Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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She’s Such a Tease: The Feminine as Burlesque Performance in Margaret Atwood’s _The Edible Woman_
Get PDFThis paper proposes that the dominant imageof Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman is that of the female as prey or commodity, and that this image can also be understood as the female as burlesque performer. As her marriage looms, Marian negotiates a complex set of social instructions on how to present herself as the ideal woman. This desired image involves strategic teasing and revealing for a male spectator: Marian’s appearance, as well as her behaviour, should be calculated to satisfy, but not sate, her male audience’s appetites. Lucy, Marian’s colleague, and Ainsley, Marian’s roommate, perform their own versions of femininity within what Judith Butler has since identified as “the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” The cake that Marian bakes in her own image, and then consumes, demonstrates her rejection of this compulsory, commodified bawdy role. However, she searches in vain for an alternative definition of femininity—one that did not yet exist when the novel was written in the early 1960s
Snickers and Sex
Get PDFMarcus Valerius Martialis (c.40-104 CE) was one of the wittiest and dirtiest of the Latin poets. Through eleven of his fourteen books of epigrams wit, poetic invention, and suggestive or, more often, explicit sexual situations come together in virtually every imaginable combination. There are excruciatingly elaborate comparisons of anatomy to various daily and not-so-daily objects (“Lydia’s beaver is as loose as a horse’s rear, as a swift-spinning bronze hoop, as the wagon-wheel through which the acrobat leaps…they say that I fucked Lydia in a pool: I can’t be sure; I think I fucked the pool” Book XI, 21), comic exaggerations (“As huge as your cock is, Papylus, your nose is just as long, so that you get a nasty snort of something whenever you get hard” Book VI, 36), and calumnies of every description (“Zoilus, you have fouled the water by washing your arse in it: the only way it could be worse is if you washed your head in it” Book II, 42). All of this makes Martial an ideal place to start when trying to work out the links between humour and sexuality. What is it precisely about sexuality that makes it useful to Martial? What does it have in common with other forms of humour? Are there patterns to how Martial employs his bawdiness?This paper explores these questions through a careful examination of three of Martial’s poems. In order of ascending bawdiness, they are: Book II, 52 (Novit loturos Dasius…), Book III, 26 (Praedia solus habes…), and Book XI, 21 (Lydia tam laxa est…). I argue for an understanding of humour as the satisfaction of a pattern or expectation in an unusual or surprising manner. Going through each poem in turn, I discuss the patterns or expectations Martial evokes in each and how they are satisfied. Finally, I argue that bawdiness is often a source of humour because we have a large and vivid set of expectations when it comes to sexual matters – expectations which can be satisfied in all manner of unexpected ways
Stage Tricks: Handling Props in Arden of Faversham
Get PDFIn 1551 England, Alice Arden cuckolded and then murdered Thomas Arden of Faversham, a prosperous, if unscrupulous, merchant and landlord, in their own home. Alice Arden was tried and convicted of murder, sentenced to die, and burnt at the stake. In the 1570s Holinshed chronicled the crimes and sentencing related to Thomas Arden's murder, and some twenty years later an anonymous playwright dramatized the events in a domestic tragedy called Arden of Faversham. Performed on the Elizabethan, and newly secular English stage in the wake of the Reformation, Arden of Faversham employs what I call the Corpus Christi affect, a phenomenon from the outlawed medieval theatre, to play a trick on its staring and startled audience. My focus is the play's spectacle--a poisoned crucifix, a painting that kills at a glance, a prayer book, shorn of its leaves--spectacle that insistently points at and exploits anxieties that motivate the iconophobes and the iconoclasts. I work with Andrew Sofer's account of semiotic and phenomenological attitudes towards stage properties in my analysis of Arden's props and the characters that handle them. I argue that while Alice's blasphemy, rebellion, and felony appear to be contained and condemned by her death sentence, the play stages its own subversive act by asserting the corpse of her husband as potentially salvific--the very means by which Alice performs her spiritual redemption
"'if buizy Love intrenches': Adorno and Rochester on Pleasure and Love
Get PDFJohn Wilmot, Earl of Rochester presents in his poetry an enigmatic and seemingly contradictory worldview that is a common topic of discussion amongst his critics. Marianne Thormählen talks about a “fundamental paradox that confronts a student of Rochester’s stances and values as expressed in his verse” which is that “the mind pursues satisfaction through the body;” but “minds are particularly unreliable guides and bodies are lamentably fallible” (27). Paul Hammond further argues, “His poetry often disturbs […] continuity through the fragmentation of experience into discrete moments which may be severed from any possible narrative” (49). It makes sense then that a body of work lacking narrative continuity can best be analyzed through the application of a theory that shares the same fragmented construction. Hammond’s description of Rochester’s poetry sounds a great deal like Devra Lee Davis’ assertion about Theodor Adorno that “His [thought] models are not duplicable, system-bound expressions: they are moments, expressions, and sketches,” and are arguably “mood betraying.” She goes on to describe his writing as an “orchestrated cacophony of outrage” (396), as if the author’s mood itself were the center of the interpretation, which is then “orchestrated” around it. From these critical observations it can be concluded that Rochester and Adorno are both notable for an intense authorial presence in their writing, revealing inconsistencies that can only come from the changeability of an active, individual mind that is not content with constructions of abstract theory, but also insists on the importance of individual experience. For Adorno, critical theory is only valuable when it considers specificity and difference, which makes his theory an ideal approach to consider the writing of the Earl of Rochester. Using Adorno’s Minima Moralia alongside a selection of Rochester’s poems, this study examines the interesting intersections in the observations and beliefs of Adorno and Rochester, specifically as they are expressed in ideas about sex, pleasure, and love, and explores the implications of these shared viewpoints as they manifest themselves in Rochester’s life and work
Pushing Boundaries and Exploring Limits: Ami McKay’s The Birth House as (Hys)torical Fiction
Get PDFThis chapter examines the structural and political devices of postmodern historiographic metafiction and the use of humorous fiction about childbirth as a counter-historical practice. I argue that while The Birth House operates as a form of historical fiction, author Ami McKay’s primary goal is to draw attention to Euro-Canadian notions of morality and the so-called medically sound infallibility of science through representations of the grotesque. What type of book is The Birth House and how does it fit in to Canadian literary tradition? I propose that The Birth House provides a space in which McKay uses binary oppositions to argue for the promotion of midwifery, holistic birthing, and the reclamation of the feminist body through mothering. Through historical fiction, McKay unpacks historic discourse by suggesting that the inscription of a woman, a midwife no less, into turn of the twentieth century narrative disrupts the national myths of medical and scientific progress
The Aest/ethics of Imagination and Deceit in Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation: A Foucauldian-Aristotelian Reading
Get PDFBy examining the actions of Paul Poitier in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation as an aesth/ethic subject, this essay explores the possibilities and challenges of integrating the aesthetic and ethical imperatives of self-formation within the limits of one’s historical and cultural situation. In Guarian terms linking art and life, how does one find the salutary balance between chaos and control: how does one give structure, or teleological purpose, to a life of random color? While the scholarship on Guare’s play readily includes discussions on race, class, and sexuality, notably lacking are rigorous ethical examinations that explore the play’s signature concerns of aesthetics and ethics embedded in the issues of race and economics. A discerning examination of Paul’s aesth/ethic pursuit within the framework of Foucauldian and Aristotelian ethics illuminates the play in unprecedented ways, at the same time offering valuable ethical insights into our own endeavors to live the good life
Call for Papers - Undressing the Bawdy
No full textUndressing the Bawdy Call for Papers for the Second Issue of Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, published by the Graduate Program in English at York Universit
