May 26
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27031303
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/27031303
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Notes on: The Gothic Monster Girl in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Margaret Atwood's "Lusus Naturae"
By Manuela LĂłpez RamĂrez, 2025 Universitat de ValĂšncia
When I was putting together a Gothic Anthology on Incest for a class, one of the things I specifically was looking for was an example written by a Black author, since that was a gaping hole in the curriculum that my professor had given us (I also told him he should put Toni Morrison on the reading list if he ever taught the class again, since she reads like a dream and gives more dimension to American Gothic Lit than some of the other authors he chose). This essay, which I had pulled up to narrow my choices down to The Bluest Eye, is what got me to read and use that story in the anthology. I also saved this for Claudia purposes, so while I'm rereading it to do some Claudia character study, I'll give you a chance to read parts of it along with me. Beware: this is not a short post.
My life closed twice before it's close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.
Emily Dickenson, poem 1773
Read-a-Long: The Incest Trope in Guillermo del Toroâs Crimson Peak by Dina Pedro, 2020
Note: this is not Open Access, unfortunately! It is a fantastic read, though.
A lot of people ask me why I like incest as a motif so much, and it's really because I think it exposes two hidden anxieties that a "normal" life would want you to disregard: one is that the family is unsafe, and over-relying on family as a means to escape outside pressures just leads to creating new monsters. The other is that the taboo of incest - as grisly and disgust-generating as it may be - does not create monsters, nor is it perpetuated by monsters. It is perpetuated by humans, and creates resonating experiences that shape a person's environment.
Is that contradictory? Perhaps. Yet, they are still both true.
The reasons why Gothic uses the motif is to specifically highlight societal flaws or blind-spots by not letting them be ignored, concealed, or treated with maiden-like delicacy.
In Crimson Peak, the incest is reflective of Victorian Nuclear Family values that hide family traumas. If the family just stays together, and continues their legacy as broken as it may be, then they'll just survive, right? It's the world against the family, right?
If you continue to read past this, get comfy. This is not short.
"Just a little bit of light reading," I say to myself.
But it definitely points out one of the things I've been noticing about how postcolonial theory presents itself. Even great theorists, and compassionate activists, have blind spots to who is seen, and what steps are needed to actually give them a voice. And even if they deserve a voice at all.
Anyway, Indigenous Americans are still living under colonization, and are therefore unseen. This is a great article if you want a jolt on how to uncenter Euroamerican ideas and viewpoints, and learn to look outside the frame of the picture.
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"Double Consciousness" - 5.1 A âPost-Continentalâ Turn
One recent inquiry â Nelson Maldonado-Torresâs 2006 article, âPost-continental Philosophy: Its Definition, Contours, and Fundamental Sourcesâ â explores a version of double consciousness of normative subjects of âdominant (white) Europeanâ cultures, citing the oeuvre of J-P Sartre as a case study. The increasing diversity of evolving U.S. society, and the approaching âtipping pointâ into a âmajority-minorityâ ânon-whiteâ population, have shifted theoretical interest onto the decline of âwhitenessâ and issues related to double consciousness but in a pluralist rather than a racial-binary context. Linda Alcoff, who has argued for the need to get beyond a binary conception of U.S. racial dynamics, considers the rise of âwhite double consciousnessâ. Finally, JosĂ© Medina advocates for a related âkaleidoscopic consciousnessâ as a personal tactic for resisting epistemic injustice in conditions of the fight for pluralist democracy.
A distinctive application of âdouble consciousnessâ comes out of âdecolonialâ theory. Of and from non-dominant cultures and social groupings, these theoristsâ commitment to social struggles at the âborderlands,â in geopolitically liminal spaces, yields arguments from doubled perspectives, both within and outside the dominant, âNorth Atlanticâ system. Thinkers like Gloria AnzaldĂșa, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter Mignolo, among others, came to constitute this movement, featuring distinctive styles of inquiry and writing, advocating a âdecolonial turnâ in humanistic research. A philosophical argument associated with this group, making explicit use of the notion of double consciousness, is Nelson Maldonado-Torresâs account of âPost-Continental Philosophyâ.
