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Dual Narrative Dynamics and the Critique of Privilege

2021; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/style.55.1.0042

2374-6629

Marsh,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Dan Shen's work on the stories of Katherine Mansfield, particularly “Revelations,” suggests the efficacy of dual narrative dynamics for approaching literary texts that critique privileged women protagonists. In some such texts, an accompanying critique of the patriarchal system that guarantees the race and class privilege of wealthy white women even as it limits them on the basis of gender is sometimes clearly in evidence. In other such texts, however, the systemic critique is obscured, posing for literature scholars problems that Shen's model helps to address. In this response, I put my work on the complexities of plot in the service of Shen's work on dual progression to suggest the applicability of her model to critiques of privilege. In doing so, I address the question of how what Shen terms a “covert progression,” which is grounded in textual evidence, can be hidden from careful readers. I argue that, in texts like “Revelations,” authors construct a particular relation between negative ethical judgments and empathetic affective responses that effectively keeps the critique of patriarchy in the background.Mansfield takes a risk in “Revelations” by consistently thwarting the authorial audience's empathy for a protagonist who draws our strongly negative ethical judgment. Judgment without empathy discourages readers from seeking the systemic causes of the protagonist's suffering, leaving the covert progression hidden. In contrast, narratives that engage both judgment of and empathy for wealthy, white women of leisure tend to integrate critiques of the privileged protagonist and the patriarchal system that guarantees that privilege. For example, Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway has accepted the costs of the kind of stable marriage Monica Tyrell contemplates, and, reminiscent of Monica, finds it “outrageous to be interrupted at eleven o'clock on the morning of the day she was giving a party” (40). Unlike Mansfield, however, Woolf keeps the reader's empathy for and judgment of Clarissa in balance, and, partly as a result, her critique of Clarissa's privilege in no way obscures her critique of the system that renders her “Mrs. Dalloway.” Edith Wharton's Lily Bart, like Monica Tyrell, makes a goal of attracting wealthy men she cannot respect or love, and she imagines, briefly and ineffectually, freedom from the necessity of conforming to feminine norms and committing to an unfulfilling marriage. We judge Lily for her complicity with the system that demands this of her, but, because she cannot bring herself to accept the things she has worked for, and because she performs admirable acts against her own interests, our empathy is consistently engaged. The factors that encourage our empathy direct our attention to the systemic basis of her suffering.When authors construct narratives that refuse readers' empathy and endorse only our negative judgment, the larger systemic critique can be eclipsed by the critique of the privileged protagonist. Shen finds that most scholarship on “Revelations” focuses on the story's critique of a wealthy, leisured protagonist characterized by “neurosis” and “weakness” (“Covert” 8; “Subverting” 191–92). Shen demonstrates that this overt plot is underlain by a covert progression that critiques the patriarchal forces that render Monica a “doll” (“Covert” 8). She cites salient textual evidence to support her case, raising the question of why this textual evidence has not led other scholars to the covert progression. I suggest that the overt plot is more complex than it appears at first, juxtaposing the weakness of Monica's position with evidence of her power and the ways she does and does not make use of it. The resulting readerly dynamics draw our judgment on Monica's privilege while obscuring the critique of patriarchy.The tension between Monica's weakness and her power first appears in the story's second sentence. After learning that Monica spends hours every morning suffering “so terribly” from “her nerves,” we are told, “It was not as though she could control them” (262). As Shen explains, our judgment and our empathy are at odds from the first sentence, in which we learn of Monica's suffering but are also alerted, by Mansfield's use of free indirect discourse, to the likelihood that Monica has expressed this suffering to friends and acquaintances, in these words, many times before as an excuse for her behavior (“Subtexts” 193). Similarly, the narrator's use of Monica's own language makes the statement that her nerves are out of her control into a question of how much control Monica actually has, a question that directs our sympathies and judgments throughout the overt plot.This tension between Monica's powerlessness and her power is also evident in the story's structure. The first half of the story depicts Monica in a position of weakness in relation to her suitor, Ralph—a position of weakness that is mitigated by Monica's practiced participation in their relationship and complicity with the system that controls her. The second half of the story parallels the first, depicting Monica in a position of strength in relation to her hairdresser, George.Monica is in the unenviable position of having to ingratiate herself to a man she considers stupid and insensitive as a way of persuading him to marry her, or risk remaining forever unmarried. Her position prevents her from telling Ralph what she needs “directly”; she must approach him “lightly” (264). She is furious that he understands her so little, and resents that he