Essay: Embodiment and Womanhood: Sympathetic Resonance in Feminist Writing Techniques
Ever since I first started writing, I have been writing about women. One could come up with any number of possible explanations for this. That, at eight years old, surrounded by boys at home and longing for my English classroom full of girls, I was projecting. That it was sexuality, or feminism, that drove me to contextualise female bodies on the page. Women and embodiment are subjects which have always fascinated me, particularly in an academic sense: postmodern women seem to reject every literary theory I’d been taught in high school, and lived, embodied experiences seem to impact me more when it revolves around a woman. The final year of my university degree has involved a whole lot of reading, writing, and thinking about women’s bodies; this has particularly proven useful over the course of developing my novel for the final project in my Creative Writing class. Rosemarie Anderson posits that embodied writing is simply writing which “seeks to reveal the lived experience of the body by portraying in words the finely textured experience of the body and evoking sympathetic resonance in readers.” (Anderson, 2001). In this essay I will be discussing different facets of lived experiences in the context of womanhood, as well as the idea of sympathetic resonance in a more focussed sense through the lens of my own writing. I will analyse the influences which have assisted in developing the framework for my creative style and final project with a focus on womanhood and embodied writing.
Perhaps the most crucial element of embodied writing is whether it means something to the reader: whether there is sympathetic resonance. Rosemarie Anderson describes this resonance as the act of understanding, in a physical sense, the “finely textured experience of the body” (Anderson, 2001) portrayed in writing. This finely textured bodily experience can also be referred to as a “lived experience” (Anderson, 2001). Utilising the mechanics of language, the writer is able to depict a familiar bodily experience, causing a physical sensation of resonance within the reader. Anderson also compares this resonance to the act of “bow[ing] a string on a violin, [wherein] the same string on another violin across the room will begin to resonate as well.” (Anderson, 2001). The reverberation is portrayed as a musical experience, an unspoken yet instant reaction: “resonance is immediate and direct.” (Anderson, 2001). Often the greatest challenge for writers is achieving this immediacy of understanding. As one “read[s] accounts of the experiences of others - experiences both similar and dissimilar to [one’s] own… [one] often find[s themselves] in resonance or consonant to some of the narrative. It strikes a chord.” (Anderson, 2001). This is particularly interesting to me in the context of womanhood, women’s bodies, and women’s writing. There are several elements which may impact the ways in which a lived experience may differ, in terms of its communication via its mode of storytelling, as well as its interpretation.
One interesting bracket of the embodiment discussion is the influence of mind versus body when it comes to women on the page. This is particularly true of mentally ill women in literature, or the notion of the mental ‘body’ and the internal experience. As Harley posits in her review of Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory, “autobiography has traded on the humanist conviction that the mind and memory are the repository for the self.” (Harley, 2013). One can argue that both reading and writing are primarily mental exercises. The concept that the mind is the repository for the self is not a new one: certainly, it is the internal lived experience which often drives readers to sympathise and empathise with the women they read about. This post structuralist idea has been explored mainly by biography scholars, investigating the idea that “the individual is a discursive fabrication in a state of constant formation, rather than an abiding, fixed reality.” (Harley, 2013). Despite this, it cannot go ignored that the body, as well, is a relevant narrative tool. There are many social, political, and racial factors that influence how a body is read, and this is particularly true of women. Since these factors influence the many ways in which a physical body and its experiences are understood by the reader, one can argue that this physicality is constantly shifting, and that in itself is not a fixed or abiding reality. As women age, dress differently, and are perceived differently by the society in which they are viewed, the personhood which they project is indeed in a state of constant formation, just like the internal self. Both mind and body are a reservoir for the self in literature, and both are equally important to project a lived experience which the reader can interpret. Sally Davies suggests that “a body enervated by the duties that attend on being a woman affect one’s capacity to think” (Davies, 2019); the notion of a “mind set free from its body” (Davies, 2019) therefore is a uniquely non-feminist one. The internal female body, as well as the external one, is just as enervated by struggles unique to womanhood. It goes without saying that this should be reflected in embodied writing on women. Whilst writing my novel Crawling Room I have been focussed on exploring both the internal self of my protagonist as well as her external self, and how both can be read, experienced, and interpreted by the reader. My mentally ill protagonist, Jenny, possesses a body which represents her womanhood, her lesbianism, her trauma, and her self expression which is emphasised by the strong internal goings-on of her sense of self, a state which is in constant transformation throughout the course of the narrative’s trajectory. This is at the core of what is the mind versus body debate and an example of the ways in which the female body, both internal and external, can be read on the page.
