoughts of keeping up her facade/performance!
"Nora (pale with fear). Corrupt my little children! Poison my home! (short pause: she throws back her head) It isn't true! It couldn't be true!"
"Nora (stands for a moment as though collecting herself) [...] Thirty-one hours to live."
She is never truly free to think about her own hopes/dreams etc. Nora is always performing. Maybe theres a point somewhere about us being the audience but I dont know
i thought id answer in regards to pl and tdom! i guess "performance" implies a pretence, especially in terms of trying to appease/entertain people who are "outside" this sort of knowledge. in terms of "always performing" i would take that to be the lack of a sort of "private sphere" for characters to retreat into
satan and the cardinal are clear examples of performance. the cardinal's secret corruption clearly juxtaposes his role within the institution of the catholic church. even in act 5 i dont remember the quote but i thhink he asks an ironic theological question about the afterlife, something he should know as a cardinal, demonstrating that his virtuousness is a pretence. for satan, god the father as an omniscient being is a character and so he is constantly being surveilled. i would think satan is on an impossible mission in order to spite god/try to "save face" in front of the angels who were punished after their failed rebellion.
i also wonder if there was an angle in which characters are literally forced to perform? i.e the transformation of satan into a snake and ferdinand's lycanthropy. i was thinking of critic empson who said that god was playing "cat and mouse" with satan, in a sense forcing him to be an actor in his grander narrative to allow for the fall to occur (the idea of felix culpa as part of god's bigger plan). meanwhile i feel as if ferdinand now performs the "cliche" audiences expect of a corrupt character facing retribution, leading to a sense of catharsis.
eve i feel like is less of a "performer" - she is persuaded by satan into eating the forbidden fruit to become godly, which feels motivated by self-interest. her idea of suicide to adam also is an idea that is against god, and seems more of a "private rebellion" situation akin to yet, she might be performing for herself to "uphold" the refined image she has for herself given her narcissistic tendencies she displayed in earlier books, and even the ultmately catastrophic decision of leaving adam to divide their labours to seem autonomous.
bosola is someone who is acutely aware and feels slighted about the corrupt patronage system in italy, and believes in order to succeed he must engage in these underhanded ways. its still perhaps ironic in a way because he ultimately ends up still performing the role of this sort of brutish "lower class" murderer despite his sense of anagnorisis in the end.
im not sure about adam. i feel like his weak "uxurious" passion in the beginning is his sort of true, milder nature, unfit to be this patriarchal ruler of women. even after god punishes them for eating from the forbidden tree, he sort of goes on this misogynistic demeaning rant to eve, which i would say is a sort of performance, but one that he cant maintain as he eventually stops.
3am thoughts so not that developed 😶😶😶
YB Z. Your points are so great! I love your idea of the pressure to perform and I'd love to see if we can expand it even more using AO5! In an essay, I'd encourage you to build this into another paragraph after this initial one where we hinge it on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and the idea of gender perfomativity. To what extent are people performing their gender in these texts? To what extend does the Duchess have to perform gender? And how is that different from the Cardinal's performance when he talks about how Julia will never make him a cuckold?
I would go as far as to say that in TDOM, there's a pressure placed on women by men to perform certain versions of femininity in order to not only conform with societal expectations, but to bolster those men's own sense of masculinity. The Cardinal expects Julia to act in a certain way to reinforce his masculinity. Ferdinand expects the Duchess to perform a certain script of masculinity to exert his power and control over her, and to enrich himself, so that he can inherit the masculine benefits of her body politic. Bosola completely violates that old lady by accusing her (and women in general) of performing gender in the 'wrong' way.
You could really nicely tie this to PL, too. To what extent is Adam's masculinity performed as we would expect masculinity to be? And to what extent would an 18th-century reader ascribe failure to his perceived lack of masculinity? To what extent does his failure to perform the cultural scripts expected of a man precipitate their downfalls? To what extent is Eve's performance of gender the cause of their downfalls? etc!
On Butler's ideas that gender is inextricable from performance (though I'm not sure I fully understand it), I wonder if the Duchess chooses not to perform gender as deeply? In regards to her recognition that it is a bit weird for her to be wooing Antonio instead of the other way round, and she's quite assertive of her own agency in a way that appears more in line with masculinity. Perhaps she often does this in the private sphere, and with her brothers she appears to be slightly more subservient? The Cardinal is clearer to me as an example, especially when he aggressively demeans Julia, acting quite stoical to the point of emotional cruelty when she is crying.
i remember in my class we were talking about how adam was almost comically subservient to his wife, making the flower crown thing even after eve disobeyed him and went alone. perhaps the inversion of the relationship dynamics have already foreboded the disaster of the fall? i think for eve though she is motivated by the vain aspects of beauty more associated at the time with femininity, desiring to have "spectators" according to cs lewis, and its this arrogance and desire to have a wider space to perform her femininity that leads to the fall
tbh i havent really considered like theories from thinkers like that, and i usually use individual critics and film adaptations. i think it would be good to develop an understanding of them before the exam esp if i forget a critics name like i often do!