In the first poem, Alette comes across a chamber where a man is standing, and they both decide that they would want to see what the world is like without gender. So they take off their sex organs and stick them on the walls. What would seems like it should have been a euphoric moment in the text was anything but, and the man and Alette were both blinded and unable to tell what was happening anymore, and so they took their sexes back. This shows one of Notley's beliefs, that equality among the genders cannot be accomplished by getting rid of gender all-together.
The next poem is when Alette is reborn and is filled with a strange light that makes her feel calm. Throughout the poems, women have been represented as the darkness, and men the light. By giving Alette this light, it was, in a way, merging women and men and making them equal. Notley's belief, therefore, is that in order for the genders to be equal, they must be on the same level of understanding, but getting rid of sex and gender all-together isn't the way to do it. Humans have come to associate their very identities with man or woman, some to the point where if they feel like they are actually the opposite gender, they are willing to undergo surgery to change that. Therefore, because it's such an important part of us, getting rid of it only causes confusion and pain.
Maybe I’m not understanding you correctly, but it sounds like you’re saying that giving Alette the light and thereby giving her men or maleness to inhabit as well as her feminine darkness makes men and women equal for Notley.
ReplyDeleteI have to completely disagree. One thing I loved about Descent of Alette is its ambiguity and the fact that Alette defeats The Tyrant, but does not actually solve the mysteries of her world. All she’s left with in the end is an understanding of her identity, and the ways in which that understanding is framed is what makes the interesting juxtapositions of feminist themes and ideals. Notley is a second-wave feminist, i.e. she came slightly after the speculum show-off and the bra-burners but before us “modern” chicas who take feminism beyond male and female to include trans, LGBT, disabled, and anyone marginalized. Second-wavers like Notley have the interesting conundrum of seeing the genders as different enough that there is some essential quality to them; in Alette’s case, light versus dark. The light and the dark can cohabitate and exist as a primordial oneness, but we lack the understanding. The labels of the sexes keep us from understanding the one. We have no neuter vocabulary. So, I don’t think the merging of men and women make them equal, it makes them a part of something entirely different.
New-wave feminists, like myself, would argue that we need to get rid of gender but not sex, which is a really complicated theory that I won’t get into (see Jezebel, BitchMagazine, Feministing, etc.) but is sort of what I think Notley is moving towards. A shorter version is that we need to redefine the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ to be fluid end of a circular continuum instead of a spectrum. I think this is what Notley is doing with the darkness and the light. Some of Alette’s tunnels are darker than other; some have no light described at all. In the end, Alette has a peaceful relationship with gender, realizing that she defines herself by her brother, and thereby defeats the Tyrant. I find it interesting that with everything going on in the text, Notley ends with Alette’s assuredness of self as an individual and not solely as a woman. It pushes the text more towards an individualistic version of feminism, which I haven’t found (in my googling that is) Notley leaning towards at all.
I realize I’m rambling a bit, but this is me making up for not getting to blog about it. I’ll stop now.
I'm very interested in the discussion of gender vs sex going on here, both in the post and the above comment. Notley's scene where Alette and the man she is with are physically detached from their sexual organs seemed to me to be specifically addressing this difference. Alette and her companion are not stripped mentally or emotionally of their gender, but of the characteristics of their genders. The sense of loss and confusion that they feel seems to point to the idea that their physical sex is simply an intrinsic part of them. I don't feel that this particularly addresses the idea of emotionally/mentally/socially constructed gender identity. One of Notley's huge points in The Descent of Alette seems to be that the gender identities we construct need to be purely for ourselves; once gender identity becomes an institution, it abuses everyone under it. This particular scene seems to say that sex is a part of oneself, that everyone is equally lost without that part of themselves.
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