There are several social factors which influence how a woman’s body is interpreted in literature. This was of course at the forefront of the development of my novel. Whilst the woman on the page may be ‘hidden’ in the sense that she is not a physical body filling up a screen to be viewed, the combination of her lived experiences and internal self (and the ways in which these descriptions invoke sympathetic resonance) essentialise the descriptive body into a kind of physical one for the reader to ‘view’ in their mind’s eye. This is particularly true when discussing the body as a social entity and the act of diversifying female bodies on the page. In Imagining the Other: Ethical Challenges of Researching and Writing Women's Embodied Lives, Feminism & Psychology, Carla Rice identifies the position of bodily privilege in researchers from a social and racial context, discerning how “issues of interpretation [may] intensify when researching and writing across physical differences distorted by colonial and other hegemonic histories and legacies.” (Rice, 2009). Indeed, this ‘Other’ is a common fate of the diversified female body in literature. Similar to how researchers may exert bodily privilege, the reader themselves may find that they have differing interpretations of fictional women's lived experiences if they do not reflect their own. For example, a white American man who has never gone hungry may sympathise with a Colombian woman’s story of poverty and motherhood, but his position of bodily privilege will influence how he empathises with and interprets her story. He ‘reads’ her body differently since it in turn is read by society in a way which is different to his own. This places importance on the idea of the integrity of the privileged author and the many ethical factors that arise from writing about diverse bodies, particularly minorities and socially persecuted female bodies. The body is certainly a social entity. Fat, queer, non-white, and disabled bodies are imperative to the discussion of privilege, both of the reader and the writer, and how these bodies’ lived experiences are translated and interpreted. Katie Conboy mentions “the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body.” (Conboy, 1997.) Representation is another factor relevant to the construction of the ‘Othered’ body in feminist literature. Braziel’s collection of essays Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression questions “discursive constructions of fatness while analysing the politics and power of corpulence and addressing the absence of fat people in media representations of the body.” (Baziel, 2001). If one particular body is often not utilised to depict or represent the body, the sudden appearance of it can be jarring for the reader. This is its own kind of ‘Othering’; the sudden appearance after a bout of absence is alarming, and may affect sympathetic resonance. There are already cultural meanings inscribed on this particular body. The sudden representation of it can therefore be a powerful literary tool in affecting the physical experience of reading and interpretation.
This ‘Othering’ of the female body is not one which is limited to race or fatness. In her manifesto Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg explores the uniquely lesbian, and uniquely butch, experience of inhabiting a body which is labelled ‘Other’ or queer in a social context; she remembers “what it was like to walk [past] a gauntlet of strangers who stare[d]: their eyes angry, confused, intrigued… they [were] outraged that [Feinberg] confuse[d] them… the only recognition [to be found] in their eyes [was] that [she was] “Other”... different… [she will] always be different. [She will] never be able to nestle [her] skin against the comfort of sameness.” (Feinberg, 1993). This is another example of meanings being inscribed on the body which affect its interpretation by others in a social context, and, as such, resonance with a reader may occur differently based on how the reader also interprets this body. This lesbian experience with isolation and with yearning for the “comfort of sameness” is a familiar one in queer women’s writing and was a major influence when constructing my protagonist in Crawling Room. Jenny is unapologetically fat, and gay, which is in no way consctructed for the comfort of the reader. I understood at the beginning of workshopping the piece that whether or not her character would be deemed ‘likeable’ would depend on sympathetic resonance; she is, in a way, an unpalatable character who does unlikeable things, who in this sense resonates most with those familiar with the ‘Othering’ of their own bodies. The act of constructing nuanced characters is also often further complicated by these external meanings inscribed on ‘social bodies’ within writing. These cultural meanings affect the ways in which the body and its lived experiences are interpreted, and are at the root of embodied writing. Tatjana Milosavljević’s essay The Body Does Matter analyses women as embodied social subjects from the context of Angela Carter’s writing. Milosavljević analyses “women’s embodied potentialities of agency [as well as their] construction of subjectivity through body” (Milosavljević, 2017) as an aspect of modern feminist writing, as feminism has “equipped us with critical tools for interpreting the reality of being in the world in a gendered body.” (Milosavljević, 2017). These social meanings inscribed on the female body affect agency, subjectivity, and the interpretation of physicality. Women already live in ‘Othered’ bodies; the discourses that play out in “women’s daily lives” as well as the “manifold institutional and private oppressions of women’s bodies” can be read and interpreted with feminism as a “conceptual apparatus” (Milosavljević, 2017), affecting resonance. This is, therefore, indicative that the act of reading and writing about female bodies can be a polarising experience. Sympathetic resonance may be unique to the familiarity of inhabiting a body prescribed with social meaning.