One guiding purpose of the de-colonial project is simply to make the charge of Eurocentrism stick against the dominant modern âWesternâ intellectual tradition initiated at the time of Descartes. Maldonado-Torresâ use of double consciousness takes it in its original bivalent Du Boisian form â as a source of both potentially deleterious illusion and of veridical insights; he employs it as an interpretive strategy for critiquing the 20th-century Continental tradition in philosophy, and through it the entire modern European tradition. He does so by situating that philosophical tradition in global anti-systemic struggles originating and developing in Western-hemispheric societies. In this connection the term âpost-Continentalâ alludes not only to the commonly accepted name of the primarily French- and German-speaking European phenomenological tradition. âPost-Continentalâ also signifies its rejection of the prevailing âgeography of power,â the largely implicit notion that the (European) continent is the locus of all significant modern philosophical production.
Of the canonical figures in that continental tradition, it is Sartre who Maldonado-Torres sees as expressing the double consciousness of European modernity, its intellectual guilty conscience. Double consciousness serves as an interpretive schema for reevaluating the meaning of both Sartreâs overall intellectual activity as well as the Sartrean conception of bad faith. This is now read as an implicit critique of the complicity of the intellectual culture of modernity in domination, with particular reference to the colonialist entanglements of its dominant philosophical traditions. Developing the political argument and its philosophical critique involves arguing that for Sartre, bad faith should be understood not only in an individual, but also in a social, collective sense, cutting against its standard, individualist interpretation. âFor Sartre, European modernity is a project of bad faithâ (2006, 13).
Maldonado-Torres distinguishes the double consciousness of the ânormative subject,â privileged member of the dominant social order, from that of the âdamnedâ â a term taken from Fanonâs Les DamnĂ©s de la Terre (1961) (translated as The Wretched of the Earth, for which Sartre wrote a preface) referring to those peopling the âunderworldâ at the bottom of the world-system. The double consciousness of the oppressed arises in their direct experience with the system in which their very being and daily existence confront them with the lies and willed ignorance â the falsehoods, the âlooking awayâ and complicity of those who benefit â on which that system depends for its reproduction. The contradiction between the purported ideals of the oppressive system and the reality of their lives is, for them, starkly apparent.
For the normative subjects, however, the lie is, in a sense, within them, insofar as they are complicit with the regime; their confrontation with that lie demands self-scrutiny and self-critique. This complicity with oppression and the lies it involves, and the selfâs confrontation with its own duplicity, can be understood in terms of Sartreâs account of bad faith. As Maldonado-Torres puts it, there is within the normative subject a struggle whether to take on fully the dominant cultureâs âdemand ⊠to occupy the center of the world.â This demand represents a requirement that the self, âwith the help of an impressive cultural, symbolic, material, and epistemological arsenal, posits itself as normative,â and thereby accedes to playing a part in the âdehumanization of Europeâs racialized and colonized populations.â Bad faith, which, in Sartreâs terms, is the subjectâs refusal of its own freedom, a flight from responsibility and into conformism, finds a political expression in the dominant cultureâs demand for normative subjectsâ conformity.
Bad faith is the conceptual hinge of Sartreâs entire critical response to the situation of European âcivilizationâ as he found it already at the inception of his philosophical career. The culmination of European anti-Semitism in the Holocaust and the war against fascism âMaldonado-Torres calls this the âcrisis of genocidal Europeâ â fueled by the active participation or silent complacence of much of the intellectual middle classes, was the original condition for Sartreâs political-philosophical authorship. Sartreâs engagement with the global anti-colonial struggle that followed the allied victory, and particularly the Algerian revolution, confirmed and focused Sartreâs increasingly political opposition to the policies of the dominant European powers.