believes he understands her, as he says, “better than you know yourself” (264). She must conceal completely what she thinks of Ralph, even as she is physically intimate with him, as when she “drew her hand over his reddish hair” (263). On this day, the crux of her frustration is that she is subject to his schedule: she is forced to accept a phone message and keep a luncheon appointment at moments of emotional distress.Mansfield offsets this depiction of Monica's powerlessness by describing her interactions with the only other characters we meet, those who serve her: the maid who is characterized primarily as “noiseless” (266), the taxi driver who seemingly inexplicably progresses from “cross” to “furious” (266, 271), the salon owner whose eyes are rimmed with “bright red” from crying (267), and the hairdresser who has just lost his child. Monica's obtuseness to the emotional experience of these characters is based in the same system that forces her into marriage even as it guarantees her class privilege. The experience of the hairdresser, George, as he interacts with Monica, parallels her experience of interacting with Ralph. Monica thinks of George in terms of the very physical attributes she wishes to be seen as having: “young, dark, slender.” Just as Ralph is convinced that Monica adores him, “Monica always had the feeling that they loved her in this shop” (267). George, at the mercy of Monica's schedule, forces himself to attend to her when he needs to mourn with his family. As he styles her hair, he tries to hide his pain, revealing it only when the commercial transaction on which his livelihood depends has been completed. Monica's is the powerful role in this relationship, again calling our attention to the uses she makes of her strength. Monica's ineffectual attempt to empathize with George—crying but running from him, considering sending flowers but allowing herself to be rushed past the flower shop—reflects the reader's experience of considering, but not sustaining, empathy for Monica.Mansfield requires us to find the systemic critique in “Revelations” without aid of empathy for the protagonist, which keeps the two progressions separate compared to the integrated progressions in Mrs. Dalloway and The House of Mirth. In this way, “Revelations” is more closely aligned with later works including Clare Boothe's The Women, Mary McCarthy's The Group, and Truman Capote's Answered Prayers, in which the consistent thwarting of the authorial audience's empathy creates an intense, even sensational critique of the privileged protagonists and tends to obscure the broader systemic critique.1 As a further example of the applicability of Shen's model to texts of this kind, I offer a brief reading of Clare Boothe's 1936 play.The Women shocks audiences by inviting them, like “Revelations,” into the boudoir and the salon, and by its unrelenting satire of “a numerically small group of ladies native to the Park Avenues of America” who spend their abundant leisure in these spaces (Boothe, “Author's Preface” 63). The play's overt plot is dominated by tension between the dependency of the women on their powerful husbands and their “murderous,” “mean-spirited,” and “merciless” interactions with one another as they compete for these men (qtd. in Boothe, “Author's Preface” 65). If the characters' weakness at some points makes a tenuous claim on our empathy, their use of their strength draws our judgment. This textual dynamic, along with what Shen would call Boothe's “fixed authorial image” as an influential conservative politician, helps to explain why Boothe had to defend herself from accusations of misogyny from the time her play was first produced, and why even contemporary critics, who conduct insightful feminist analyses of the play, rarely see the play as feminist.2We may empathize with Boothe's protagonist, Mary Haines, as she discovers that her husband has a mistress. But Mary's power is as constant a factor in the progression as her suffering. She is served by maids, cooks, nannies, manicurists, stylists, and saleswomen. Her family wealth makes her independent of her husband's money, and, even though she and her husband get a divorce and he briefly marries his mistress—a saleswoman—we suspect from the start that the threat posed by this working-class rival will not be a lasting one. Mary's class privilege and the uses she makes of it discourage any empathy we may feel, maintaining her and her peers as the focus of our negative judgment. Shen's concept of a dual progression, however, encourages us to move beyond the complex overt plot of The Women and appreciate both objects of its irony. We may begin to seek Boothe's critique of patriarchy in the protagonist's eleven-year-old daughter. Frustrated by how her changing body is viewed by others and the limited options for women in her world, Little Mary tells her mother, “I don't want to be a little girl” (89). Boothe appears to subvert the child's protest to comedy when she asserts to her mother, newly enlightened about her husband's extramarital affair, “I bet you anything you like, Daddy has more fun than you” (90). However, further attention to Little Mary, and to the protagonist's interaction with her own mother, reveals a sustained pattern of rebellion against socially prescribed roles.3 This pattern is evidence of Boothe's critique of the system that positions these “Park Avenue ladies” as ruthless competitors on the marriage market.Dan Shen's model of dual narrative progression offers an opportunity to reconsider the work of writers who risk refusing our empathy for their protagonists, who make an unmitigated critique of their characters' privilege and their use of it even as they recognize the complexity of the historical and social power relations that constrain them.