One interesting facet of the female body comes from a genre which I have always been particularly drawn to: horror. Crawling Room is a domestic horror novel, dealing primarily with interpersonal relationships and the lived experiences of my female protagonist. When examining feminist horror, one notion that typically arises is the depiction of the grotesque. Womanhood in a Western context typically involves constraints relating to how palatable a woman’s body and general self is: how neat, fragile, and inoffensive. Many feminists have disputed this by analysing the female sense of self through the lens of the grotesque. How offensive, horrifying, and unpalatable can a woman’s body be? In the female grotesque: risk, excess, and modernity, Russo focuses on the word itself: it “evokes the cave… the grotto-esque. Low, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral.” (Russo, 1994). Certainly this is analogous with the “cavernous anatomical female body” (Russo, 1994); the notion of the woman as a consumptive creature rather than a penetrative one. This is true of the horror genre, which sees female deaths written at the hands of men as her body often being penetrated: by knife, by machete, or by violation at his own hands. Conversely, feminist horror tends to focus on consumption, the cavernous space: the woman cannibal as in Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body, the space inside the home of Shelley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. These are physical spaces inhabited or filled by female character’s in all sense of the grotesque, rather than the forceful implementation of something sharp and cheap; feminist horror is a metaphorical filling of a body or space, the consumptive act of curing a vastness. “To live with the grotesque as I have done,” Russo points out, “can be a claustrophobic experience… as a bodily metaphor, the grotesque cave” (Russo, 1994) is inseperable from the idea of womanhood, bodily obligation, and female bodies. In my own novel, I found the setting of the home to be just as important as scenes reflecting embodiment which also focus on consumption: sex, the internal self, and female characters depicted eating food are all equally important in representing this notion of the grotesque and feminist consumptive horror. The 2007 horror film Teeth, directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, features a more ‘on-the-nose’ representation of feminine/masculine horror and the grotesque. His protagonist has a condition derived from folklore called vagina dentata: “The toothed vagina appears in the mythology of many and diverse cultures all over the world. In these myths, the story is always the same. The hero must do battle with the woman, the toothed creature, and break her power. The myth springs from a primitive masculine dread of the mysteries of women and sexual union. Fears of weakness, impotence. It is a nightmare image of the power and horror of female sexuality. The myth imagines sexual intercourse as an epic journey that every man must make back to the womb, the dark crucible that hatched him.” (Lichtenstein, 2007). In the film, her condition is subverted from curse to asset; much like the myth of Medusa, the transformative act of the woman in horror becoming monstrous, becoming grotesque, is its own empowerment. This subversion is in polarity to traditionally masculine horror wherein the act of monstrous transformation is seen as a negative condition, stripping the male protagonist of his inherent personal power. The womb, a cavernous space reminiscent of the “grotto-esque” grotesque represents life, womanhood, and motherhood. The violent imagery of the toothed entrance to this cave is also one which reflects the subversion of penetrative horror. Teeth are for eating, chewing, biting, consumption, and are therefore an aspect of feminist horror or the female grotesque in the horror genre, and are a weapon of empowerment. The body has been transformed into a symbol of this power; this is undoubtedly embodied writing from a feminist perspective. In Crawling Room, Jenny peers through a keyhole into an empty room and at the things that fill it; she eats a bowl of cereal which is reminiscent of teeth after a nightmare about her own; she allows the woman she is interested in to be inside of her, in a scene experimenting with both horror and eroticism; she experiences an out of body experience, then is thrust back into the realm of her own physicality. These are all elements of feminist consumptive horror that I found apt for my own work.
Even outside of horror it can be argued that the female experience is a consumptive one. In her poem passion rampant in small secret rooms, Rita Wong asserts that “a woman is her own house / dangerous [and] whole.” (Wong, 1999). The subversion of the cavernous space into something “whole” is apparent in the phrasing of the word “house”; rather than the word ‘home’, this suggests a detachment, with emphasis on the physical space rather than its meaning. Despite this, Wong subverts expectations by describing the house as “dangerous and whole”; the woman is not a cavernous space waiting to be filled, but rather something with her own capability and culpability, full and whole. This is a highly physical description which seeks to achieve resonance with the reader, asking them to picture the physical subversion of this space. In Crawling Room, it is the outside of her childhood home that appears mundane; it is the act of filling it, of the things that occupy her space, that grant significance to Jenny’s story. Subversion is another technique I utilised when exploring this concept. The mundane is made horrific, as is often the case with domestic horror. Similarly, Jenny finds comfort in uncertainty, isolation, wide spaces, and her own loneliness. These are depicted as physical experiences or as circumstances so large and encompassing that they seem to possess their own ‘bodies’ within the work. These are aspects of embodied writing which I believe often resonate with women and within feminist literature.