His engagement with the work of the Afro-Caribbean theorists AimĂ© CĂ©saire and Frantz Fanon pushed him further, adding energy to his sometimes explicitly anti-racist critical reflection. Sartreâs engagement with their thought make him, for Maldonado-Torres, a âborder subjectâ as well, grounded in the split allegiances of a kind of âdouble life,â itself a product of this basic rift at the heart of Europeâs empire. Maldonado-Torres quotes a passage from Sartreâs âPrefaceâ to Fanonâs The Wretched of the Earth, in which Sartre addresses the bookâs [presumably white] French reader. The quotation reads, in part:
This fat and pallid continent has ended up lapsing into what Fanon rightly calls ânarcissism.â Cocteau was irritated by Paris, âthe city which is always thinking about itself.â What else is Europe doing? Or that super-European monster, North America? What empty chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour, country, and who knows what else? That did not prevent us from holding forth at the same time in racist language: filthy n***er, filthy Jew, filthy North Africans. Enlightened, liberal and sensitive souls â in short, neocolonialists â claimed to be shocked by this inconsistency; that is an error or bad faith. Nothing is more consistent, among us, than racist humanism, since Europeans have only been able to make themselves human beings by creating slaves and monsters.
Here, then, through Sartre, double consciousness takes the form of both a confession and a self-critique, an admission and a renunciation of duplicity. Maldonado-Torresâs use of double consciousness as a lens through which to read Sartreâs conception of bad faith sharpens Sartreâs account of European cultureâs willing racial ignorance, its foundational self-deception, and shows his ambivalence toward Europeâs oppressive civilizational hierarchies. It is what Maldonado-Torres calls Sartreâs âpotentiatedâ double consciousness that, he claims, yields Sartreâs critical relation to the colonialist complicity of the continental tradition. Sartreâs focus on the self-deceptive aspects of the modern European traditionâs intellectual identity, taken as the historical work of double consciousness, both reveals and subverts the hypocritical complicity of the philosophical mainstream with the geopolitics of colonialism.
"Double Consciousness" - 5.2 White Double Consciousness
A similar argument about the applicability of Du Boisâs notion to âwhite folkâ, in the American vortex, is presented by Linda Alcoff. In The Future of Whiteness (2015), she claims that many white Americans are subject to âwhite double consciousnessâ due in part to recent social changes. The bookâs argument â part of an anti-racist âproject to rearticulate whitenessâ â describes what she calls the âcrisis of white hegemonyâ and the pressure exerted by this crisis on white individualsâ racial identity and self-understanding. Her account specifically addresses the disaffection of many âprogressiveâ whites from the dominant, mainstream cultural form of whiteness, and from its justification by what she calls âwhite vanguardism,â a false historical narrative of a decidedly racist cast. (Alcoff notes the existence, but foregoes the analysis, of a reactionary, right-wing white double consciousness, claiming it lacks any significant fact-based theoretical basis for critical argument.) White double consciousness is a specific kind of disaffection with whiteness, an alienation from whiteness as norm, âa turmoil in white subjectivityâ (174).
The crisis of white hegemony results partly from demographic changes under way that will transform the U.S. into a âminority-majorityâ society by mid-century, and an acknowledgment of these impending changes by white Americans still able and willing to face social reality. These demographic shifts portend a shifting spectrum of political contestation. Citing the work of historian Nell Irvin Painter charting the historic formation of whiteness, Alcoffâs argument identifies other broader social and political changes to U.S. society that track what might be called âthe declining significance of whitenessâ. These include a diminished capacity of white identity to secure for its possessors the differential advantages once available to them; an increasing contestation in the terms of public discourse on race, given changes in the federal governmentâs identification and counting of race categories, and recent theoretical uncertainties in academic and journalistic writing about race categories; a declining possibility of living in whites-only communities and for restricting oneâs daily life to segregated spaces; the end of state-sanctioned racial hierarchy, enabling the increasing openness of new generations of whites to interracial contact, interaction, relationships, families, and multiracial community.
