Ten across;
not loyalty, faithfulness
or constancy.
Took nothing with me
when the game was over
we all lost,
it was all unfair.
Author: Ana Francisca Silva
poetry, translation, post-colonial theory, identity, gender & sexuality, strongly expressed commentary & views
since 2013. @anafranciscas
Gender Trouble in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’
“. . . but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” [1]
‘Bliss’ opens with the heroine – Bertha – being moved by an overwhelming, and misunderstood, feeling of anticipation, which is particularly characterised by her inability to give expression to it. Throughout much of the story she is unable to give full expression to her inner passions, whether out of fear or inability, ‘her discourse is tempered by social conditioning.’[2] When she is overcome by this intense feeling of bliss she asks whether there is ‘no way to express it without being ‘drunk and disorderly’’ and perceives civilisation as ‘idiotic’ because of its control over her own individual expression. When she desires to ‘get in touch’ with her husband, she becomes paralysed on the phone, ‘What had she to say? She’d nothing to say… She couldn’t absurdly cry: ‘Hasn’t it been a divine day!’ Again, in the nursery, the contrast between her internalised feelings and her verbalised response is striking, ‘You’re nice – you’re very nice! … I’m fond of you. I like you,’ she says to her baby daughter.
Continue reading “Gender Trouble in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’”Representation, Expression and Censorship: Same-sex Desire in ‘Orlando’ and ‘The Well of Loneliness’
By 1928 – the year The Well of Loneliness[1] and Orlando[2] were published – there was an increasing social awareness of female same-sex desire in Britain.[3] Whilst The Well engages in religious and contemporaneous sexological discourse in order to legitimise and justify ‘sexual inversion’; Orlando adopts metaphorical language and narrative strategies to deconstruct and expose conventional heterosexuality, exploiting the possibility for same-sex desire.[4]
The masculinised protagonist of The Well – Stephen Gordon – can be identified, with the help of Newton, as ‘The Mythic Mannish Lesbian’.[5] This view of female homosexuality echoes throughout the novel, and is primarily drawn from the work of contemporary sexologist’s such as; Havelock Ellis[6], Edward Carpenter[7], Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Karl Ulrich, whose theories of ‘congenital sexual inversion’ Hall embraced.[8] To these theorists ‘sexual inversion’ is seen as misaligned gender identity[9]; in other words, female homosexuality is characterised by a masculine soul trapped in a female body.[10] Stephen is directly associated with masculinity: her masculine tastes and accomplishments, her cropped hair and her men’s ties, combined with an aversion to female domesticity and passivity, identifies her as the quintessential ‘invert’.[11] For Stephen – and Hall – ‘lesbianism is a congenital form of lust caused by and manifested in gender reversal’[12] but this use of sexological distinctions between ‘true inverts’[13] and the women who love them, sets up a hierarchy of inversion weighed down by contradictions about same-sex desire.
Continue reading “Representation, Expression and Censorship: Same-sex Desire in ‘Orlando’ and ‘The Well of Loneliness’”Lover
quick like a rat, darkly cunning minx- with palpable wit
she sits in flames, burning
… passionately patient.
stalking in the shadows at night,
singing softly as she tweaks her mouse trap
‘I know where is an hind…
I know where is an hind…’
Continue reading “Lover”Queen
The picture of defiance;
stood still and fair.
She, opulence born, declaring
‘Give me justice!’
to deaf ears
in streams of sober black velvet laced in pearls
Continue reading “Queen”nocturnal
I dream each grain of the ocean bed
anemone, coral reef
jellyfish blooms –
colours that unbend, unravel
tied in ribbons in knots of fragile wind I may be
Continue reading “nocturnal”Victim
Soft, malleable, peachy;
that naughty babe was never innocent.
Barefoot, with lips dripping honey
flushing purposefully with the pinkness of her youth
Continue reading “Victim”Outcast
…possesses loose breasts,
a wobbly womb, unfavourable features
resembling an English mare etc;
And is therefore unfit to bulge my huge passion.
She read silently.
‘By my life, he could not get it up.’
Commentary
‘Outcast’ is the third in a four-part poetry series based on four of Henry VIII’s wives, and inspired by Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The World’s Wife’ (read more on this here). In ‘Outcast’ I explore the culpability assigned to the woman for Henry’s failure to consummate the marriage (which is historically true). Even with the 400+ year difference between now and then, this is a familiar situation in popular culture, and in the personal lives of women.
Here, she openly retaliates, and turns the accusation back on him: accusing him of a lack of virility. Henry was obsessed with portraying a strong image of manhood (one look at the projection of his codpiece in his most famous portrait is just one indicator of this), and so I played on this idea.
In Limbo: Double Consciousness in Ellison’s Invisible Man and Wright’s ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’
‘You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist – can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think…’[1]
The term double consciousness was first explored by W E B Du Bois in ‘The Souls of Black Folk’[2], published in 1903. Du Bois understands this doubling of consciousness as a direct product of ‘the power of white stereotypes in black life and thought’[3] and the practical racism that excluded every black American from the mainstream of society.[4] For Du Bois, the concept of double consciousness is characterised by two particular and distinct signifiers; the first is ‘second sight’ – the inherent duality of African American identity and vision. The second, and more problematic signifier, is that of existing ‘behind the veil’ and this may be defined as the limitations of seeing and being seen unclearly. Continue reading “In Limbo: Double Consciousness in Ellison’s Invisible Man and Wright’s ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’”
Degrading the Feminine: Reading Misogyny in E. E. Cummings & T. S Eliot
There is a degraded and misogynistic representation of the feminine in E. E. Cummings [1] poetry: a victimised and openly disdained object Cummings invites us to judge.
Criticism of The Waste Land [2], on the other hand, has come to a general conclusion that it is, in short, ‘about a sexual failure which signifies a modern spiritual failure’ [3]. And while, here too, women are victims of a failed Western civilisation, Eliot’s portrayal of the degradation of both sexes depicts a shared failure of human relationships in Western societies. There are many characters – male and female – presented through various voices, but it is the expression of a single protagonist, ‘various facets of whose character are represented by the different men and women in the poem.’ [4]
Continue reading “Degrading the Feminine: Reading Misogyny in E. E. Cummings & T. S Eliot”
only coffee is real 