In feminist writing, the emotional experience is often depicted as a physical one, such as in this short story When I Say Love by Meredith Martinez: “In February, my best friend died in a creek. His mother, driving home from the morgue… bought [nine] frozen turkeys… his weight to the pound. [...] She unwrapped them carefully, like removing bandages, aware of her rings, her hangnails. Still in her clothes, she kneeled in the tub, gathering the turkeys around her in the shape of his corpse.” (Martinez, 2009). In an interview with Louisiana Channel, Zadie Smith found it interesting how, in “books by young… women”, when a character experiences “something emotional… instead of responding either in the narrative or vocally as you would in a traditional novel, the character will pinch a bit of their skin until it bleeds, or… hold their jaw so straight as if the body was a dissociated thing… the idea of verbalizing emotion is quite distant and the body is treated like this strange thing you have to drag around.” (Smith, 2018). In the past I have depicted great moments of trauma or emotion as internal experiences. However, the act of subverting them into physical ones has been beneficial to my work. Throughout the course of writing Crawling Room, there has been a subtle focus on external reaction: Jenny bites her nails while she is being driven to the hospital to see her father; she is focussed on the movement of her love interest’s fingers around the neck of a bottle; she bites her tongue until it bleeds when struggling to react to upsetting news. The depiction of emotional circumstances as physical or lived experiences can be poignant for the reader, transporting them to the character’s very body. In terms of the experience of womanhood, this was greatly important to my stylistic approach. In her essay Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber: A Feminist Stylistic Approach, Seda Arikan likens Carter’s descriptive style to embodied writing: she “makes these experiences explicit and redefines them. She moves the perception of ‘loss or end of innocence’ to the realm of ‘female experience’ of her own body.” (Arikan, 2016). There is a commonality in this: that writing about womanhood tends to transform the emotional or internal experience into techniques which reflects one’s own physicality and lived experiences. This, in turn, invites the reader to resonate.
Solitude is a common aspect of feminist writing. The solitary space is often depicted as either a liminal one or a permanent structure: either the woman is waiting for her space to be filled with companionship, or she believes she will die alone. Karin Arndt presented a study in 2013 which analysed “nine women’s first-person accounts of extended periods of solitude” (Arndt, 2013) likening both positive and negative experiences to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Madness, peace, seclusion, and empowerment are all aspects associated with the secluded woman in literature. Traditionally, female writers have managed to find empowerment here: the woman finds freedom in her madness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, for example. This is in direct contrast to depictions of isolated women becoming undesirable, such as the mad woman in the attic trope exacerbated by Jane Eyre. Arndt’s study directly references Virginia Woolf, who was a known advocate of positive isolation: “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” (Woolf, 1931). The duplexity of freedom and confinement are common themes in women’s stories of isolation, often depicting the experience as a physical one. Are their bodies trapped, do they resent confinement, or do they find freedom when the limitations of the cultural meanings inscribed on their bodies are no longer deemed relevant to their state of physical existence? This concept is dually interesting when applied to the physical condition of womanhood itself. Jeanette Winterson muses on the notion of her body as a disguise or social costume, wondering if “skin, bone, liver, [and] veins are the things [she uses] to hide [herself. She has] put them on and… can’t take them off. Does that trap… or free [her]?” (Winterson, 2001). This notion of freedom and confinement in female bodies is one which is at the forefront of feminist embodied writing, and is something which I found integral to the development of my own writing.
Embodied writing is the act of representing physicality within writing, and in turn invites readers to resonante sympathetically with the bodily experience being depicted. This is pertinent in the context of feminist writing, women’s bodies, and womanhood. Internal experiences, social meanings inscribed on ‘Othered’ bodies, authorial and reader bias, horror, the feminist grotesque, solitude, and the duality of freedom and confinement are all aspects which influence the ways in which writing about womanhood are affected by embodied experience and sympathetic resonance, and in turn have affected my own writing style.