Alcoffâs focus on these and other actual social conditions forming the matrix for white double consciousness resembles Du Boisâs own increasing attention to the âenvironing conditionsâ materially grounding changes in double consciousness in the developing century of his life. Whiteness is not an ideology for Alcoff, but an âorganically emergentâ social reality. Alcoff takes as a given both the fluidity of all such racial determinations of identity and the relative stability of the lived, material reality of whiteness. Her broader account is aimed to counter recent arguments that whiteness is too closely tied to white supremacy in its origins and motivations to be freed from its racist past, on the one hand, and, on the other, that it is an ideological formation which can be simply given up and left behind as part of the struggle to overcome that historic legacy. Rejecting these claims, she argues whiteness may well be de-linked from racism and white supremacy, a possibility that white double consciousness prefigures in its specific, binary form.
The ideology of âwhite vanguardism,â which Alcoff characterizes as the âillusion ⊠that has configured European whites as the scientific, technological, moral, artistic, and political leader of the human raceâ (24), has increasingly lost plausibility to significant numbers of whites themselves. This âillusion,â which once supplied some sense of dignity and social standing to the many whites without other cultural or economic resources, has been increasingly contested both in the academy and the public forum, and is at odds with changing social realities. Thus, white double consciousness is a growing reflection in significant sections of the population of the deep crisis of whiteness. At the same time, Alcoff argues, whites affected with double consciousness are living out their disillusion with their own previous white vanguardist assumptions.
Alcoff relies on a variety of sources to support her account. These include, in addition to philosophical critiques of the racial formation and of whiteness, ethnographic studies of local white communities, narrative accounts of anti-racist and anti-klan activists in the South and episodes from her own life and experience. She presents as a paradigmatic case the âBeatâ writer Jack Kerouac â who exemplified the anxiety about whiteness in the form of a lived creative artistic rebellion, one nonetheless identified by the culture as racially white. Alcoff characterizes Kerouac as exhibiting such white double consciousness in his deportment and self-presentation, saying that his âalienated consciousnessâ âmanifested as discomfort with his embodied identity.â She adds that:
Jack Kerouac expressed a poignant alienation from his white identity and the general normative whiteness of heterosexual suburbia, and he emphatically identified with the more intense existential registers of nonwhite affect that he took to be common among African Americans and Mexicans. (169)
Another noteworthy example is the description by Simone de Beauvoir of her own experience, during a visit with Richard Wright in New York, as a white person walking through Harlem and experiencing a measure of discomfort on confronting the accusatory glances of the neighborhoodâs residents. âBeauvoir notes the hostile glances and feels herself âstiffen with a bad conscienceââ (139). This provides Alcoff with an example illustrating the role that reactive emotions such as guilt and shame can have in triggering the formation of white double consciousness. Such encounters with racialized others in conditions of daily life can prod whites into seeing the disparity between how they view themselves and how they are seen outside of their own segregated communities, as they begin to âintuit how they are viewed by nonwhite othersâ (170). For many whites, Alcoff argues, the guilt and discomfort with whiteness which results provokes a critical rethinking and attempt to reshape their identity even as, for others, it drives a desire to escape the attribution of racial whiteness altogether, an ultimately dead-end path.
A growing disaffection with the mainstream condition of whiteness â and with its dependence on the ideology of âwhite vanguardismâ â is the core of white double consciousness for Alcoff. It is linked, for many whites, with a close daily lived association with communities of brown and black people. Nonetheless, an honest, fact-based and realistic approach to their lives requires their acknowledging the actuality of whiteness as their own personal racial identity and their understanding it as an historically shifting social construct. Acknowledging whiteness as a social construct involves both accepting its connection with historical and ongoing brutal racial oppression and questioning its core ideology of white vanguardism. The double consciousness this acceptance/suspicion elicits involves, to some extent, a self-ascription of whiteness as identity, a critical distance from it as a form of life, and a rejection of its âwhite vanguardistâ ideology as false, and falsely justifying continued white supremacy.
White double consciousness can lead whites to a deeper understanding of the realities of U.S. social conditions and the history shaping them. It thus represents a resource and potentially a trigger for working through their false views about race and moving toward anti-racism. Unlike the case of black double consciousness â which is the native understanding of their own lives, achieved through intraracial communal cultural associations and solidarities, that makes possible blacksâ understanding of the lies upholding white domination â whitesâ double consciousness âinvolves coming to see themselves through both the dominant and non-dominant lens and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truthâ (140).