Reference List
Anderson, R (2001) Embodied Writing and Reflections on Embodiment, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 33 (2), 83-98
Arikan, S (2016) Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber: A Feminist Stylistic Approach, The Journal of International Social Sciences, 26 (2), 117-130
Arndt, K (2013) A room of one's own, revisited: An existential hermeneutic study of female solitude (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University)
Braziel, J (2001) Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, University of California Press
Conboy, K (1997) Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press
Davies, S (2019) Women’s minds matter, Aeon
Feinberg, L (1993) Stone Butch Blues, Alyson Books
Martinez, M (2009) When I Say Love, Contrary Magazine Spring 2009
Milosavljević, T (2017) 'The body does matter': Women as embodied social subjects in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, Educons University
Rice, C (2009) Imagining the Other? Ethical Challenges of Researching and Writing Women's Embodied Lives, Feminism & Psychology, 19 (2)
Russo, M (1994) The female grotesque : risk, excess, and modernity, Routledge
Smith, Z (2018) On Shame and Writing, Louisiana Channel
Winterson, J (2001) The Powerbook, Vintage Publishing
Wong, R (1999) passion rampant in small secret rooms, Ariel Vol 30 (2)
Woolf, V (1931) The Waves, Hogarth Press
Perhaps the most crucial element of embodied writing is whether it means something to the reader: whether there is sympathetic resonance. Rosemarie Anderson describes this resonance as the act of understanding, in a physical sense, the “finely textured experience of the body” (Anderson, 2001) portrayed in writing. This finely textured bodily experience can also be referred to as a “lived experience” (Anderson, 2001). Utilising the mechanics of language, the writer is able to depict a familiar bodily experience, causing a physical sensation of resonance within the reader. Anderson also compares this resonance to the act of “bow[ing] a string on a violin, [wherein] the same string on another violin across the room will begin to resonate as well.” (Anderson, 2001). The reverberation is portrayed as a musical experience, an unspoken yet instant reaction: “resonance is immediate and direct.” (Anderson, 2001). Often the greatest challenge for writers is achieving this immediacy of understanding. As one “read[s] accounts of the experiences of others - experiences both similar and dissimilar to [one’s] own… [one] often find[s themselves] in resonance or consonant to some of the narrative. It strikes a chord.” (Anderson, 2001). This is particularly interesting to me in the context of womanhood, women’s bodies, and women’s writing. There are several elements which may impact the ways in which a lived experience may differ, in terms of its communication via its mode of storytelling, as well as its interpretation.
One interesting bracket of the embodiment discussion is the influence of mind versus body when it comes to women on the page. This is particularly true of mentally ill women in literature, or the notion of the mental ‘body’ and the internal experience. As Harley posits in her review of Posthuman Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory, “autobiography has traded on the humanist conviction that the mind and memory are the repository for the self.” (Harley, 2013). One can argue that both reading and writing are primarily mental exercises. The concept that the mind is the repository for the self is not a new one: certainly, it is the internal lived experience which often drives readers to sympathise and empathise with the women they read about. This post structuralist idea has been explored mainly by biography scholars, investigating the idea that “the individual is a discursive fabrication in a state of constant formation, rather than an abiding, fixed reality.” (Harley, 2013). Despite this, it cannot go ignored that the body, as well, is a relevant narrative tool. There are many social, political, and racial factors that influence how a body is read, and this is particularly true of women. Since these factors influence the many ways in which a physical body and its experiences are understood by the reader, one can argue that this physicality is constantly shifting, and that in itself is not a fixed or abiding reality. As women age, dress differently, and are perceived differently by the society in which they are viewed, the personhood which they project is indeed in a state of constant formation, just like the internal self. Both mind and body are a reservoir for the self in literature, and both are equally important to project a lived experience which the reader can interpret. Sally Davies suggests that “a body enervated by the duties that attend on being a woman affect one’s capacity to think” (Davies, 2019); the notion of a “mind set free from its body” (Davies, 2019) therefore is a uniquely non-feminist one. The internal female body, as well as the external one, is just as enervated by struggles unique to womanhood. It goes without saying that this should be reflected in embodied writing on women. Whilst writing my novel Crawling Room I have been focussed on exploring both the internal self of my protagonist as well as her external self, and how both can be read, experienced, and interpreted by the reader. My mentally ill protagonist, Jenny, possesses a body which represents her womanhood, her lesbianism, her trauma, and her self expression which is emphasised by the strong internal goings-on of her sense of self, a state which is in constant transformation throughout the course of the narrative’s trajectory. This is at the core of what is the mind versus body debate and an example of the ways in which the female body, both internal and external, can be read on the page.
There are several social factors which influence how a woman’s body is interpreted in literature. This was of course at the forefront of the development of my novel. Whilst the woman on the page may be ‘hidden’ in the sense that she is not a physical body filling up a screen to be viewed, the combination of her lived experiences and internal self (and the ways in which these descriptions invoke sympathetic resonance) essentialise the descriptive body into a kind of physical one for the reader to ‘view’ in their mind’s eye. This is particularly true when discussing the body as a social entity and the act of diversifying female bodies on the page. In Imagining the Other: Ethical Challenges of Researching and Writing Women's Embodied Lives, Feminism & Psychology, Carla Rice identifies the position of bodily privilege in researchers from a social and racial context, discerning how “issues of interpretation [may] intensify when researching and writing across physical differences distorted by colonial and other hegemonic histories and legacies.” (Rice, 2009). Indeed, this ‘Other’ is a common fate of the diversified female body in literature. Similar to how researchers may exert bodily privilege, the reader themselves may find that they have differing interpretations of fictional women's lived experiences if they do not reflect their own. For example, a white American man who has never gone hungry may sympathise with a Colombian woman’s story of poverty and motherhood, but his position of bodily privilege will influence how he empathises with and interprets her story. He ‘reads’ her body differently since it in turn is read by society in a way which is different to his own. This places importance on the idea of the integrity of the privileged author and the many ethical factors that arise from writing about diverse bodies, particularly minorities and socially persecuted female bodies. The body is certainly a social entity. Fat, queer, non-white, and disabled bodies are imperative to the discussion of privilege, both of the reader and the writer, and how these bodies’ lived experiences are translated and interpreted. Katie Conboy mentions “the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body.” (Conboy, 1997.) Representation is another factor relevant to the construction of the ‘Othered’ body in feminist literature. Braziel’s collection of essays Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression questions “discursive constructions of fatness while analysing the politics and power of corpulence and addressing the absence of fat people in media representations of the body.” (Baziel, 2001). If one particular body is often not utilised to depict or represent the body, the sudden appearance of it can be jarring for the reader. This is its own kind of ‘Othering’; the sudden appearance after a bout of absence is alarming, and may affect sympathetic resonance. There are already cultural meanings inscribed on this particular body. The sudden representation of it can therefore be a powerful literary tool in affecting the physical experience of reading and interpretation.
This ‘Othering’ of the female body is not one which is limited to race or fatness. In her manifesto Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg explores the uniquely lesbian, and uniquely butch, experience of inhabiting a body which is labelled ‘Other’ or queer in a social context; she remembers “what it was like to walk [past] a gauntlet of strangers who stare[d]: their eyes angry, confused, intrigued… they [were] outraged that [Feinberg] confuse[d] them… the only recognition [to be found] in their eyes [was] that [she was] “Other”... different… [she will] always be different. [She will] never be able to nestle [her] skin against the comfort of sameness.” (Feinberg, 1993). This is another example of meanings being inscribed on the body which affect its interpretation by others in a social context, and, as such, resonance with a reader may occur differently based on how the reader also interprets this body. This lesbian experience with isolation and with yearning for the “comfort of sameness” is a familiar one in queer women’s writing and was a major influence when constructing my protagonist in Crawling Room. Jenny is unapologetically fat, and gay, which is in no way consctructed for the comfort of the reader. I understood at the beginning of workshopping the piece that whether or not her character would be deemed ‘likeable’ would depend on sympathetic resonance; she is, in a way, an unpalatable character who does unlikeable things, who in this sense resonates most with those familiar with the ‘Othering’ of their own bodies. The act of constructing nuanced characters is also often further complicated by these external meanings inscribed on ‘social bodies’ within writing. These cultural meanings affect the ways in which the body and its lived experiences are interpreted, and are at the root of embodied writing. Tatjana Milosavljević’s essay The Body Does Matter analyses women as embodied social subjects from the context of Angela Carter’s writing. Milosavljević analyses “women’s embodied potentialities of agency [as well as their] construction of subjectivity through body” (Milosavljević, 2017) as an aspect of modern feminist writing, as feminism has “equipped us with critical tools for interpreting the reality of being in the world in a gendered body.” (Milosavljević, 2017). These social meanings inscribed on the female body affect agency, subjectivity, and the interpretation of physicality. Women already live in ‘Othered’ bodies; the discourses that play out in “women’s daily lives” as well as the “manifold institutional and private oppressions of women’s bodies” can be read and interpreted with feminism as a “conceptual apparatus” (Milosavljević, 2017), affecting resonance. This is, therefore, indicative that the act of reading and writing about female bodies can be a polarising experience. Sympathetic resonance may be unique to the familiarity of inhabiting a body prescribed with social meaning.