A highlight from a lecture on Levinas's "Totality and Infinity," on the metaphysics of desire
Levinas suggests that our ["Western"] culture chiefly operates by familiarizing the unfamiliar-- "the way of the same". This conventional approach is essentially predicated on comprehension-- from the Latin: com- (with/together) and prehendere (to grasp). Figuratively speaking, one comprehends an object by reducing its 'otherness' into 'sameness' so that we can recognize it, know it, understand it--in other words, so that we can figuratively grasp and possess it. This is imperialism. We try to take everything that is unfamiliar (all that is other) and make it "dissolve into the same."
Levinas spends some time discussing the nature of our senses, primarily sight and touch. These two senses in particular, he claims, tend to support the illusion of objectification. In other words, when we can touch an object (or even see it), it is easy for us to believe that we know it, that we "grasp" it. "By the hand the object is in the end comprehended, touched, taken, borne, and referred to other objects, clothed with a signification (Levinas)." Because of vision and touch, we can be comforted into forgetting the infinite--we assume that because we can see an object, it can be domesticated, made familiar and thus comprehensible.
According to Levinas, this is the thinking of totality. And it's not good; it's like colonization. This egoist perspective seeks to grasp and possess the world-- and this is the central characteristic of the "Western world," especially since the Renaissance. Recall how the key thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment taught us that the world is essentially knowable through reason's grasp. Levinas wants to break out of this attempt to cast light on the world, this attempt to know the world.
To Levinas, the pursuit of knowledge of conventionally perceived of as a need-- that is, it is an attempt to fill in what is lacking. We don't like this. Need, according to Levinas, is like the force driving the lovers who seek their long-lost other halves (Aristophanes). Need is a "nostalgia, a longing for return." One who needs is incomplete. But the important part is that the needed object is essentially already known--one has a preconceived notion of what the needed object is, even before the search begins. This, to Levinas, is unethical because it irresponsibly attempts to divest the other of its otherness.
Desire ("metaphysical Desire") is conversely the movement toward the other that is not predicated on a lack. We do like this. When following this kind of Desire, one does not know in advance what one is seeking--it is a search for the invisible or the yet undetermined. Also, according to Levinas, such a Desire cannot be satisfied because it cannot ever properly grasp the object of it's desire. Unlike need, which "proceeds from the subject," Desire alternatively "originates from its 'object'". Because of this, Desire is essentially "non-nostalgic," [and] is far more an exploration than a discovery.
"The metaphysical desire does not rest upon any prior kinship. It is a desire that can not be satisfied. for we speak lightly of desires satisfied, or of sexual needs, or even of moral and religious needs. Love itself is thus taken to be the satisfaction of a sublime hunger. IF this language is possible, it is because most of our desires and love too are not pure. The desires one can satisfy resemble metaphysical desire only in the deceptions of satisfaction or in the exasperation of non-satisfaction and desire which constitutes voluptuosity itself. The metaphysical desire has another intention; it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness--the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it." (Levinas, "Totality and Infinity",pg 34)
The point is that totalization is unethical, and infinite desire is good. Levinas urges us to step outside of our conventional model of thinking, which conceptualized otherness as an essentially negative trait that must be overcome. We must resist the temptation to view another person as a reflection of our sameness (a satisfaction of our lack).
Conversely, we must celebrate this otherness and leave it intact! The foreignness of the other opens our experience of freedom. We must see another as an other (one who remains unfamiliar, yet undetermined, not comprehensible yet). If we are to create an image of the other in our head, that image must be principally informed by the incomprehensibility of an untamed otherness. We must let our imagination roam beyond its traditional confines.
...
The desiring caress proves to be the alternative to the totalizing or colonizing grasp. The caress does not claim or possess; it appreciates. It bridges the gap between self and other, but it does not aim to close that gap.
-- Dr Math Trafton II, "Incomprehensibilty: on Grasping"