One interesting facet of the female body comes from a genre which I have always been particularly drawn to: horror. Crawling Room is a domestic horror novel, dealing primarily with interpersonal relationships and the lived experiences of my female protagonist. When examining feminist horror, one notion that typically arises is the depiction of the grotesque. Womanhood in a Western context typically involves constraints relating to how palatable a woman’s body and general self is: how neat, fragile, and inoffensive. Many feminists have disputed this by analysing the female sense of self through the lens of the grotesque. How offensive, horrifying, and unpalatable can a woman’s body be? In the female grotesque: risk, excess, and modernity, Russo focuses on the word itself: it “evokes the cave… the grotto-esque. Low, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral.” (Russo, 1994). Certainly this is analogous with the “cavernous anatomical female body” (Russo, 1994); the notion of the woman as a consumptive creature rather than a penetrative one. This is true of the horror genre, which sees female deaths written at the hands of men as her body often being penetrated: by knife, by machete, or by violation at his own hands. Conversely, feminist horror tends to focus on consumption, the cavernous space: the woman cannibal as in Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body, the space inside the home of Shelley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House. These are physical spaces inhabited or filled by female character’s in all sense of the grotesque, rather than the forceful implementation of something sharp and cheap; feminist horror is a metaphorical filling of a body or space, the consumptive act of curing a vastness. “To live with the grotesque as I have done,” Russo points out, “can be a claustrophobic experience… as a bodily metaphor, the grotesque cave” (Russo, 1994) is inseperable from the idea of womanhood, bodily obligation, and female bodies. In my own novel, I found the setting of the home to be just as important as scenes reflecting embodiment which also focus on consumption: sex, the internal self, and female characters depicted eating food are all equally important in representing this notion of the grotesque and feminist consumptive horror. The 2007 horror film Teeth, directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, features a more ‘on-the-nose’ representation of feminine/masculine horror and the grotesque. His protagonist has a condition derived from folklore called vagina dentata: “The toothed vagina appears in the mythology of many and diverse cultures all over the world. In these myths, the story is always the same. The hero must do battle with the woman, the toothed creature, and break her power. The myth springs from a primitive masculine dread of the mysteries of women and sexual union. Fears of weakness, impotence. It is a nightmare image of the power and horror of female sexuality. The myth imagines sexual intercourse as an epic journey that every man must make back to the womb, the dark crucible that hatched him.” (Lichtenstein, 2007). In the film, her condition is subverted from curse to asset; much like the myth of Medusa, the transformative act of the woman in horror becoming monstrous, becoming grotesque, is its own empowerment. This subversion is in polarity to traditionally masculine horror wherein the act of monstrous transformation is seen as a negative condition, stripping the male protagonist of his inherent personal power. The womb, a cavernous space reminiscent of the “grotto-esque” grotesque represents life, womanhood, and motherhood. The violent imagery of the toothed entrance to this cave is also one which reflects the subversion of penetrative horror. Teeth are for eating, chewing, biting, consumption, and are therefore an aspect of feminist horror or the female grotesque in the horror genre, and are a weapon of empowerment. The body has been transformed into a symbol of this power; this is undoubtedly embodied writing from a feminist perspective. In Crawling Room, Jenny peers through a keyhole into an empty room and at the things that fill it; she eats a bowl of cereal which is reminiscent of teeth after a nightmare about her own; she allows the woman she is interested in to be inside of her, in a scene experimenting with both horror and eroticism; she experiences an out of body experience, then is thrust back into the realm of her own physicality. These are all elements of feminist consumptive horror that I found apt for my own work.
Even outside of horror it can be argued that the female experience is a consumptive one. In her poem passion rampant in small secret rooms, Rita Wong asserts that “a woman is her own house / dangerous [and] whole.” (Wong, 1999). The subversion of the cavernous space into something “whole” is apparent in the phrasing of the word “house”; rather than the word ‘home’, this suggests a detachment, with emphasis on the physical space rather than its meaning. Despite this, Wong subverts expectations by describing the house as “dangerous and whole”; the woman is not a cavernous space waiting to be filled, but rather something with her own capability and culpability, full and whole. This is a highly physical description which seeks to achieve resonance with the reader, asking them to picture the physical subversion of this space. In Crawling Room, it is the outside of her childhood home that appears mundane; it is the act of filling it, of the things that occupy her space, that grant significance to Jenny’s story. Subversion is another technique I utilised when exploring this concept. The mundane is made horrific, as is often the case with domestic horror. Similarly, Jenny finds comfort in uncertainty, isolation, wide spaces, and her own loneliness. These are depicted as physical experiences or as circumstances so large and encompassing that they seem to possess their own ‘bodies’ within the work. These are aspects of embodied writing which I believe often resonate with women and within feminist literature.
In feminist writing, the emotional experience is often depicted as a physical one, such as in this short story When I Say Love by Meredith Martinez: “In February, my best friend died in a creek. His mother, driving home from the morgue… bought [nine] frozen turkeys… his weight to the pound. [...] She unwrapped them carefully, like removing bandages, aware of her rings, her hangnails. Still in her clothes, she kneeled in the tub, gathering the turkeys around her in the shape of his corpse.” (Martinez, 2009). In an interview with Louisiana Channel, Zadie Smith found it interesting how, in “books by young… women”, when a character experiences “something emotional… instead of responding either in the narrative or vocally as you would in a traditional novel, the character will pinch a bit of their skin until it bleeds, or… hold their jaw so straight as if the body was a dissociated thing… the idea of verbalizing emotion is quite distant and the body is treated like this strange thing you have to drag around.” (Smith, 2018). In the past I have depicted great moments of trauma or emotion as internal experiences. However, the act of subverting them into physical ones has been beneficial to my work. Throughout the course of writing Crawling Room, there has been a subtle focus on external reaction: Jenny bites her nails while she is being driven to the hospital to see her father; she is focussed on the movement of her love interest’s fingers around the neck of a bottle; she bites her tongue until it bleeds when struggling to react to upsetting news. The depiction of emotional circumstances as physical or lived experiences can be poignant for the reader, transporting them to the character’s very body. In terms of the experience of womanhood, this was greatly important to my stylistic approach. In her essay Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber: A Feminist Stylistic Approach, Seda Arikan likens Carter’s descriptive style to embodied writing: she “makes these experiences explicit and redefines them. She moves the perception of ‘loss or end of innocence’ to the realm of ‘female experience’ of her own body.” (Arikan, 2016). There is a commonality in this: that writing about womanhood tends to transform the emotional or internal experience into techniques which reflects one’s own physicality and lived experiences. This, in turn, invites the reader to resonate.
Solitude is a common aspect of feminist writing. The solitary space is often depicted as either a liminal one or a permanent structure: either the woman is waiting for her space to be filled with companionship, or she believes she will die alone. Karin Arndt presented a study in 2013 which analysed “nine women’s first-person accounts of extended periods of solitude” (Arndt, 2013) likening both positive and negative experiences to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Madness, peace, seclusion, and empowerment are all aspects associated with the secluded woman in literature. Traditionally, female writers have managed to find empowerment here: the woman finds freedom in her madness in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, for example. This is in direct contrast to depictions of isolated women becoming undesirable, such as the mad woman in the attic trope exacerbated by Jane Eyre. Arndt’s study directly references Virginia Woolf, who was a known advocate of positive isolation: “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” (Woolf, 1931). The duplexity of freedom and confinement are common themes in women’s stories of isolation, often depicting the experience as a physical one. Are their bodies trapped, do they resent confinement, or do they find freedom when the limitations of the cultural meanings inscribed on their bodies are no longer deemed relevant to their state of physical existence? This concept is dually interesting when applied to the physical condition of womanhood itself. Jeanette Winterson muses on the notion of her body as a disguise or social costume, wondering if “skin, bone, liver, [and] veins are the things [she uses] to hide [herself. She has] put them on and… can’t take them off. Does that trap… or free [her]?” (Winterson, 2001). This notion of freedom and confinement in female bodies is one which is at the forefront of feminist embodied writing, and is something which I found integral to the development of my own writing.
Embodied writing is the act of representing physicality within writing, and in turn invites readers to resonante sympathetically with the bodily experience being depicted. This is pertinent in the context of feminist writing, women’s bodies, and womanhood. Internal experiences, social meanings inscribed on ‘Othered’ bodies, authorial and reader bias, horror, the feminist grotesque, solitude, and the duality of freedom and confinement are all aspects which influence the ways in which writing about womanhood are affected by embodied experience and sympathetic resonance, and in turn have affected my own writing style.
Reference List
Anderson, R (2001) Embodied Writing and Reflections on Embodiment, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 33 (2), 83-98
Arikan, S (2016) Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber: A Feminist Stylistic Approach, The Journal of International Social Sciences, 26 (2), 117-130
Arndt, K (2013) A room of one's own, revisited: An existential hermeneutic study of female solitude (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University)
Braziel, J (2001) Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, University of California Press
Conboy, K (1997) Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press
Davies, S (2019) Women’s minds matter, Aeon
Feinberg, L (1993) Stone Butch Blues, Alyson Books
Martinez, M (2009) When I Say Love, Contrary Magazine Spring 2009
Milosavljević, T (2017) 'The body does matter': Women as embodied social subjects in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, Educons University
Rice, C (2009) Imagining the Other? Ethical Challenges of Researching and Writing Women's Embodied Lives, Feminism & Psychology, 19 (2)
Russo, M (1994) The female grotesque : risk, excess, and modernity, Routledge
Smith, Z (2018) On Shame and Writing, Louisiana Channel
Winterson, J (2001) The Powerbook, Vintage Publishing
Wong, R (1999) passion rampant in small secret rooms, Ariel Vol 30 (2)
Woolf, V (1931) The Waves, Hogarth Press
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